fiction

The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

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What if you grew up reading fairy tales, all the ones I found in a corner of the little stone library near our house: the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault? Perhaps like Zoë you would come to believe that someday a fairy godmother would come or a magic cloak be given, a prince, a slipper, so that you yourself need do nothing but hold yourself in readiness, be calm and pleasant and passive.

What if you lived with your widowed mother, a sad and solitary woman, with no friends or even visitors aside from two of your mother’s cousins-in-law who descend on you with indigestible food, unsolicited advice, and unwelcome invitations before disappearing again (to yours and your mother’s relief)?

Zoë says:

After I had done my homework in the evening I would take up my position at the window. I liked to watch the lights go on in other houses, as if preparing for a wayfarer’s return. My reading had conditioned me to think in terms of wayfarers, so that footsteps on the pavement gave me an agreeable sensation that the stories contained enough authenticity to justify the fact that I still read them.

When Zoë is sixteen, her mother unexpectedly meets a man at one of the cousins’ parties and marries him, whereupon Simon whisks his new wife off to his home in Nice. Zoë is delighted with Simon but wants to stay in their old London flat. She is finally ready for freedom.

Freedom. It can mean so many things. As Zoë faces increasingly difficult challenges, she discovers different ways of being free, from sacrificing her own ideas and desires as she clings to an indifferent lover to Sartre’s existentialist freedom with its attendant responsibility and anguish.

As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice.

With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of the people Zoë interacts with, such as elderly Mme Levasseur whose face was somewhat twisted after a stroke, and her bitter disappointment when her grandson, a small child, refuses to kiss her.

As quietly brilliant sentences follow one upon the other, Zoë’s experiences bring her to a place where many of us have found ourselves. As poet Stevie Smith put it:

Oh I know we must put away the beautiful fairy stories
And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment

Then we must read on to discover how Zoë will manage her new adult freedom. This most unusual coming-of-age story will deliver surprising insights if you will let it.

What coming-of-age story have you read that was especially memorable?

The Far Field, by Madhuri Vijay

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“I am thirty years old and that is nothing.” It’s a great first sentence and resonates throughout the book, taking on new shades of meaning as Shalini tells us the story of what happened when she was twenty-four.

A privileged young woman, she lives in Bangalore in southern India. Her father is a successful businessman, freeing her to lead a life without purpose: drinking and clubbing, occasionally volunteering.

Like a few of my recent reads, this novel is set in motion by the death of the protagonist’s mother. Chapters alternate between what happens next, as Shalini sets out on a journey to politically unstable Kashmir, and flashbacks to her childhood growing up with her larger-than-life mother.

Shalini’s mother never went to the U.S. like her father, and still prays to the Brahmin idols that he’s abandoned. Sarcastic, rude, and uninhibited, her mother wields her anger like a cudgel to get her own way with shopkeepers, family, and everyone else. Only Stella, their servant, remains imperturbable in the face of the tornado. Shalini calls her mother “incandescent” and “vicious.”

Then a traveling salesman comes to the door selling clothing from Kashmir. Shalini is shocked when her mother invites Bashir Ahmed in and even more so when he treats her mother’s insults and barbs with humor. A teller of magical stories that enchant both mother and daughter, he becomes a regular visitor, the only regular visitor to the house.

However, at the time of her mother’s death, they hadn’t heard from him for ten years. Floundering without her mother’s strong presence, Shalini sets out to find the charming and mysterious Bashir Ahmed.

Some people in my book club believed that Shalini hoped to discover exactly what the relationship was between Bashir and her mother, but I thought she believed that in him she would find again the comfort and certainty she’d lost when her mother died.

The writing is gorgeous, and seduced me from the start. Vijay’s descriptions and unusual images are stunning.

. . . below us was the river. I’d learned its name as a child in school, and that it was one of the five mighty rivers of the north, but I had not been prepared for such a vital, living, thing. The water was gray in places, slate blue in others, and, farther off, a tawny green. The roar was so loud it seemed to dampen the sun’s glare, so that it felt momentarily as if we were standing in shadow.

As she steps out onto the swaying bridge, at first she watches her feet but then looks up.

I could see miles and miles up and down the river, mountains looming dark on both sides, all that tall blue sky held between. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and a sound—a laugh of delight or moan of fear, I couldn’t tell—escaped me, torn away in an instant by the gale that funneled through the valley.

There is much else to like about this story. I welcomed learning more about Kashmir and Bangalore. The political divisions in Kashmir emerge organically in this story. And I’ve never before run across Bangalore as a setting in the Indian novels I’ve read.

