fiction

The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble

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In her seventies, Francesca Stubbs likes being busy and likes driving. When tailgated, she chooses the accelerator rather than the brake, which pretty much describes her philosophy of life.

Her job inspecting care homes for the elderly keeps her crisscrossing the country when she’s not at home in London. “England is now her last love. She wants to see it all before she dies. She won’t be able to do that, but she’ll do her best.”

The nearness of death is ever-present in this 2016 novel. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, from ‘The Ship of Death’ by D.H. Lawrence: “Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.”

There is actual flooding as well, in the Somerset Levels where she gets stuck going to a care home in February. The Canary Islands, where her newly widowed son visits an elderly writer and his young partner, is also threatened with floods from the minor earthquakes.

The novel moves between Francesca, her son, the couple in the Canaries, her elderly friends in various states of health, and several others, moving in an organic way that feels similar to following threads on the internet, reflecting Francesca’s inability to focus.

To the surprise of her friends and grown children, she’s chosen a flat in a high rise in a dodgy part of town because she likes the view. They are also surprised that she spends considerable thought and time making and delivering meals to her invalid ex-husband, a retired surgeon happy to consume prescription drugs, drink wine, and listen to Maria Callas all day.

Still, this exploration of aging is anchored by Francesca as she meets with the residents of various care homes, worries about her children, and visits her friends with whom she can laugh about the past and complain about the obituaries of other friends.

Her wry, self-deprecating sense of humor keeps the story from becoming too dark. For example, she sometimes “exercises herself by trying to recall the passionate and ridiculous emotions of her youth and her middle age, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” More often she recognises that “she doesn’t need to worry about bloodstains on the skirt, though she worries now about the soup stains on her cardigan, the egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel.”

Drabble’s masterful use of the omniscient point of view complements the story. Most novels these days use first person or close third point of view, with lots of dialogue, jump cuts, and action. Here, even scenes are narrated, evoking a slightly old-fashioned air. Yet they crackle with wit and insight as we begin to appreciate the web of associates and associations that make up a life, past and present. I found myself setting aside my to-do list in order to stay immersed in this story.

Do you have a favorite Margaret Drabble novel? Have you read a good novel about aging?

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

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“The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

Thus begins Kingsolver’s ninth novel, set in 2016. Willa Knox and her husband Iano recently inherited the house in Vineland, New Jersey from her aunt and were glad to get it. Not long before, in their fifties, they had been enjoying the rewards of lives spent building their careers and launching their children. Then the magazine Willa wrote for folded, forcing her to go freelance, and the college where Iano had tenure closed, obliging them to give up their house in Virginia.

Iano has managed to get a teaching job nearby, though it is only as an adjunct. Willa had thought they might just make a go of it, even if barely scraping by. Now it turns out that part of this house was built directly on the ground, with no foundation, and the whole thing is starting to tear itself apart: zigzagging cracks in the brickwork, leaks in the roof, ruptures in the ductwork.

It’s not just the two of them either. Iano’s bedbound father Nick, in his nineties and vociferously right-wing, lives with them, as does their daughter Tig, who has turned up after traveling from one organizing project to another since dropping out of college in 2012 to join Occupy Wall Street. Her barista income and Iano’s adjunct salary add up to a pitiful sum.

Then their daughter-in-law dies, and their grieving son leaves the newborn with Willa and Iano while he goes back to Boston to try and revive his startup. As they struggle with the Byzantine medical system and the demented gig economy, Willa and Iano still can’t get over the shock of having followed all the rules only to find themselves in this fix.

But that’s only half the story. In alternating chapters, another story plays out, set in the same block 145 years earlier. Thatcher Greenwood has reclaimed his wife’s childhood home in Vineland, a utopian community founded in the 19th century by Charles Landis. Fueled by his bombastic promises, it has grown and is now run by him as a fiefdom. Thatcher has started teaching science at a local school where his attempts to explain the new science of Darwin, John Stevens Henslow, John Herschel, etc. are stymied by the anti-science Christian principal, putting Thatcher’s job at risk.

His wife Rose and her mother are thrilled to be back in the house her father built—without the help of an architect, so it too is falling down. The two women, though, are only concerned with spending money and reclaiming their status symbols. Thatcher finds someone with a similar outlook to his in Rose’s younger sister, but all too soon the girl is imprisoned in corsets and tea parties.

It is their next-door neighbor, Mary Treat, who becomes his intellectual companion. Treat, a real person as is Landis, is a scientist investigating plants, insects and birds. She maintains a correspondence with Darwin and other scientists and is highly respected by them.

