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I enjoy short stories, especially at times like these when my attention is a bit fractured. Just now about all I can handle is a powerful short story that can pull me in, tumble me about and let me go, as changed as the person in the story.

This is the first I've read Robinson's work, which was recommended to me by my local indie bookstore. Unsure what to expect, I steeled myself for pranks and allusions and metafictional games. But no. These stories stand four-square, solid and traditional. With great deliberation they capture my attention.

Most of the stories start with a single, declarative sentence: “That summer we rented a house in France, with friends.” No tricks, no mischief, just a simple statement of fact, yet plunging me into the story. Then it continues to draw me in, enticing me with evocative description:

. . . it was a long farmhouse of golden stone, with a faded orange tile roof. In front of it was a flat stretch of pale gravel, shaded by wide trees. The swimming pool was shimmering turquoise, surrounded by high green hedges; along the garden paths were cypress trees—cool, dark sentinels against a light-filled landscape.

These two quotes are from “Assez”, perhaps my favorite story in the book. The situation is not unusual: a woman hoping to use a summer away to regain her husband's interest, sharing a house with a couple who are their closest friends, Nina and John. What makes it stand out is the way Robinson makes me care so deeply, so immediately about these four people as they do ordinary holiday things: touring Roman ruins, shopping in the village, going out to dinner.

She does it with the detail, the bit of dialogue or description that is fresh and startling, like Steven returning from shopping and proudly stating that he has become “‘a man known to the locals.'” He explains that when he was leaving the vegetable shop and thanked the woman at the counter, as he always did, she not only thanked him back, but added:

“‘à demain.'” Steven looked at us all. “‘Until tomorrow'! She expects me!”
“‘Now that is a real accomplishment,” Nina said generously.

and she offers him one of the olives he's just brought home. A small thing, but the exchange delightfully suggests the friendship between the couples, the trust that can allow a playful boast and equally lighthearted praise. Yet the darkness is there, and Robinson masterfully manages the pace of the story to keep us shifting between the dark and the light.

I have read and reread these stories, at first just enjoying them, and then studying them. I admire the pieces—the pacing, the description, the dialogue, the characterization—but admire even more the way they are put together, the balance perhaps a little different from one story to the next, one a little heavier on action, another on reflection. I also like the different narrative voices: some protagonists are male, some female, a child, a teen, a middle-aged suburbanite.

Although they used to be popular, today's market wisdom is that people don't like to read short stories any more. Do you agree?

This autobiography by the well-known British poet was completed in 1950, when he was 41. He meets the objection that he was too young to sum up his life by explaining that “events both public and private tended to make my pre-war life seem complete in itself”, the public event being the end of WWII. John Bayley, in his introduction calls the book “the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century.”

I have not read widely enough to assess that claim, but it is certainly very fine. I like autobiographies and memoirs because I am always curious about other people's solutions to the problems of living. Admittedly I read these books, not just to learn something, but because they are written in a fascinating voice, such as Angela's Ashes, or tell a compelling story, such as The Glass Castle. However, judging by the books published and the best-seller lists, we also read to learn about the lives of celebrities or about historical events or famous people. Meeting those criteria as well, Spender knew literary celebrities like Auden and Virginia Woolf, earned fame himself as a poet and describes major historical events such as the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

However, the appeal of this book lies in his openness. Spender gives us simultaneously the story of his emotional, intellectual, political and poetic journeys during the years 1928-1939. He brings out the inner conflicts of his time, when Freud opened new ways of understanding ourselves while the Puritanical British society denied them. “As a child, even, I wanted to know someone who saw himself continually in relation to the immensity of time and the universe: who admitted to himself the isolation of his spiritual search and the wholeness of his physical nature.”

Spender pursues his goals first of trying to discover his real self and then to find a right relation to the world. He says: “My difficulty was to connect my interior world with any outward activity. At what point did my inner drama enter into relation with the life which surrounded me?” He is concerned with the relationship between our inner and outer lives, “the conflict between personal life and public causes”.