However, I found some of the plot hard to believe. Without giving anything away, the generous assistance Shalini encounters on her journey seemed designed to advance the plot rather than how people would realistically behave, even in a culture that honors hospitality.

Several people in my book club disliked Shalini to the point where it kept them from enjoying the book. However, I found her credible. It’s not surprising that an immature, very privileged girl would be self-centered and unable to understand how to behave with the very poor people she encounters in Kashmir.

The story is a fascinating look at the clash between the wealthy urban culture of Bangalore and that of an impoverished and politically unstable village in the Kashmiri mountains.

Have you read a novel set in Kashmir?

Undue Influence, by Anita Brookner

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This third bookshop book, like the last one, starts with the death of the protagonist’s mother. However, no one is throwing Claire out of the London flat—the only home she’s known—and she’s already working in a bookshop. Still, her father having died some years previously, she’s now alone in the world.

Claire is a curiously passive person, though she doesn’t see herself that way. The bookshop where she works is owned by two elderly sisters, Muriel and Hester, but Claire doesn’t sell books. She’s in the basement transcribing the writings of the sisters’ late father for possible publication. Between the sermons and the rather dry articles, she finds herself pleasantly immersed in a more predictable past.

She has one friend, Wiggy, whom she met at the National Gallery and sees occasionally. Although she enjoys her company, Claire thinks Wiggy is too passive. Mistress to a married man, Wiggy almost never leaves her flat in case he drops by. Still, Claire turns to Wiggy now to compensate in part for the loss of her mother’s company.

Before her mother died, Claire used to go on vacations to foreign cathedral towns where she’d dutifully see the sites so she could describe them to her mother. She also indulged in brief affairs that she did not tell her mother about.

It doesn’t seem like much of a life, but Claire’s imagination fills in the gaps. Convinced that she perceives the secret lives of people she’s barely met, she’s often tempted to give them advice or set them straight.

Thus when a quiet good-looking man ventures into the bookshop and is sent by Hester to the basement to find a particular book, Claire pursues an acquaintance with him. She believes she is helping him come out of his shell, but is she influencing him or the other way around?

She’s vulnerable, having been unmoored by her mother’s death, though she doesn’t recognise it. I have seen myself how a death can leave you bereft, not just of the loved one but of the routines that filled your days. Brookner captures that weightlessness, that waiting.

Brookner’s style, with its leisurely pace, subtle shifts, and extensive use of exposition may turn off some modern readers. Claire, as the first-person narrator, tells us this story, with only a few dramatic scenes, whereas we have become used to stories that are almost entirely scenes tied together with a little exposition. But I love the change of pace and the chance to settle fully into the mind of another person.

Like other Brookner novels I’ve read and loved, this story makes me think of the muffled sound of falling snow, so quiet you barely notice until you look out and see how the world has changed.

Have you read a novel by Anita Brookner? Do you have a favorite?

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

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When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck because she has no references. Finally, the fond, if bossy, Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner of a struggling bookshop into hiring Grace for six months so she can get the necessary reference.

Primrose Hill is barely staying afloat because it is far away from Paternoster Row, home of most of London’s bookstores, and its owner Mr. Evans is not much of a businessman. Grace is nervous: she’s not a reader, so how can she recommend books to customers?

However, her retail experience helps her make the shop more organized and attractive, and she finds the kindness lurking under Mr. Evans’s gruff exterior. She also enjoys the customers, especially George whose encouragement finally gets her to start reading.

Then war comes, with blackout curtains and the Blitz. Amid loss and constant fear, Grace volunteers as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, coincidentally paired with the grumpiest of the store’s customers, sending her out on the dark nights during the worst of the bombing. She takes refuge in her new passion: reading. On the nights she’s not on duty, when she and Mrs. Weatherfield sleep in the subway tunnels, she’s persuaded to read aloud to help others pass the time and distract them from their fears.

This second in a string of bookshop books for me starts out as a light read, but quickly turns serious with the start of World War II. The story eloquently depicts the home front: the women and old men left behind, the first attempt to find your way home in the blackout, the fear at the sound of the doorbell because it could be someone delivering a telegram, the sounds and smells of sleeping in the tube station turned air raid shelter, the attempt to extinguish incendiaries, the shock—first physical and then emotional—of a bomb blast.

What I most admire in this story is the way Martin integrates the larger story of the war with Grace’s particular journey. The grim accuracy of life in London during the Blitz, and all the losses—loved ones, homes, security—keep this from being a frothy romance or coming-of-age story. The war is not just pasted on to add drama; it informs everything in Grace’s story, from large events to the smallest detail.