The two stories echo each other in obvious and subtle ways. Both Willa and Thatcher are struggling with a multigenerational family, a precarious income and a collapsing house.

For both of them, the house becomes a metaphor for the social turmoil of their time, when people’s assumptions and expectations about life, including their understanding of natural and economic laws, are being shaken. Demagogical leaders dupe a gullible populace with false promises. As Mary Treat says, “‘When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.’” In both timeframes, we find clashing convictions about religion, science and the natural world.

The book also looks at the ongoing tension, especially in the U.S., between self-sufficiency and interdependence. Both the widowed Mary Treat and Willa are struggling to find ways to survive financially. Nick refuses to accept government help, so Willa has to work around him to get help from Medicaid. Willa is also trying to find a government grant to restore their home, while daughter Tig befriends people in the neighborhood. Rose and her mother draw their validation from their social circle, while Thatcher is up against the community’s rejection of science in favor of a religion that gives man sovereignty over nature.

How we write about social issues in fiction is a common debate among writers and readers. Kingsolver herself has said that she tries to make issues accessible in stories that appeal to a general audience. However, a lot of readers find this book didactic and heavy-handed, even when they agree with Kingsolver’s politics and concerns. I agree that editing some of the more obvious lectures would have made this a better book, but the stories kept me reading to the end.

I appreciated the love between Iano and Willa, the way they supported each other, their tender memories, and physical encounters. There’s some of that in Thatcher and Rose’s marriage, but more interesting to me in that story was his intellectual friendship with Mary Treat.

And I loved Tig. She faces up to the climate emergency and is committed to making do. She says, “‘All the rules have changed and it’s hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.’” Much of her success (and the family’s) is due to her connecting to the local community, embodied in the Puerto Rican families living next door. I especially love that despite her fury at her brother’s devotion to capitalism, she is the one who is able to deal in a loving way with Nick and all his racist ravings.

Shelter is such a profound concept. There’s more to it than housing or Rose’s sheltered upbringing. All of us seek it, perhaps in faith, perhaps in science, perhaps in nationalism or our tribe. When the foundation of our society is threatened, we need to think carefully about what to tear down and what to rebuild.

Have you read any of Kingsolver’s books? What do you think about her exploration of social issues in fiction?

Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick

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While I love a realist novel that pulls me right into someone else’s life, like Stoner by John Williams or Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, I also like to be surprised and challenged sometimes.

Here a woman named Elizabeth, in a story written by an Elizabeth, summons her past: “If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. . . Perhaps.” What arrives is a kaleidoscope of people she’s known, places she’s lived, literary references, letters, brief essays: vignettes presented in prose as concise and brilliant as poetry, connected by threads so fine as to be invisible.

Elizabeth writes about her mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was.” She writes about friends, such as Alex who has never quite fulfilled his promise—“Not quite liking himself, he whom everyone adores”—or Louisa who “spends the entire day in a blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it appears to be, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or the coldness of salt water.” And Billie Holliday with her “ruthless talent and the opulent devastation.”

I was most interested in the parts about two women who once worked for her: Ida when Elizabeth lived in Maine, and Josette when she lived in Boston, summoning the shape of their lives in spare sentences. Josette, who “in her passionate neatness, adored small spaces” finds her dream home in a trailer. In Maine, Ida is the “rough and peculiar laundress” whose “disaster” is the disreputable local man who moves in with her:

Winter came down upon them. The suicide season arrived early. The land, after a snowfall, would turn into a lunar stillness, satanic, brilliant. The tall trees, altered by the snow and ice, loomed up in the arctic landscape like ancient cataclysmic formations of malicious splendor. The little houses on the road . . . trembling there in the whiteness, might be settlements waiting for a doom that would come over them silently in the night.

This passage takes me back to my first winters in New England, fifty years ago now, when winters were more severe. Or at least that’s how I remember them. I have mixed feelings about her portraits of certain women. Anything that reduces individuals to categories rubs me the wrong way, yet the descriptions themselves are piercing.

I like to remember the patience of old spinsters, some that looked like sea captains with their clear blue eyes, hair of soft, snowy whiteness, dazzling cheerfulness. Solitary music teachers, themselves bred on toil, leading the young by way of pain and discipline to their own honorable impasse, teaching in that way the scales of disappointment.

Like Elizabeth, we find roots of our identity in the people we’ve encountered during our lives and in places. She writes of the Kentucky of her childhood and sojourns in Amsterdam. But it is New York City that is most vividly rendered here.