As a corollary, he addresses the issue of whether poets should avoid politics in their writing, as his friend Auden maintained, or if events of the time were of a magnitude that they could not be ignored. There are many wonderfully insightful critical assessments of the writers of his time, most of whom were his friends, along with anecdotes about them which illuminate them wonderfully, such as an account of one of Virginia Woolf's dinner parties. I most enjoyed reading about Berlin in the early 1930s, when he lived there with Isherwood and other friends.

I should explain that the book in is five parts. The first is a short section about childhood, intended to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. The second part is about his time at Oxford where he became friends with Auden, Louis MacNeice and Isaiah Berlin, among others, and began his vocation as a poet. The third section is an account of his time in Weimar Germany after leaving Oxford, beautifully describing the sense of freedom, ferocious life, and creativity before moving into the darker forces which would result in Nazism. This section also includes his life in London when he became intimate with the Bloomsbury Group. The Spanish Civil War dominates the fourth section, and the final section is about London during WWII before tying the whole back to the themes discovered in childhood.

I've described these sections by outer events, but Spender presents them with his own emotional and creative responses and the cultural currents that run alongside and mesh with the political ones.

Then there are the short, vivid descriptions written out of his poetic sensibility. Serving as a fire fighter in London during the war, he describes standing in the middle of a fire, training his hose on the flames, as peaceful, “as though . . . standing in the centre of the pine forest at Sellin with a sound of crepitating pine needles and oozing gum, more finely etched than silence itself upon the burning copper wall of the day.” Or this description of visits to country houses of Bloomsbury friends such as Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Harold Nicolson and Victoria Sackville-West:

In my mind these houses in the south and south-west of England, belonging to people who knew one another and who maintained approximately the same standards of living well, talking well, and believing passionately in their own kind of individualism, were connected by drives along roads which often went between hedges. At night the head-lamps would project a hundred yards in front of us an image of what looked like a luminous grotto made of crystal leaves, coloured agate or jade. This moved always in front of us on the leaves and branches. Delight in a vision familiar yet mysterious of this kind was the object of much of their painting, writing and conversation, so that when we drove in the country at night, and I watched that moving brilliant core of light, I felt often that I was looking into the eyes of their sensibility.

I love this partly because it reminds me of my own drives through English hedge-bound roads, but also because of its insightful summary of the group of people who became my first models of what an ideal life would look like.

What memoirs or autobiographies have you loved?

Since we enjoyed Kavalier and Klay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union so much, my book club selected Telegraph Avenue for this month's read. Chabon's 2012 novel has gathered a lot of critical praise, but we struggled with it. Only one person besides me finished it, and most of the others couldn't make it past the first 50 pages.

Old friends Archy and Nat run a used record store—yes, records as in vinyl—called Brokeland Records on the title's street in North Oakland. Their struggle to keep the store going is dealt a serious blow when a former football star plans to open a megastore just down the street, with a large used record section. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, work together as midwives. Eight months pregnant herself, Gwen has trouble keeping her temper as she wrangles doctors and babies and Archy and her own cumbersome body.

Julius, whom everyone calls Julie, is Nat and Aviva's 14-year-old son who has become friends with Titus, a boy his age who has arrived from Texas to stay with a distant relative. Further complicating matters is the appearance of Archy's father, Luther, a former star of blaxploitation films. He deserted his family long ago and has struggled with drugs and stints in jail, but now he's been clean for over a year and looking for a relationship with Archy.

I wish I'd had that summary before I started reading. We all found the beginning confusing and overwhelming. Even I was put off, and I'm a big fan of Chabon's writing. I thought too many characters were introduced without enough information to keep them straight or perhaps they were just not clearly presented. I didn't understand who they were or what their relationship to each other was; it took me forever to figure out that Luther was Archy's father. We spend a lot of time with one character who then disappears except for a single brief reference near the end. It was also unclear at the beginning who the main character is. Presumably it's Archy since the book starts with him, after a gorgeous brief paragraph about the (as yet unnamed) boys, Julie and Titus, but then Archy's gone before we have a chance to care about him.