What novel have you read that incorporates events current to the story?

The Christmas Bookshop, by Jenny Colgan

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I somehow ended up with three books in a row about a woman working in a bookshop, one that is floundering and perhaps about to go out of business.

One of the things I cover in my writing classes is how an idea alone is not a story. An idea such as the one above is too general; it needs to be expanded with details about the character, her situation, what she wants and why, what kind of trouble she’ll have getting it. Then the story begins to take shape.

These three vastly different books illustrate how one idea can fuel any number of stories.

In this one, Carmen loses her job when the department store where she works closes. Her elderly parents, wanting the family rebel to get out of their house and get on with her life, persuade Carmen to go live with her sister Sofia in Edinburgh.

Sofia is practically perfect in every way that Carmen is not. Married to a handsome, well-off man who adores her, Sofia finished university and now works as a lawyer, while managing her gorgeous home and three small children.

Sofia isn’t thrilled about having her difficult sister move in, but is pregnant again and agrees that an extra pair of hands, however incompetent, would be helpful on the nanny’s days off. Carmen, who shares her family’s low opinion of her, can’t help being snarky with her sister. Still, Sofia finds Carmen a job with one of her clients.

Mr. McCredie’s bookshop in a touristy area of Edinburgh has been losing money for years, and he is on the verge of bankruptcy, probably because he spends his time reading his books rather than trying to sell them. Carmen is dismayed by the dusty shop windows simply containing piles of books, and Mr. McCredie’s eccentric way of organising the books on the shelves.

Seeing how the bristly, socially awkward Carmen finds her way around not just the bookshop, but also the community of merchants on the street is fascinating. As her efforts begin to make a difference, her self-esteem begins to rise. Among the customers she meets are a lanky, reticent man from the university and a famous author who welcomes the chance to drop his New Age façade with Carmen.

Colgan handles Carmen’s progress beautifully, keeping it realistic, so that we, along with Carmen, re-evaluate the people in her life. The ending was a bit bar-fetched, but the book is such fun that I was ready to forgive that. I especially loved Mr. McCredie and his bookshop/home: a magical warren of spaces.

What really sets this book apart is Cogan’s use of Edinburgh as a character. Carmen comes to the city with all kinds of negative preconceptions. With her, our eyes are opened to the charm of the ancient city, especially during the holiday season. Cogan’s descriptions made me want to hop on a plane and go. I thoroughly enjoyed my one visit there; now I’m longing to return.

Stayed tuned for the other two bookshop books.

What novel have you read where the setting is a character?

City of Friends, by Joanna Trollope

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The premise for Trollope’s 20th novel interested me: four women, friends since university, now in their forties are successful in high-power careers, yet they are all struggling with work-life balance. The story begins with Stacey, a senior partner at a private equity firm, requesting flexible time in order to care for her mother who is suffering from dementia. Stacy, her husband, and her friends are confident she’ll get it given all she has done for the company. Instead she is fired.

Stacey finds herself on a park bench having a meltdown. Who is she without her job?

Two of her friends— Melissa, a management consultant who owns her own business, and Beth, an author and academic expert on business psychology—decide that their fourth friend Gaby, an investment banker, should give Stacey a job. Never mind how becoming an employee and employer would upset the relationship between Stacey and Gaby, not to mention a deeper betrayal that lurks on the horizon.

All four women have families, each a different constellation: Stacey with a husband and no children. Gaby with a husband and three children, Melissa single with one child, and Beth with a partner, a young woman with whom she’s bought and refurbished a house.

I was looking for insight about women surviving the clash of career work with domestic work. That’s not what this is about. The two husbands and the partner take care of domestic chores, other than caring for Stacey’s mother. All the families are quite wealthy, which cushions the domestic crises that affect all four.

Instead it is about the difficulties encountered by women like these four who, while loving their families deeply, find their greatest satisfaction in work. Although men are assumed to feel this way, few women—even today—will admit to it. I was interested in seeing how these very privileged women managed to navigate these shoals.

Unfortunately, I had trouble keeping straight which was which. They sounded much alike, not surprising in longtime friends, but challenging to a reader. My other difficulty was their idealised situations. Here, teens might be sulky but also bring you flowers and cook you dinner. Husbands, who are very minor characters indeed, don’t kick up a fuss or resent their work-obsessed wives, who themselves succeed in their work almost effortlessly.

