fiction

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

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In this remarkable debut, the author gives us eight interconnected stories about a Jamaican-American family. Most of them center on Trelawny, the younger child, born after Topper and Sarah emigrated to Florida in the 1970s with Delano, their beloved first-born. Not only is Trelawny American in a way that the rest of his family is not, but he is also sensitive and bookish, earning scorn from his father and brother.

“In Flux” explores the complexity of race as Trelawny tries to find out what he is. His light-skinned parents were not considered Black in Jamaica, but he certainly is when he goes to college in the Midwest. That’s just the first layer, as he keeps peeling them back, showing both the obvious and the subtle workings of racism in the U.S.

In this, as in several other stories, the author makes extensive use of second-person point-of-view: addressing the reader directly as “you.” It’s an interesting choice. A fad for second person swept the literary world after the success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and then quickly became tiresome.

Here it works by engaging the reader and creating a buzzing immediacy. The author avoids the doldrums with the vibrant energy of his prose, the precision of his depictions of the culture, and his irrepressible—if often dark—humor. It is also a good choice for someone who hasn’t yet figured out who he is or if he as a person actually exists.

The other characters are unforgettable: Cukie, whom Trelawny envies because he gets to spend a summer with his father learning lobstering; Jelly, whose racist family baits Trelawny in the strangest Thanksgiving dinner ever; Delano, who totally buys into his privilege as the preferred son and assumes the world will likewise deliver for him. One story, in Jamaican dialect, presents Topper as a young man deciding to emigrate to Florida.

Having just been reading the essay “Dysfunctional Narratives” by Charles Baxter, I couldn’t resist applying his thesis that too many books are about a young person identifying the trauma that damaged them when young—usually from their family—and has continued to ruin their lives. Writers sometimes refer to this as the protagonist’s wound.

But if that is all there is to the story, then readers lose interest. Most readers want to see characters who grow and “start to act like adults, with complex and worldly motivations.” I agree with Baxter that we want to see characters admit their mistakes, take responsibility for them, perhaps even justify them.

Trelawny, at least, does acknowledge his mistakes. And certainly he is a victim of so many circumstances: racial discrimination, poverty, his father’s oft-stated preference for Delano, even a hurricane that destroys their home. However, even with the humor and brilliant writing, I sometimes had to take a break from his woes as the victim also of less-than-loving girlfriends, weird jobs, his own mistakes.

If I had any doubt that men are in trouble, this book would have put them to rest. The women, once they’ve left their husbands, do well, but the men all flounder.

Still, I have to defend Trelawny’s sense of being a victim. I can’t speak to enduring racial discrimination, but I’ve been poor and Escoffery is right: when you’re poor, survival hangs by a most tenuous thread. If you have the emotional support of your family or your community or both, you can weave in some happy times, sweet moments, even a few successes. Without them, your outlook is pretty bleak.

As Trelawny says, “It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.”

I am on the lookout for books of interconnected stories like this one, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Have you read a good book that uses that format?

Horse, by Geraldine Brooks

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This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly.

We start in 2019 in Washington, D.C. A graduate student from Nigeria is working on a magazine article related to his studies in art history when he notices his elderly neighbor, the one who has always been rude to him, lugging heavy items—probably her late husband’s things—out to the curb. Theo goes out to help. She refuses but tells him to take what he wants. Politely he pulls out a dirty oil painting of a horse.

At the same time, in a Maryland suburb of D.C., Jess works for the Smithsonian running a lab where she and her team clean animal bones and sometimes wire them back together. Originally from Australia, she begins working with a scientist from England studying the skeleton of what was once the most famous horse in the U.S., a skeleton that has gotten lost in the Smithsonian’s storage units.

The we move to Kentucky in 1850 where we meet Jarret, a slave who has grown up with horses and has an amazing affinity with them. His father Harry, who has bought his own freedom and is saving up to buy Jarret’s, is the head trainer for the plantation owner’s racehorses. Jarret and Harry are with the mare when she gives birth in the night.

These are the main threads, but we also get the stories of the itinerant horse painter Thomas J. Scott who later volunteers with the Union army, a rebellious daughter of Jarret’s original owner, and the New York gallery owner Martha Jackson in the mid-1950s who specialises in modernist artists but finds a 19th century painting of a horse irresistible.

So, yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. Yet race is mentioned only as it is integral to the story, whether it’s an abolitionist dressing down his in-laws at dinner, the Talk that both the Australian and the Nigerian missed, or the chapter headings that identify the boy as Warfield’s Jarret, then Ten Boeck’s Jarret, and so on through the book.

For me, the story moves beyond race into thinking about those who want to achieve great things, whether it is a horse eager to run, a child who wants to be free to exercise his particular skill with horses, or an athlete such as a gymnast or tennis player, ballet dancers—the list goes on—and those who profit from them. There is much in the news about the dangers of playing football, the emotional and physical damage of pushing young athletes too hard, and the potential for abuse of young people who want to win. Yet they DO want to win.

The novel is also about science and art and where they intersect. Brooks stirs in us that peculiar pleasure that comes from hard, creative, purposeful work. Woven into the story, too, are the opportunities denied to the women of the 1850s and 1950s.

Brooks’s novel enthralled me, chores postponed as I plunged into each new chapter, savoring the texture of each scene, and moving easily between the different worlds.

Looking back, I’m surprised by the last item. I am generally not a fan of novels with multiple point-of-view characters, yet here the transitions are so smooth that I barely noticed. It felt as though we were all sitting around a campfire passing around a talking stick, taking turns to tell what is so clearly one story.

I particularly dislike the kind of omniscience that moves from one character’s thoughts to another’s in the same scene. Brooks rarely does this, but it’s smooth as butter when she does.

I’ve been studying one scene in particular between Harry and Jarret when they receive bad news. We start with Jarret’s thoughts, move into Harry’s, and then back into Jarret’s within the space of two pages. It works because there’s plenty of dialogue to anchor the scene, and the moments of transition are moments of high emotion so the shift feels right. Also, Brooks also uses action as a bridge in those two transitional moments.

Whether you are interested in horses or not, you’ll find much to enjoy in this novel. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

Have you read a Geraldine Brooks novel that you enjoyed? What did you like best about it?

Lessons in Chemistry, by Bonnie Garmus

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Garmus’s enormously popular book was this month’s choice for two of my book clubs. In early 1960s U.S., Elizabeth Zott is the host of a hit cooking show, but it’s not just any cooking show and she’s not just any woman. She’s actually a research chemist, though her scientific career has been stymied in ways that you can imagine a woman trying to succeed in a scientific field at that time would encounter. Or today, for that matter.

Having lost her job at the research institute, she takes the television job in order to support herself and her daughter. She approaches cooking as chemistry, e.g., “combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride,” an approach her female audience loves. They start studying chemistry textbooks and begin to find their voices.

If this sounds like a fairy tale, well, that’s what it is. Enjoyable: hilarious in parts, horrible and sad in others. It’s a fast read. And unrealistic, of course.

The idea of chemistry and cooking as a path to empowerment for women has its merits. Many women of the time were undereducated, including my mother who was denied her dream of going to college like her brother because her parents didn’t see any point to it.

However, women should think twice about emulating Zott’s path to success. Stubbornly sticking to your guns, telling misogynistic men who have power over you just what you think about them don’t always work in real life. You can’t count on rousting the misogynists by standing your ground. Force of will is not enough.

And don’t hope to become a champion rower on your first attempt by studying physics.

The many anachronisms contribute to the unreality of the tale. As one of my book club friends noted, Zott is like a modern-day woman transplanted into the repressive, pre-second-wave-feminism period. Plus there were several factual anachronisms, such as talking about defunding the police.

Another factor in the fairy tale atmosphere are all the coincidences. People keep turning up and returning and just happening to be right there when needed for the plot. Zott just happens to be gorgeous but doesn’t care or even notice that she is. She just happens to meet the perfect partner for her who—surprise—adores her back AND is a famous chemist. She has no degrees but is one of the most brilliant chemists in the world just from self-study. I could go on.

I wanted to like this book more. I did like it, once I accepted that it was a fantasy, despite some gruesome scenes. However, as a woman who worked in a male-dominated STEM field through the last quarter of the 20th century and well into the 21st, I had hoped for a more realistic picture of how to deal with the problems involved. Just snapping your fingers and having the magic happen isn’t really useful.