I think the heart of the story is what it is to be a man. Archy stumbles through each of his roles: friend, business partner, husband, potential and unexpected father, community member, son. His failures mount as he seems unable to assert himself, to make a plan and carry it through. This section moved me: Gwen has not slept well, troubled “By thoughts of Archy and his furtive approach to grief. Holding his sadness close, as if it were a secret, the man always moving from one thing he couldn't talk about to the next, sneaking across the field of his emotions from foxhole to foxhole, head down.”

What I haven't captured is the immense exuberance of the text. Each sentence explodes with references and allusions and sneaky bits of fun. I enjoyed the verbal fireworks, but found the prose so demanding that I was not able to read more than a few pages at a time. By then, I felt pummeled and drained. Some members of my book club thought Chabon was just showing off and felt manipulated, but I can see how the style supports the story. I think the prose is a brilliant capture of today's environment with its rapid-fire demands on our attention, but it sure is exhausting. Section III, though? Even I thought that was just showing off. Quite remarkable, but unnecessary.

Chabon's references and allusions are great if you get them. I found myself snickering and laughing out loud as I read. One person started looking them up but soon quit. Several people felt that the ebullient prose distracted and distanced them, keeping them from delving into the story and caring about the characters. The character who interested me was Julie, so smart and self-possessed, so willing to give of himself.

Many of these references and allusions are embedded in the imagery—metaphors and similes—which pack every sentence. Some are brilliant. Others you just have to go with and not try to analyse. I found that I was kind of surfing, letting myself be carried along; that was the best way to handle the confusion, chaos, and conflicting demands of the text.

And by doing that, I was responding exactly the same way Archy responds to the chaos of his life. Brilliant!

I'm glad I stuck with this book, but I don't think my book club is likely to read another Chabon novel. That's a shame because he's such an amazing writer.

What is your book club reading?

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. These are the ten best books I read in 2013. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Human Chain, by Seamus Heaney

I was saddened to learn of Heaney's death this week at what seems to me now the young age of 74. In his honor I salvaged this 2010 collection of his poetry from the depths of my to-be-read pile. In these poems he brings together and shares tesserae from all of his ages—climbing with Jim Hawkins into the ship's rigging, buying a used copy of the Aeneid, being carried on a stretcher, hearing funeral bells toll. Heaney fashions the final mosaics, examining the questions that absorb us at the end: what is the use of a life, my father's life, my own?

2. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

Rereading this remarkable memoir has been even more delightful than the first time. And more awe-inspiring. From the poetic beauty of his sentences to the intricate structure of the book, Nabokov's consummate writing skills are on display.

3. Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg

Stumbling across Eisenberg's short story “Another, Better Otto” resulted in one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've ever had. Immediately I hustled to the library and laid my hands on this collection, which includes that story along with five others, and sat down to savor them. Eisenberg's tales stretch out to give us a complex world with characters who tantalise the reader with their many facets.

4. Prospero's Daughter, by Elizabeth Nunez

As the title declares, this novel retells the story of The Tempest. Set in 1961 on Trinidad and the small island of Chacachacare off its coast, Prospero's Daughter portrays the intersection of a handful of lives as England's empire withdraws. This story is enthralling, keeping me up nights to finish it. Nunez's descriptions are gorgeous. Like its precursor, this is a story about power, the power of knowledge, the power of love, the power of courage, the power of integrity. It brilliantly brings out the relationship of power to class and race buried in Shakespeare's play.

5. Authenticity, by Deirdre Madden

Finding a new favorite author is a lovely bit of serendipity. Set in Dublin, this story revolves around two artists and is about art: the joys and costs of pursuing your gift and the consequences of ignoring it. It is simply a good story well-told, a rare and remarkable accomplishment. This Irish author has published several novels, and I will be trying to get my hands on every one of them.

6. Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Ron Rash

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories set in North Carolina. The various accents of the readers enhanced the verisimilitude of the characters and their environment. What makes these stories so powerful is the way he goes deeply into the characters. While the plots often take surprising turns, you won't find slick tricks here, just good, strong story-telling. The folks who populate them are so thoroughly imagined and so carefully presented that I feel I know each and every one of them.