The spotlight shone down on the black, hushed circle in a café; the moon slowly slid through the clouds. Night—working, smiling, in makeup in long, silky dresses, singing over and over, again and again.

Originally published in 1979 as a novel, Hardwick’s plotless book is now considered an early work of what is now called autofiction where the lines between autobiography and fiction are blurred by writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Knausgård and Ben Lerner.

Readers prospecting for details of her life may find fragments in their sieves: “I was then a ‘we.’ He is teasing, smiling, drinking gin after a long, day’s work . . .” The absence of the narcissistic ex-husband who co-opted her life is refreshing.

I mistrust autofiction, though I do recognise that we create our lives and curate our memories of them. I appreciate, particularly in these days of flagrant misinformation, the attempt to tell the truth.

Still, I enjoyed this fragmented chronicle of a life. Partly it’s the writing, and partly it is honoring the collection of seemingly random memories. Many of us, as the decades pile up behind us, look back and try to find coherence in the jumbled chaos of our days. Like Elizabeth we are:

Looking for the fosselized, for something—persons and places thick and encrusted with final shape; instead there are many, many minnows, wildly swimming, trembling, vigilant to escape the net.

Have you read anything by Hardwick, either her essays or novels?

Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy

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“At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” Thus begins this short, sharp novel by Jaeggy, an award-winning Swiss author who writes in Italian. Appenzell is a canton in Switzerland.

I thought of other novels I’d read set in boarding schools, but realised this was going to something altogether different when I read the next sentence: “This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college.”

Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer, an early Modernist admired by Kafka and Hesse, whose plotless stories convey the somber gravity of life. In one story he says, “Ultimately, the most romantic thing is the heart, and every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls.”

Our narrator is enclosed by the strictures of boarding school life, having been in one or another since she was eight and her grandmother sent her away for being too wild, too savage. Her parents are separated, her mother in Brazil writes only to the headmistress giving orders such as that she is to have a German roommate. Her father, cold & distant, lives in hotel rooms, visiting her rarely.

This unwanted girl becomes fascinated by a new student: the silent and aloof Frédérique. She mounts a campaign to “conquer” Frédérique and force her into friendship. The violence of the narrator’s feelings contrasts with the strict controls imposed by the school—“Obedience and discipline set the tempo at the Bausler Institut”—and with Frédérique’s own outsized love of order.

As part of her campaign, the narrator pretends to be interested in Expressionist art and French literature, but confides to us “I postponed any serious thinking until I was out in the world.” This was exactly what a woman told me in a class I taught in a prison. It made sense to me then and makes sense to me now reading about this young woman who is desperate to break free and live her own life.

You must always say thank you, even when they have refused you something. Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile. There is a mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique, In the one the girl runs about and laughs, and in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.

The style of the book challenges today’s common writing advice to write in scenes, to show not tell. There are no scenes here, yet the narrator’s telling is irresistible. It is her voice, her feelings, and her judgments that carry the story.

The narrator’s ferocity and emotional swings can be unnerving, such as one minute wanting to literally strangle her roommate and the next laughing with her in their shared washroom. The austere beauty of the prose and the free association of the narrator’s thoughts make this a startling read.

Can you recommend a novel by a Swiss author?

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

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Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know that Teddy was peculiar: an unmarried man who wore suspenders, drank borscht every morning, and kept the tv tuned to pro wrestling. We learn more about Teddy’s background, his growing interest in Civil War reenactment, and the strange way he chose to participate in it. All add up to an unforgettable portrait of man and the weight of history.

The other stories are about equally peculiar people. Set in earlier ages, each delves into a person who is, well, different. From naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace collecting new species in the Malay Archipelago to a female aéronaute piloting a balloon into eternity, their voices invite us to share their experience as they launch themselves outside society’s straitjacket.

I particularly liked “The Line Agent Pascal” which begins “Every morning Hippolyte Pascal, agent of the Line at Urupá, woke to the sun and the sound of parrots, rose from his hammock, dressed, set a battered kettle on the fire, and crossed his tiny station to check the signal.”

Writers are often advised to leave out routine actions for fear of boring the reader. Yet this first sentence not only grounds the reader in time and place, but also conveys his solitude. It is a time when the telegraph was necessary to connect the town and the distant mines, when the technology was primitive enough to require signal boosters at intervals along the line. But it is his solitude that is the core of the story, the eternal balancing act between solitude and society.