Still, it was a pleasant, easy read. And we certainly need more stories challenging society’s continuing biases about women’s lives. We also need more stories about our working lives; they absorb so much of our time and energy and attention, yet are too often sidelined in favor of domestic dramas.

What novel have you read about today’s working life?

Best Books I Read in 2022

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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 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
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. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer

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The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world.

Worse, the rest of the world is dead. Something has happened to kill the people and creatures on the other side of the wall. The one man she can see sitting on a bench outside a cottage never moves, nor does his body deteriorate. Eventually it falls over and is covered by vines. Same with the cows lying in the field, the dog on the doorstep.

This is her journal.

She begins writing two years into her isolated existence. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, she must “science the shit out of this” except that her science is that of the last 12,000 years: how to grow enough food to live using only hand tools and the few items in the hunting lodge.

It is her worst nightmare come true:

As a child I had always suffered from the foolish fear that everything I could see disappeared as soon as I turned my back on it. No amount of reason could completely banish that fear. At school I would think about my parents’ house and suddenly I would be able to see nothing but a big, empty patch where it had previously stood.

I’m reminded of the recurrent nightmares my sister and I had when young about a nuclear bomb falling while we were at school. Not surprising given our post-Hiroshima, Bay of Pigs childhood.

I was mesmerized by this woman’s narrative. It is fascinating to watch a society woman learn to chop wood, milk the cow she discovers on her side of the wall, scythe and gather grass for hay, and force herself to go hungry while saving back beans and potatoes to plant in the coming year. Frequently exhausted, she forces herself to keep going because the animals—the dog and cow and a stray cat—have come to depend on her.

The changes in her are subtle. Sometimes she reflects on her previous life, looking for what writers call the through-line. Worrying about the animals, she says:

I’ve suffered from anxieties like these as far back as I can remember, and I will suffer from them as long as any creature is entrusted to me. Sometimes, long before the wall existed, I wished I was dead, so that I could finally cast off my burden. I always kept quiet about this heavy load; a man wouldn’t have understood, and the women felt exactly the same way I did. And so we preferred to chat about clothes, friends, and the theatre and laugh, keeping out secret, consuming worry in our eyes.

Her grown children are on the other side of the wall. There is nothing she can do for them. There is no future beyond her own life.

One day I shall no longer exist, and no one will cut the meadow, the thickets will encroach upon it, and later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it. Sometimes my thoughts grow confused, and it is as if the forest has put down roots in me, and is thinking the old, eternal thoughts with my brain. And the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back.

I’m reminded of the summer I lived in a tent in the woods with a friend and her children in a second tent. Life was simple. Keep the tent clean, gather blueberries in the woods, fix the many meals preschoolers require, clean up, entertain the children. My brain did begin to rewire itself that summer.

The narrator says:

I was no longer in search of a meaning to make my life more bearable. That kind of desire struck me as being almost presumptuous . . . I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament.

Doris Lessing said of this book, first published in 1968 in Germany, “women in particular will understand the heroine’s loving devotion to the details of making and keeping life, every day felt as a victory.” I urge you all to read it, regardless of your gender. Read it partly for the occasional insights, partly for the saga of survival, partly for the companionship of the animals, partly for the critique of our human society, mostly for the spellbinding prose.

What novel have you read that you want to immediately urge everyone you know to read?

Tigers in Red Weather, by Lisa Klaussmann

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We first meet Nick and her cousin Helena in 1945. They are leaving their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Nick headed to Florida to join her husband Hughes who is leaving active duty in the Navy and Helena about to marry Avery and move to Hollywood. Helena’s first husband was killed in the war.

The cousins will miss each other but know they will meet at the family’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard: the magnificent Tiger House and the small bungalow built years ago for Helena and her mother.

Helena’s relative poverty has tamed her in comparison to Nick, whose privilege of wealth and status protect her while she indulges in wild and whimsical shenanigans. These could be shocking her conservative Florida neighbors by wearing her bathing suit on the street, ignoring her own dinner party because she feels like lying on the grass smoking and watching the stars, or helping herself to any man she fancies.

Hughes is more complicated: often distant, yet never complaining about her antics. Avery turns out to be the sort of Los Angeles oddball I remember hearing about in my younger days. He devotes himself to collecting memorabilia about his deceased former love, an actress, and trying to get the money to make a film about her life.

As the book progresses through the 1950s and 1960s we see them and their children—Nick’s daughter Daisy and Helena’s son Ed—spending overheated summers at Tiger House. Daisy’s obsession with a boy named Tyler leads her through various ups and downs, including a violent tennis match. Ed, though, is a cipher. He watches. Still, he and Daisy have an enduring connection.