7. The Crime of Julian Wells, by Thomas H. Cook

Philip Anders, a middle-aged literary critic, is shocked by the death of his best friend, the successful writer Julian Wells, at the home Julian shared with his sister in Montauk on Long Island. Though the two have known each other since childhood, Philip cannot imagine why Julian would commit suicide. To answer that question, Philip begins retracing Julian's footsteps, trying to learn where things went sideways. The writing is masterly; the pacing magnificent. I love an intelligent read like this, one that challenges my preconceptions and delivers a satisfying conclusion.

8. The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

A young boy—only eleven—is sent alone by ship from Colombo to London where he will join the mother he hasn't seen in four or five years. For his meals he is seated at the Cat's Table, the one farthest away from the Captain's Table and clearly reserved for the least important passengers. This is a story that you can read lightly, chuckling over the boys' adventures and mourning their frayed innocence, or you can pay closer attention. The book is dense, as one person in my book club said, with motifs and themes that all tie together. Ondaatje's books always reward close attention. This one, too, is a masterpiece worth reading and rereading. It is a Boy's Own adventure of knives and dogs and mischief, and at the same time a coming-of-age story. Memories are dismantled and reused; the mysterious motives and knotted hearts of adults are unwound; and the secret scars of childhood laid bare.

9. House of Breath, by William Goyen

Published in 1949, this first novel explores the hold memory has on us, those earliest memories, of childhood's dark cellars and magical woods, of the family that looms like a race of giants. Snippets of memory repeat and repeat, creating our own personal mythology. These are the memories of Boy Ganchion, called up on a dark night in strange city. I had to adjust to reading this memory-packed stream-of-consciousness style, so the first few chapters went slowly. I felt that, like Boy, I was struggling to sort out and make sense of the overwhelming rush of memory. However, a semblance of structure emerged, and the power of the prose grew on me. The last few chapters are simply magnificent, culminating in a celebration of what it means to be alive in the world, carrying our own particular past.

10. Collected Poems, by Hope Mirrlees

Born in 1887, Mirrlees was a poet, novelist, and translator who is best known for her fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), and an influential modernist poem, “Paris” (1920). “Paris” chronicles a day's trek through that city, starting in the underground, wandering the streets, and finishing up at dawn in her room on the hotel's top floor. Her fragmentary, stream of consciousness style was new to British poetry when Hogarth Press published “Paris”. She acknowledged the influence of Jean Cocteau's poem _Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance”, and her poem became a bridge between French experimental poets and British writers. Her erudite references and use of footnotes are believed to have influenced her close friend, T.S. Eliot, in “The Wasteland” which he began the following year. I recommend this rediscovered masterpiece. Take your time with it.

What were the best books you read in 2013?

Anne Tyler has long been one of my favorite writers. Her stories are set in my neighborhoods and feature their eccentric inhabitants. In my love-hate relationship with Baltimore, the quirkiness of its denizens is definitely a plus. While not glossing over their peculiarities, Tyler always treats her characters with compassion.

This 2012 novel is set in motion when Aaron is visited by his recently deceased wife, who was killed when a tree crashed into their house. He mourns for Dorothy, so traumatized by her loss that he does not expect to return to the house, even once it has been restored. Only 35, Aaron displays the fussy crankiness of an old man. Stolid and reticent, he rejects offers of help, throwing out the many casseroles deposited on his doorstep, though meticulously washing and returning the dishes. This is nothing new to him. Handicapped by a withered right arm and leg, he has spent his life fending off the well-meant assistance of his mother and older sister. Dorothy's serious and independent demeanor broke over him like a refreshing wave, and he does not know how to bear life now without her.

With his sister, he works for the family-owned vanity publishing business. One of their big successes is a series of short books for beginners: The Beginner's Wine Guide, The Beginner's Dinner Party, The Beginner's Colicky Baby. Although his co-workers urge him to take time off, he buries himself in work.