The title story takes us into one of the farthest of society’s outliers: Arthur Bispo de Rosário who calls himself a sailor and “a collector of lives.” What today we would call an outsider artist, he speaks to us from the Brazilian psychiatric institution, his home for fifty years, where a doctor draws details of his life from him. Interspersed in the narrative are Arthur’s descriptions of his elaborate embroideries, part of his “divine mission.“ Mason draws on his own work as a psychiatrist to take us into the mind of this actual person, diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose name now adorns Rio de Janeiro’s Contemporary Art Museum.

The real question in these stories is: What does it feel like to be inside this person’s head? How do they perceive and interpret the world?

And this is the great gift of fiction: to be able to see the world through the eyes of another.

Yes, like many readers, I sometimes dive into a novel to escape from our humdrum or terrifying present into a pleasant dream of a world. Even in the most lightweight novels, though, we are asked to experience the events along with the protagonist. Every time we do that, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Some stories stay with us for years. What is one that has stayed with you?

Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski

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Subtitled A Novel of Peter Pan, this dark tale is not a retelling of the J. M. Barrie classic, but rather a story inspired by it. Holly Darling, granddaughter of Wendy, has come through great trauma to finally arrive at a good place. She lost her beloved husband and one of her twin sons in a terrible car accident, leaving her with a limp and her other son Jack with terrible wounds. Her daughter Eden, born after the accident, has been in a coma for years after a fall from a tree.

That’s a lot of tragedy for one woman. On the plus side, she has wealth through her mother Jane, and Holly herself has started a skincare business that has taken off. Jack has made a miraculous recovery, and Holly is able to use her lab at the business to continue researching a cure for Eden.

Then Eden disappears. Holly is convinced that the only one who could have taken her is Peter.

The family doesn’t talk about the whole Peter Pan thing. Wendy is a beloved memory; the emotionally distant Jane is fascinated by Peter, but also resents the fact that he never took her to Neverland. Yes, there is magic in this story, simply there, something that is part of the Darling family’s world. For Holly, “Maybe the line between the real world and the magical one isn’t quite as solid as she thinks.”

One of the things that brings this book into today’s world is its depiction of the terrible cost of celebrity. With the enduring popularity of Barrie’s book, the Darling family is hounded by stalkers and wannabes, while being fearful of ending up in the news for any reason. By lending her name to her company, Holly has taken a big risk, emotionally.

I took a risk as well, reading this book. Peter Pan is one of my favorite stories, ever since seeing Mary Martin fly across the stage of the Lyric Theatre. Was it really Mary Martin? I’m not sure, but that’s how I remember it. That experience launched me into wanting to become an actress.

It took 15 years for me to learn that acting wasn’t for me; childhood’s dreams don’t always work for adults. Meanwhile Peter’s story became a shifting metaphor for so many things in my life: the yearning for adventure, even dangerous adventures; the idea that wonderful things can come into your life, unexpected and unearned; the recognition that certain people never grow up and others are obsessed with crowing about themselves. I’m often reminded of Wendy’s line after she sews on his shadow: “Of course, I did nothing!”

Michalski’s story is so dark that at times I thought I must be crazy to risk this radically different interpretation of Peter, Tinkerbell, Hook, et al. But I have always been aware of the darkness in Barrie’s story: a charismatic leader who creates a cult-like following eager to agree with him; a father who is also a cruel pirate who flirts with Wendy; Wendy herself as the only one who is eager to grow up, pretending to be a mother to Peter and the lost boys, like women everywhere who take up the slack when men absent themselves.

The problems in Barrie’s tale have been brought home to me more recently in sharing the story with my grandchildren through Cathy Rigby’s film. It has prompted discussions of indigenous people and pirates, gender roles and personal space, lost children and parents, crocodiles and alarm clocks. We act out the parts we love: making Wendy houses, playing Hook and croc chase games, pretending to fly.

It’s as a parent that I appreciate the truth in the themes Michalski draws from the original story to explore here. Teenaged Jack is trying to pull away from Holly’s control, not understanding her reasons for putting limitations on him. Both Wendy and Jane have kept up the fiction that Peter Pan and Neverland are fun and innocent and lovely, leaving Holly vulnerable to Peter’s pixie dust. Not hearing the truth from her mother and grandmother, Holly is a “motherless daughter” as Adrienne Rich described in her essay “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman.”

The themes from Barrie’s original story around loss of innocence, aging, and leaving home/parents play out differently here. Our heroes aren’t always who we expect them to be. A couple of Michalski’s darker interpretations are ones that I’ve considered for years.