However, the misogyny itself is not a fairy tale, so I hope this story helps young people see how things were back then, and in some ways still are today, whether they want to believe it or not. I hope, too, that this story acts as a corrective to the rosy, nostalgic picture of the 1950s and 1960s being pushed by the radical right.

If nothing else, I hope it encourages young women to go into STEM fields. Yes, there’s still prejudice against women, but it’s also easy to demonstrate real, irrefutable competence.

If you’ve read this novel, what did you think about it?

The Midcoast, by Adam White

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This debut novel takes place in Damariscotta, a small town on the coast of Maine. Andrew grew up there and has recently returned to teach at the high school. As the story opens, he and his family come to a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team at the home of Ed and Steph Thatch.

As a teenager Andrew had worked for Ed at the Lobster Pound and is surprised by the lobsterman’s rise in the world, wealthy enough now to own this huge estate and to send his daughter to Amherst. Andrew had briefly met Steph as a teen and is equally surprised to find her practically running the town.

During the party, Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house and notices some photos of a burned car with two bodies in it. An hour later, state police cruisers arrive. The rest of the story becomes Andrew’s attempt to learn how Ed and Steph got to this point, exploring his own memories, researching archives, and interviewing people involved.

Opening a story with the last scene is a technique that’s fine for an episode of a television drama. In a novel, though, I believe there are subtler and more interesting ways to create suspense. Still, there is much to like in this book.

Although the story moves around in time—delving into Andrew’s past and what he can reconstruct of Ed and Steph’s, skipping forward into the present where Andrew is considering writing a book about the couple—I had no trouble following it. The author does a good job with creating logical transitions and grounding each new scene in time and place.

Ed and Steph’s progress from blue-collar to the most powerful couple in town, from trailer to mansion, has larger resonances, something I always appreciate in a story. Ambition and the corruption that often accompanies it fill today’s headlines. Their story also reflects the changes Steph brings to the town to turn it into a tourist destination, creating what some natives find a false image.

The author actually grew up in Damariscotta, now living in Boston with his wife and son, so he is able to bring a wonderful level of detail to his depiction of the town and its people. I wonder, though, how the people who live there feel about the book, especially those who are portrayed as corrupt or sycophantic.

The story of a wealthy man with a possibly shady past narrated by a neighbor, naturally brings to mind The Great Gatsby. That’s setting a high bar for yourself as a writer! For me, Ed and Steph don’t measure up to Gatsby and Daisy. The Thatches seem like ordinary people, so I didn’t quite buy their epic devotion to each other, Ed’s seeming invulnerability, or Andrew’s obsession with them. More character development would have helped.

Still, the story kept me interested through to the end. Living now in a small New England town myself, I was especially intrigued by the workings of Damariscotta, such as the power mechanisms, the class conflicts, and the peculiar attitude toward those who return after leaving.

With elements of mystery and thriller, this book is solidly in the general fiction category. It’s an enjoyable first novel, and I look forward to seeing the author’s next book.

What novel have you read set in Maine?

A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan

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I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work, ever since a copy of her second novel leapt off the shelves and into my hands due to its title: Let Me Alone.

At last! I thought. Someone who speaks my language.

This, her first novel, published in 1929, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents—Dr. Deane who has ceased to practice and spends his days among his books and autocratic Mrs. Deane whose only friends are two elderly sisters who live outside of town—has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults.

At the beginning of the story, Ronald, the spoiled, feckless son, has gone off to London to work and is much envied by the lively, independent Beryl, while her older sister Olive has become a melancholy mouse. Beryl no sooner decides to ask her brother to help her escape to London than she finds he’s returning home, bored with having to earn a living.

At the same time, two young men enter the family’s closed sphere: a sculptor whom Ronald met in London comes for a weekend and the nephew of the two elderly sisters who has come to the area to take up farming. Between them, they offer opportunities for the sisters and raise the stakes for any potential escape.

It is the language in this psychological novel that intrigues me: precise, cool, and brusque. Kavan’s Spartan prose style contrasts with the stuffy, ornate atmosphere of the vicarage, thus increasing the tension around the family. It also sets the reader up for the different sort of life Beryl might discover in London.