When Dorothy—short, plump and plain—begins to appear, walking beside him, sitting next to him in the mall, even conversing with him, he becomes obsessed with finding the right conditions to make her reappear.

I am reminded of one of my favorite films: Truly, Madly, Deeply. Nina is so tormented by grief at the loss of her husband that he takes pity on her and returns. Her joy is gradually tempered by the day-to-day frustrations of living with someone—he keeps the heat turned way up because he is always freezing and brings his ghost friends over for movie night—until finally she is ready to move on. It is the most wrenching film I've ever seen, capturing both the reckless fun of being in love and the despair of letting go.

Aaron's story is milder, but still deeply felt. I particularly love his tenderness toward his unglamorous wife. “She had a broad, olive-skinned face, appealingly flat-planed, and calm black eyes that were noticeably level, with that perfect symmetry that makes the viewer feel rested . . . She wore owlish, round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat—wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soles shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners. Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.”

It's a delightful story, filled with misunderstandings and kaleidoscopic shifts in relationships. There is much humor, but it is never cruel. And through it all, for me at least, the familiar details of my particular world, as Aaron walks my streets, shops at my grocery, visits my Apple Store. Tyler celebrates the small events in a life, an ordinary life, such as that of the person next door to you.

Is there a novel set in your town that you particularly like?

As the year ends, it seems like a good time to consider what (or whom) we are ready to say goodbye to.

What are you ready to let go of?

This has been a “hinge” year for me and my family, a year of fundamental changes, some the culmination of years-long endeavours, others pure chance. Music remains a constant, especially the intersection of song and story. These are the songs I listened to over and over.

Waltz of the Floating Bridge, Jeremiah McLane
Time Will End, Jeremiah McLane
Claudy Banks, Finest Kind
By The Green Grove, Finest Kind
Cielos Sin Fronteras, Pablo Peregrina
Chapulin, Pablo Peregrina
Una Cicatriz, Pablo Peregrina
Stay Home , Josh Hisle
Whiskey At Home, Josh Hisle
Not Alone, Patty Griffin
Antigua, Jacqueline Schwab
Mendocino Morning, Jacqueline Schwab
Helena, Bare Necessities
Portsmouth, Bare Necessities
Heidenröslein, Bare Necessities
Tan Dun: Desert Capriccio, Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Ensemble
Mamiya: Five Finnish Folksongs For Cello & Piano – 3. Miero Vuotti Uutta Kuuta, Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Ensemble
Trad: Mido Mountain, Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Ensemble
Trad: Mongolian Long Song, Yo-Yo Ma: Silk Road Ensemble
War Requiem, Op. 66: Requiem aeternam, Benjamin Britten
War Requiem, Op. 66: I. What Passing Bells for These Who Die As Cattle?, Benjamin Britten/Wilfred Owen
War Requiem, Op. 66: IX. Lacrimosa dies illa, Benjamin Britten
War Requiem, Op. 66: X. Move Him Into the Sun, Benjamin Britten/Wilfred Owen
War Requiem, Op. 66: XVII. It Seemed That Out of Battle I Escaped, Benjamin Britten/Wilfred Owen
War Requiem, Op. 66: XVIII. Let Us Sleep Now…In Paradisum, Benjamin Britten/Wilfred Owen

What have you been listening to?

This memoir of Bryson's childhood in the 1950s, told with his special brand of gentle humor, turns out to be as much about the culture in the U.S. during that decade as about his personal experience. Much was familiar to me, since we are near-contemporaries, so I most enjoyed the bits that fell outside my experience: delivering newspapers, digging through layers of long underwear to pee, watching a tornado move across the horizon. Life in Des Moines, Iowa turns out to be remarkably like life in the Baltimore neighborhood where I grew up. Like me, Bryson was turned loose most of the day to find his own adventures. Unusually for the time, both his parents worked at the local newspaper, which to him mostly meant that dinners were rushed affairs, food thrust in the oven by his mother as she ran in and left to burn while she tore around trying to do the million and one other household chores.