These days I think more about Wendy’s mother in the original story, losing her daughter to a charming man, a man without a shadow. I wonder about mother and daughter’s relationship after Wendy returns from Neverland, still charmed and eager to return to help with Peter’s spring cleaning. As a parent, I accept the lesson Holly struggles with: “I learned long ago that if you wish to keep your loved ones close, you need to let them leave.” At the same time, I would do anything—really, anything—for my children. Michalski’s story asks how much we will give of ourselves to protect those we love.

Poet Stevie Smith said, “we must put away the beautiful fairy stories / And learn to be good in a dull way without enchantment.” Michalski’s book is anything but dull; I couldn’t stop reading. It is a book for adults, for those of us who have learned to be wary of enchantment and to treasure the truth.

What modern interpretation of a fairy tale have you read?

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

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The island is Jeju, off the South Korean coast. The sea women are the Haenyos, women who don’t use breathing equipment but rather hold their breath to dive to the sea floor to harvest seafood.

The story opens with Young-sook, an elderly retired Haenyo who hates being treated as a tourist attraction. She is especially peeved by the persistence of an American woman and her daughter who claim to be descended from Young-sook’s best friend Mi-ja. They show Young-sook a photograph which she pretends not to recognise.

We are then transported back to 1938. As the daughter of the chief of a Haenyo collective, Young-sook trains from a young age, both to learn the breathing technique called “Sumbisori” and to be in top physical condition. Since the women are the ones who earn money, men on the island stay home to care for the children. Meanwhile, the island is suffering under Japanese rule.

We follow Young-sook as she meets and befriends Mi-ja, who is an outcast because her parents collaborated the Japanese. The girls eventually begin training to become Haenyos, starting out as “baby divers” and gradually becoming more proficient. They work as a team farming the wet fields (the sea) and the dry fields (the vegetable garden). Much as Young-sook loves being in the sea, she can never forget the danger involved, repeating the mantra “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life.”

The situation worsens during World War II, as the Japanese impress young men from the island into their army and send refugees to the island, where there is already too little food. The end of the war brings a new nightmare, as the Americans install a dictator in South Korea and help his forces further tyrannize the island. The carnages on top of the great poverty on the island makes for difficult reading at some points.

The two girls find themselves at odds as they enter arranged marriages. The progress and zig-zags of their friendship are one of the best things in the story, beautifully rendered. The story occasionally flashes forward to 2008, when the Americans continue to pester the elderly Young-sook, wanting to tell her about Mi-ja’s fate.

The details of the culture on the island, the history of the people there, and most of all the immersive experience of diving with the Haenyos are what make the story memorable. Meticulously researched, with additional information on the author’s website, we are privileged to learn about a way of life that has now almost disappeared.

Perhaps the hardest task for a novelist is inserting a trail of breadcrumbs such that the ending comes as a surprise, yet perfectly obvious looking back over the story. What makes it hard is the range of readers: I know from my book clubs that some people catch on right away, while others may still need an explanation even after finishing a book.

For me, with this book, I saw the answers to the story questions too early and wondered through much of the book why the characters were not able to see them as well. Still, though the story of the friendship sagged a little, for me at least, the story of the sea women and their island did not. I strongly recommend this book.

Have you ever heard of the Haenyos?

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

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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.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

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Most synopses of this book ignore the prologue, which started as a short story and was added here at the beginning of this first book in Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series. Yet this was the part that grabbed my attention, centering as it does on a young woman in a world that seems similar to England in the late Middle Ages, though with some differences.

It’s Egwene’s first day being allowed to work as a water carrier during the annual sheep shearing in Emond’s Field, a town in the Two Rivers district. However, her ambition to be the best water carrier ever is derailed by her desire to see what the three young men—Rand, Mat and Perrin—are up to. The town has a mayor, who also owns the pub, but it is the Wisdom, an elderly woman, who holds the power. There are subtle signs that something is threatening this world.

As we move into the story proper, two strangers come to Emond’s Field: the mysterious Moiraine and her warder Lan. Gleeman Thom Merrilyn also turns up to entertain the town during the Winternight celebration with songs, stories, and juggling. When the town is attacked by Trollocs—creatures believed to only exist in legends—Moiraine leads the four young people and Thom on a quest to find out why their town was attacked and prevent future invasions.

While I love that women have the power in this world, what makes the story work is how each character is brought to life as their lives change and they are invited to become more than they ever thought they could be. Their individuality and the realistic character development kept me reading to find out what would happen to them.