One reason I read this book was that it was supposed to be set in Martha’s Vineyard. Indeed most of it is, but the setting is barely mentioned. It’s simply a wealthy colony by the sea with nothing to distinguish it from any other such spot. That is probably appropriate for the characters who just want to drink and flirt and, at least for the children, play tennis. Yet such a point had been made about how this was so important a family home that I was surprised there wasn’t more made of it.

We are left with just the characters, who bumble around doing things they think will make them happy or at least make their privileged lives bearable. A murdered girl turns up, but this is not a murder mystery. None of the characters try to find the killer, though the murder does have consequences. The author does beautifully convey the preppie world of the 1960s and the subtle lines of status and discrimination within the world of the wealthy.

What I liked about the book were the different points of view. It is hard to handle multiple points of view well, but Klaussmann succeeds brilliantly. There are five parts to the book, each narrated by a different character. Thus we get to see the events of the novel through varying perspectives, each new view adding nuance to what’s come before.

The title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, about conformity and imagination. Klaussmann’s peculiar characters and her use of multiple points of view remind me to consider how others see things and why their opinions may differ from mine. It makes me reinterpret Stevens’ line “None of them are strange” as being not a critique of conformity but a call for empathy.

Have you read a novel set on Martha’s Vineyard?

Magic Hour, by Kristin Hannah

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Successful LA psychiatrist Julia Cates is watching her career crumble. A suit against her brought by the families of victims of one of her patients has created a media frenzy that asserts, if not her guilt, then at least her incompetence. At the same time, her sister Ellie, police chief in tiny Rain Valley on the outskirts of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, faces a challenge unlike any that has come her way before.

The two sisters are opposites: Julia the smart one who never fit in and left Rain Valley after high school; Ellie the beautiful one, adored by her father and popular in school, who stayed, taking her uncle’s place as chief. They are alike in one way, though: unsuccessful in love. Ellie, whose friend Peanut says suffers from “the curse of the small-town beauty queen,” has burned through two marriages, while Julia’s all or nothing approach to love has left her bruised, alone, and suspicious of men who are too handsome for their own good.

When an emergency call takes Ellie to the park in the small center of town, she finds a ragged child in a tree clutching a wolf pup and refusing to come down. She doesn’t seem to understand Ellie’s words and only growls or howls in response. Eventually lured down with food and sedated, the girl is found to be severely dehydrated and undernourished. The scars on her body indicate beatings and—worst of all—ligature marks around her ankles.

Ellie calls on her sister, not recognising that the “wolf girl” will generate her own media frenzy that will only add to Julia’s problems. The psychiatrist’s patient list has evaporated, so there’s nothing keeping her in LA. However, returning to a town where she never felt at home and must now see her as the failure the rest of the world believes her to be is a challenge in itself.

Their parents now dead, the two sisters must renegotiate their relationship while trying to help the nameless, terrified girl who doesn’t seem to know what a toilet or a bed are and has been separated from her only friend, the wolf cub. They must navigate not only the media but also the small-town gossips and turn them into assets in their search for the girl’s family. Working with the possibly feral child exposes their own weaknesses, strengths, and secrets.

Being set in a small town the world has left behind since the logging has ended, whose inhabitants stubbornly refuse to give up, provides a fitting frame for the story. Living now in a small town myself has made me appreciate the webs of interaction that are different from those in a city.

As with all of Hannah’s books that I’ve read, this book is almost impossible to put down. The emotions that roil the action are true to life and so carefully orchestrated that they engage the reader without becoming either exhausting or melodramatic.

I’ve heard of writers charting the levels of suspense in their novels during the revision phase. Hannah’s masterful work makes me consider charting the emotional temperature of my stories. After a little searching, I’ve found that Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers have a writing craft book about doing just that: The Bestseller Code. Analysing data, they found, among other things, that high-performing books have a similar pattern of emotional highs and lows. I guess it’s no surprise that Magic Hour seems to fit that pattern.

The aspects of the story that most interested me are the wild child’s introduction to society, the relationship between the sisters, and their relationship with the past. I was less interested in the rather predictable romance aspect of the story, but that could also be due to my personal preferences when it comes to books.

This story and its well-drawn characters will stay with me for a long time. It has added more nuance to my thoughts about nature and society. It has made me think more about what we do with our past, how much we let it influence our present. Most of all, it took me in and wouldn’t let me go until the end.

Do you have a favorite Kristin Hannah novel?