Of Iowa, he says it “has always been proudly middling in all its affairs. It stands in the middle of the continent, between the two mighty central rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi, and throughout my childhood always ranked bang in the middle of everything—size, population, voting preferences, order of entry into the Union.” As such, it makes an appropriate setting for this tale of middle class life during the decade when the U.S. middle class was at its most prosperous.

My favorite part is where he talks of visiting his grandfather's farm. I loved his description of the church potluck suppers with their endless meatloafs with bizarre toppings and Jell-O molds filled with bizarre ingredients—“marshmallows, pretzels, fruit chunks, Rice Krispies, Fritos corn chip”—which were familiar to me from a memorable pot luck supper in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1965. His grandfather's barn was a terrifying place filled with old machinery and old manure. He says:

Even scarier were the fields of corn that pressed in on all sides. Corn doesn't grow as tall as it used to because it's been hybridized into a more compact perfection, but it shot up like bamboo when I was young, reaching heights of eight feet or more and filling 56, 290 square miles of Iowa countryside with a spooky, threatening rustle by the dryish late end of summer. There is no more anonymous, mazelike, unsettling environment, especially to a dim, smallish human, than a field of infinitely identical rows of tall corn, each—including the diagonals—presenting a prospect of endless vegetative hostility. Just standing on the edge and peering in, you knew that if you ventured more than a few feet into a cornfield you would never come out.

Since much of his humor comes from this kind of exaggeration, I felt some concern that readers not as familiar as I with that decade would think that even the true things were exaggerations. Examples include his description of the amount of radiation given off by the bombs so casually tested near populated areas—in 1958, he tells us, “the average child . . . was carrying ten times more strontium [the chief radioactive product of fallout] than he had only the year before”—and the hysteria about communism that led to so many lives being ruined without any proof at all. It is somewhat comforting to be reminded that even back then, foolish congressmen spouted insane pronouncements displaying their prejudices, such as John Rankin from Mississippi saying, “‘Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.'”

In some cases, Bryson thoughtfully includes photographs, such as one of the many ads showing a woman at work, perfectly dressed from the waist down, but above that wearing only a bra, with the caption: “I dreamed I went to work in my maidenform bra.” Without such proof, one would be justified in believing such ads couldn't possibly have been published in all kinds of magazines, so must be an exaggeration.

Such misogynism is only one example of how the 1950s were not the perfection today's ranting politicians would like us to believe and bemoan the loss of. Occasionally he refers to the prejudices whose blatant expression was considered acceptable in those days, but this is Bryson's story of one aspect of 1950s culture, the one he experienced. It is a story of growing up white and well-to-do in the middle of a prosperous U.S. that was filled with optimism about the future despite fears of communism and atomic war. I enjoyed the book and am glad to add his experience to the multiple other facets that make up the prism of this decade.

What books about the 1950s have you read?

I've heard a lot about what a great writer Mary Gaitskill is. Looking through the descriptions of her books, though, they seemed to be about subjects that didn't interest me: obsession, addiction, porn, and what sounded like self-conscious flirting with sexual kinks. I pictured a smiling two-year-old sneaking looks at you out of the corner of her eye as she reaches for the glass bowl she's been told not to touch.

What I found is something quite different. If the mark of a great writer is her ability to immerse you in her world and the life of her characters, Gaitskill is a great writer. Even more so given the flimsy material she chose to work with in this novel.

We first meet Alison when she is, by her own account, old and sick, her beauty gone. She's in her forties, which tells you a lot about her right there. She reflects on her life, running away from home at 15, eventually becoming a model. However, since she is shallow and undisciplined, we cannot expect a deep and disciplined narrative. It jumps around in time, held together by a tenuous web of associations. Supremely self-centered, we cannot expect Alison to understand, much less help us comprehend, the other people in her life, including Veronica, the odd friend she makes while working as an office temp before going back to modeling.