Slipping out of the grasp of a controlling parent is a theme that always interests me. The post-war period of the 1920s, like the 1960s, was a time when women were doing the same with society’s expectations for them. As they try to assert their independence, both Beryl and Olive continue to surprise throughout this story.

Their father insists that they—and the rest of the family—will always fail, saying:

There is some defect in us all, some flaw, some canker of the soul that holds us back from fruition. Life is too hard for us. We yearn and struggle and rebel, but in the end we are always vanquished because of that obscure disability. We cannot succeed because we are not free. Some inhibition, some fatal limitation, binds us, from which we can never escape.

Kavan’s prose is unusual in that it is forthright in this way. She plumbs the motives of the characters, their feelings and unspoken words and then tells us straight out. Using an omniscient point of view, she inhabits the characters in turn, giving the reader a full picture of their psychological states and the reasons for their actions.

While I usually prefer a single point of view and more subtlety in fiction, I found this story refreshing. I also felt confident that I was in good hands with this author and surprised by her skill in this first novel. In her later novels, Kavan moves from this realism to a more experimental style.

If you’re looking for something a little different, I recommend this book. Its breezy style and brief chapters make it almost fly by. And it’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

Do you enjoy a novel more when you identify with one of the characters?

Lessons, by Ian McEwan

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The story begins in May 1986 with 37-year-old Roland Baines worrying about how the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster might harm his infant son in their London home. Sleepless, he remembers being 14, at boarding school, and the experience that changed his life.

McEwan’s latest novel gives us that life. All of it. The novel clocks in at 448 pages, which is way too long to spend in the company of someone who is not particularly interesting. I would have abandoned it early on if it hadn’t been my book club’s choice for the month.

Some in the book club found Roland boring, and most of us considered him passive, someone who drifts through life, reluctant to make a commitment. The few decisions he does make are self-destructive, twisting his future away from achievement and accomplishment into the morass of surviving on low-level dead-end jobs.

When we meet him in 1986 he still thinks of himself as—potentially—a professional poet, but is working as a tennis instructor and piano player in a lounge, while caring for his son. “How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life,” he thinks.

The story skips around in time, too much so according to some in my book club who found the narrative hard to follow. We learn that his German-born wife left him to bring up their newborn son as a single parent while she goes off to become the successful writer he aspired to be. Far from resenting her, milquetoast Roland thinks she did the right thing because her novels are so good.

My book club discussed the idea that not everyone does great things; there are ordinary people who just deal with their circumstances and go on. There have been many great novels about such people. This is not one of them. It’s too long-winded, and the main character too dull.

Roland’s passivity leads to a reluctance to commit himself: to a career, a partner, a skill. The only commitment that doesn’t waver is to his son. That is the best thing I can say about Roland. He changes the diapers, takes him to the playground, does the laundry and cooking. Not a small job, of course, but are we supposed to think him extraordinary because he does what women everywhere do to no applause?

The book is set in motion, in a sense, by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Convinced he is about to die, young Roland makes a choice that turns out to be disastrous for his future. Throughout the story, the events of his life are tied to events in the larger world. He is present for the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see how he is affected by the Suez Canal crisis, the attack on the World Trade Center, Margaret Thatcher’s reign, Brexit, and finally the Covid pandemic.

Having Roland be a microcosm of an entire generation—the privileged one that enjoyed the post-war boom and surge in educational opportunities—feels insulting. The author comes across as a chiding teacher, saying that we Boomers, like Roland, have never lived up to our potential. Well, perhaps we haven’t, but we are not all such failures.

My book club has read several of McEwan’s books. We agree that his writing is excellent, but unfortunately his characters too often are not interesting and even unpleasant. Also, as here, female characters are not developed well. From Roland’s predatory piano teacher to his narcissistic ex-wife to his Earth Mother girlfriend, they are one-note characters. Of course, in this case we are seeing them through Roland’s eyes, which perhaps says more about him.

As a writer I was most interested in how the author brilliantly integrates current events into the story. They are not tacked to add context, but function fully as part of Roland’s story. I find much to admire in McEwan’s writing and have loved some of his books. This one needed an editor.