A friend recommended the series, surprised that I’d never heard of it. There are fourteen books in the series, the last three of which were completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. Since each book is over 800 pages long, the series is a huge commitment.

The amount of detail Jordan has infused into this world is stunning. The world began when the Creator set a wheel in motion, such that the pattern of its seven ages repeat, but the intervals are so long, that people forget what’s happened before.

In addition to the theme of time being cyclical is the theme of how best to use power. The One Power which turns the wheel is divided into male and female halves, saidin and saidar. Unfortunately, history has shown that men who try to channel the One Power go mad and destroy everything, so now only women wield that power.

During creation the Creator imprisoned “Shai’tan,” the Dark One, but at various times his influence has escaped, so that his followers—Trollocs, Myrddraals and others—now fight to free him to take over the world.

Among many things I admire in this book is the language, particularly in dialogue. Jordan has found a way to suggest an older time without belaboring the reader with archaic diction. I need to study more carefully how he’s accomplished this, but one way is by occasionally using an obsolete word, such as scullion, while retaining the flow of our current speech patterns.

Another thing I admire is Jordan’s inventiveness, both with the detailed legends and with the dangers our protagonists encounter. Even more, I love the possibilities that open before them. And for once, the ending is perfect. I won’t give it away, but it is a model for how to handle the climax of a quest effectively, one way at least. And there are maps!

Will I read more? I don’t know if I have the stomach for fourteen books, but I may read a few more. There’s this one character I’d like to know more about.

Have you read The Wheel of Time series? What is your favorite fantasy novel?

Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Subtitled A Novel, this book is a collection of short vignettes by an unnamed narrator, each named by where it takes place: “On the Sidewalk,” “In the Office,” etc. A picture gradually emerges of a 45-year-old woman in an unnamed Italian town whose “heart” is not really in her new teaching job, a woman who says, “Solitude: It’s become my trade.”

She seems very alone. Her colleagues keep to themselves. She has a few friends, one a married man with whom she might have once been involved with. This is just the kind of liminal relationship that interests me, but Lahiri doesn’t follow up with it, though the narrator runs into him and his wife a few times.

Some of the fragments have to do with the narrator’s parents. Her now-deceased father is remembered fondly despite his penny-pinching ways, but her relationship with her mother is strained. In one piece where Lahiri’s glorious use of language peeps out, the narrator says her mother always kept her close: “She protected me from solitude as if it were a nightmare.” Even now, her mother wants to recreate that bond, “blind to the small pleasures” of her daughter’s solitude.

Overall, though, the prose seems to me more pedestrian than I would have expected of this author whose other books have astounded me. The plot, too, is obscure: brief, seemingly unconnected incidents recounted by a person so reticent she can only share the barest details.

I suspect these limitations come from Lahiri having written the book in Italian, a recent language for her. Working myself on learning that language, I’m in awe at her accomplishment with this, her third language.

I’ve also tried writing in Italian and translating English into that language, and failed. I can use a dictionary as well as the next person, but I don’t know the connotations that have accrued to words, the cultural references evoked by certain phrases, the slang. It’s too easy to use a word innocently, not knowing what it conjures up for a native speaker.

My only recourse has been to write very simply, using basic vocabulary. I wonder if that isn’t what the author has chosen to do here. My own failures make me even more appreciative of the moments when her language sings, such as when she says of a father and daughter who run a trattoria that, coming originally from an island, they have “stored the sun in their bones.”

The lack of names—was the island Capri, Sardinia, Lampedusa?—adds to the disconnected feel of the book. The little vignettes are like leaves floating in a pond, sometimes touching briefly before slipping apart. The challenge is to make these seemingly random pieces hold the reader’s interest.

I love the concept of locating each piece so precisely—“At the Ticket Counter,” “On the Balcony”—while withholding any identifier that would anchor them in our world. Although I miss Lahiri’s beautiful language, I love the way the style she’s chosen for this novel reflects the narrator’s self-sufficiency. Other reviews mention the narrator’s loneliness, but I see her as positive about the solitude she has chosen. Yes, she has casual encounters and a few relaxed friendships, but prefers to walk the world alone. She betrays no angst and no regrets about her choice.

The fragmentary form of the book reflects what our lives are actually like. One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is finding a narrative arc in our messy lives. In this novel, Lahiri has chosen to present a messy life without a narrative arc. It is an experiment in form and language that leaves me with the haunting portrait of a fictional woman I wish I knew more about.

Have you read any of Jhumpa Lahiri’s books?