If this sounds like a book you don't want to read, think again. Alison is curiously innocent, like a Parzival set adrift in the whirling, wicked world of 1980s New York and Paris. Despite her self-centeredness, she has no sense of who she is; there is an empty space at her center which she fills with the reflections of herself in others' eyes. She runs away from home because that is what teens do in the tv movies that scare her parents. The only thing she seems to know about herself is that she is beautiful, and she knows that not because she admires herself, but because everyone tells her so (though two modeling agents say that her breasts are “not good”). She takes up with an agent in Paris, not because she loves him but because he expects her to.

That lack of self-knowledge is why she is drawn to Veronica, a much older, ugly and flamboyant copy-editor. Obnoxious and rude, Veronica speaks her mind. She says, “‘Prettiness is all about pleasing other people . . . I don't have to do that anymore. It's my show now.' She said these words as if she were a movie star.”

One of Gaitskill's techniques that I loved is the way Alison describes some key moments in terms of ten pictures. Of the conversation quoted above, she says, “Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them she's the fool, and I'm the person who has something. But in the tenth I'm the fool, and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw.” It's an extraordinary way to show both how much it takes to pierce Alison's insensitivity and how she changes her view of herself based on what other people see.

Alison is proud of herself for befriending this woman who is old and ugly and, eventually, ill. Veronica contracts AIDS from her beloved bisexual on-again/off-again boyfriend, Duncan, who can't be bothered with protection even when he knows he is sick. We are enveloped in the frantic hedonism of the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when so much was rumored and so little understood, when it seemed as though there would be no tomorrow, no need to save any of yourself for a mythical old age.

Although we never really get to know Veronica, since we see her only through Alison's narcissistic eyes, we see her effect on Alison, who comes to regret bragging to others about the peculiar old woman she has befriended.

The writing is indeed excellent. Other reviewers have talked about her word choice and word-pairing, how her sentences seem to hold you off while hinting at their secrets. I liked the interplay of “old” Alison's story with her “wicked” youth. I liked the motifs that, like knots in a net, keep the whole flimsy tale from dissipating into air. This story will stay with me for a long time.

What books have you liked in spite of yourself?

If you've followed this blog, you know that I read a lot of books each year. I also subscribe to the London Review of Books, read other reviews online, and am a member of “Goodreads”: www.goodreads.com/author/show/1453712.B_Morrison. When my son moved to Canada, he introduced me to a slew of wonderful authors who were unknown here in the U.S., several of whom I now count among my top ten favorite authors. Since then, I've made an effort to learn about books by writers from a variety of countries, nearly always in translation unfortunately, but still widening my experience. I've also attended Toronto's International Festival of Authors several times.

All this is to say that I've at least heard of a lot of authors. Still, my friend whom we'll call DAP managed to stump me when he said that his favorite author was Vardis Fisher. That's not a name easily forgotten! I'd never heard of him. So of course I consulted my wonderful local library and selected this book.

Mountain Man is Fisher's most famous book. It's the basis for the film, Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford, a film I've never seen (my film knowledge is much more limited than my knowledge of books!).

Named Samson for his huge size, Sam Minard left his family back in New York state for a brief trip to see the still-unsettled west and fell in love with the mountains and the independent life he found there. Strong and self-reliant, he knows where in the wilderness he's likely to find his friends, the other mountain men who sell furs to purchase the few necessaries, like coffee and tobacco, that they cannot provide for themselves.

Reveling in his freedom and the beauty of his world, Sam responds with the music he learned from his father: “He had learned that playing Bach and Mozart arias [on his mouth organ] when in enemy country was not only good for his loneliness; the music filled skulking Indians with awe.” Many of the descriptions throughout the book use musical terms, as he hears symphonies in the stars and opera in the storms.

Sam is about to add two commitments to his currently loose ties with the other mountain men, one accidentally and one on purpose. He comes across a woman, Kate Bowden, who in a blinding rage has just killed the four Blackfeet who killed her three children. Her husband has been carried off by the rest of the band, and now she has dropped to her knees beside her children and lost all sense of anything outside of them.