Have you read a novel that failed to live up to its potential? Where do you think it went off course?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

The Pavilion in the Clouds, by Alexander McCall Smith

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This stand-alone novel takes place in 1938, already setting us apart from the characters because we know what is coming.

Bella Ferguson is eight and lives on the tea plantation in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, owned by her father. She leads a charmed life: lessons with Miss White, servants to attend to her needs, a beautiful home in the clouds, where she doesn’t have to see the terrible working and living conditions of the plantation workers.

Henry and Virginia, her parents, embody the English empire, somewhat to Virginia’s discomfort. She wonders by what right they should own this land that historically belonged to the indigenous people of the island, and if indeed the British would one day be driven out.

We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe, and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet nobody seemed to see.

Empire, colonialism: these are weighty subjects, but barely touched upon here.

Meanwhile, Bella has come to believe that there is something worrisome about her governess’s relationship with her father, a concern that she confides to her mother.

I’m a huge fan of Smith’s novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series with Mma Precious Ramotswe, and the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie series, but this one—no. A trite situation: a woman suspects her husband of cheating. And the characters are boring: he is barely present, and she does nothing day after day. She had been teaching her daughter, reading her poetry, but now they have hired the English governess, so she has nothing to do but to wander about and occasionally lunch at the club. And imagine what might be going on.

Maybe I’d have been more interested if there’d been more about Ceylon besides the initial lovely but brief description of the tea plantation. Maybe if the characters hadn’t been so predictable. Maybe if several story threads had been satisfactorily tied up rather than left hanging.

Still, I appreciate Smith’s humor, his moral universe, his gentle philosophical ruminations. My favorite parts of the book center on Bella, with her dolls, Li Po and Po Chü-i, named after Chinese poets. She carries on conversations with them and attributes distinct personalities to them, while they advise her out of their great wisdom. I love the way they participate in scenes like any human character.

I may be the only person aside from Li Po who is skeptical of the ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but really! Well, perhaps I am too cynical. Time for another dose of Alexander McCall Smith’s world.

What is your favorite Alexander McCall Smith book?

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

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In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him.

The world of this remote area of Siberia is brilliantly brought to life. We learn that it is a time of great change in Soviet Russia, leading characters to say things like:

“This could never have taken place in Soviet times.”

“You girls can’t imagine how safe it use to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made”.

“Now we’re overrun with tourists, migraines. Natives. These criminals”.

Bounded by mountains and the sea, there is no way the kidnapper could have taken the girls off the peninsula without being caught, thus creating a locked-room mystery, as the author says in a Paris Review interview.

However, this is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories—twelve, one for each month of a year—about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, some of whom knew the girls and some who did not. It is about how they are affected by what we know is a kidnapping, though the police are pressured to call it an accidental drowning to quell panic.

In this way we learn that an indigenous girl also went missing a few years earlier, but there was no investigation, no posters or campaigns such as for the two Caucasian girls. The police assumed the young teen ran away.

We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia. These pressures and the various kinds of violence affecting these women’s lives are recognisable to women in the author’s native U.S. and elsewhere. The author has studied Russia extensively, as shown by her brilliant evocation of this place and its people, and lived in Petropavlovsk for two years. Still, I can’t help wondering how natives of Kamchatka would describe their lives.

Some readers are thrown by the nontraditional structure of the book, with each chapter introducing new characters and seeming to stand alone. I loved it, though, recognising immediately the similarity to one of my favorite novels: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, which also starts with a missing girl.

Reservoir 13, too, is not about solving the mystery of the disappearance, but rather describes the effect on the community. Each of 13 chapters details a year in the life of the village, with seasonal celebrations coming around, life going on or not, and the way the missing girl echoes down through the years. In McGregor’s book, the village is the main character, while Phillips centers each chapter on one woman. The advantage of McGregor’s structure is that we are not introduced to a new cast of characters with each chapter.

I listened to the audiobook of Disappearing Earth, and only later realised the print and ebook versions included a cast of characters and a map. I would have found both very helpful, as I had trouble remembering characters from previous chapters. Still, Phillips’s novel is a brilliant debut that introduced me to a part of the world I knew nothing about. More importantly, it immersed me in the lives of these women, their dreams, their constraints, and their strength.

Have you read a novel with a nontraditional structure? What did you think of it?