Sam buries the children and builds her a little house, though she still seems completely unaware of him and the food he puts in front of her. He has to move on, but spreads the word among his friends and they look in on her when they are near.

He has to get on because he is ready for a wife and knows who he wants, the daughter of a Crow chief. This part of the story alone is worth reading the book for, the negotiations with her father, the way he and the young woman get to know each other without a common language, the way he reacts to this tumultuous change in his life.

I loved this book. The characters fascinated me, especially Kate and the trajectory of her life, but also Sam. The descriptions of a west that no longer exists enthralled me. And I loved all the stories about the other mountain men that they told each other, many of them lies or exaggerations, but true for all that. At one point he imagines what the others are up to at that moment: “in what deep impenetrable thicket tall skinny Bill Williams had hidden from the red warriors, his high squeaky voice silenced for the night; by what fire with its cedar and coffee aroma Wind River Bill was spinning his yarns and saying, ‘I love the wimmins, I shorely do'; in what Spanish village short blond Kit Carson was dancing the soup dance with black-eyed senoritas; what tall tales Jim Bridger was telling to bug-eyed greenhorns from a wagon train that stopped this day at his post to get horses shod and tires set . . .” Scattered throughout Sam's story are these tales of men who relished the independence of life in the mountains.

I'm grateful to my friend, DAP, for recommending this author. What books have your friends recommended that you've liked?

Gardam has been one of my favorite authors since I was introduced to her via “Old Filth”: , recommended by the ever-reliable folks at my local indie bookstore, The Ivy. Her stories remind me a bit of Barbara Pym's because they are about the charming and extraordinary lives of ordinary people. In the memoir workshops I lead, I always say that everyone has a story to share. The most humdrum life has trials and triumphs and moments of grace. Often, reading obituaries of people I never met, I think Wow! I wish I'd known that person.

Even more than Pym, though, Gardam's work reminds me of Ann Tyler's. Tyler is famous for her eccentric characters, portrayed with understanding and compassion. Having grown up in the neighborhood where Tyler often places her characters, I can attest to their accuracy. So perhaps we are all eccentrics and oddballs; some people just hide it better.

In this story, six-year-old Polly Flint is left by her father at a remote yellow house near the Irish sea. After he hands her over to her two aunts, her late mother's sisters, he takes himself off to his ship. Two months later he went down with his ship.

I expected a Jane Eyre sort of story, but Gardam is never predictable. Polly's aunts, pious spinsters, assume from the first that she will be with them always, not as a duty to be undertaken, but as a member of the family. “Never in all the years did they suggest that they had been good to me or that there was the least need for my gratitude, or that I had in any way disturbed their lives.”

For Polly, who has lived in foster homes since her mother's death when Polly was one, she might as well be stranded on a desert island, so isolated from the world does she feel, growing up in the old wooden house. When she stumbles upon Robinson Crusoe in the library, she recognises her soul-mate and life's guide.

And what a life it is! At every turn, when I think I know what is coming next, Gardam outwits me, spinning her tale in another direction. We follow Polly as she grows up, as the twentieth century's wars and evolutions change her enclosed world.

I loved the characters, so unusual and yet so real I felt I must know them. I loved the descriptions: “It was the light at first that was troublesome—the light and the space of the yellow hose. Light flowed in from all sides and down from the enormous sky . . . Here the wind knocked the clouds about over the hills and the marsh and the dunes and the sea, until the house seemed to toss like a ship. I remember that I clutched on to things a good deal.”

Gardam deals efficiently with the challenge of adjusting Polly's first-person voice as she ages. Polly's relationship to the book changes too as she grows, but she never ceases to turn to it for guidance. She never ceases to admire Crusoe as a man and what he accomplished. Some members of my book club felt the references to Crusoe were overdone, but I thought they came at just the right intervals.

This is a lovely read, funny at times and sad at others. I was enchanted by the people Polly meets and what she makes of them. Her life, however ordinary-seeming, is rocked by strong tides and shaken by a family's small rivalries and secrets. I highly recommend it. If you've read any of Gardam's books, what did you think of them?