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Pearl of China is actually the story of a woman named Willow growing up in the rural village of Chin-kiang where Pearl Buck’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, works as a missionary. The two girls become friends after an initial misunderstanding. Pearl’s mother, Carie, becomes especially close to Willow, teaching her music.

As I’ve mentioned before, I dislike stories that use real people as characters. I think it’s an invasion of privacy, and also can’t help but feel the author is being a bit lazy not creating his or her own characters. So, feeling as I do, why did I read this book? For the same reason I read any book: something about it intrigued me. Also, I knew the next book I read would also feature a missionary in Asia and wanted something to get me in the mood. The use of a real person didn’t bother me so much here because Pearl is not only treated respectfully, but is also is not the main character. She’s really more of a foil for Willow.

Although covering the sometimes horrific events of 20th century China, I found the book a pleasant read. Min’s spare prose flows well. Her sentences are short and simple, nearly always employing the same structure: subject-verb-object. I’m surprised this book wasn’t in the Young Adult section. Certainly the simple prose is easy to absorb and the protagonist, at least in the beginning, is herself young.

The character I found most interesting was Willow’s father. Handsome and educated, a bit of a rascal, he prefers reciting poetry to working as a coolie, but everything he turns his hand to seems to end disastrously. Eventually he is reduced to stealing to provide for his family which, as the story opens, consists only of his ailing mother and seven-year-old Willow, but he is too clumsy to be a successful thief. He pretends to convert to Christianity in order to get meals and later employment in Absalom’s church. His attempts to mediate between the church’s conventions and those of the Buddhist villagers are endlessly entertaining, as he increases attendance until Absalom has the largest Christian community in China. However, it is his evolution from scamp to true believer that I found most moving.

Pearl struggles to get her stories published also aroused my interest. The prevailing norm in China at the time was didactic: to publish edifying works that would raise the peasant mind. Pearl’s stories about the world from the peasant’s point of view are repeatedly rejected by Chinese publishers. Her real success as a writer comes only after she returns to America although, as Willow says, “When she talked of home, she meant China.”

Willow’s childhood is the most fully dramatised section of the book. Later sections move rather quickly through her adult life, where Pearl’s influence on Willow becomes minor compared to the effects of the political changes shaking China. Willow’s childhood conversion to Christianity and her memory of her friendship with Pearl are repeatedly challenged, particularly after her husband becomes Mao’s right-hand man. Madame Mao alternates between wanting Willow to woo the Nobel Prize winner’s support for the new regime and castigating her for not denouncing Pearl as an enemy of the revolution.

In a way, I wish Min had done away with Pearl Buck altogether. A note in the bio says that she was ordered as a child to denounce Buck, and I don’t doubt that Min’s interest in the writer, piqued by this event, became the initial impetus for writing this book. Writers are often told to throw out the first paragraphs or pages of their work. It’s true that it sometimes takes a bit of dithering about and scene setting to get to the meat of the matter. It’s also true that sometimes, perhaps more often than not, the original impetus does not really belong in the final version. As Faulkner said, “In writing you must kill all your darlings.” Here I believe Min’s book might have been stronger with a fictional missionary’s daughter. Perhaps putting Pearl’s name in the title sells more books, but in a way it is false advertising since this isn’t her story so much as it is Willow’s. Willow emerges as a brave and believable woman whose life gives us an unusual view of China’s transformations in the 20th century.

As the book begins, Esther remembers her childhood and her Great-Aunt Eileen telling her to be where she is. An old woman now, Esther faces her last day and night in her home on Lake Ontario. She uses that time, interrupted as it is by the sounds and imagined actions of the shift workers at the quarry next door as they work around the clock, to recall and relive once more the sequence of stories that Eileen told her so long ago.

The tales start with Mary, Eileen's mother and Esther's great-grandmother, who in 1842 stumbles upon a shipwrecked sailor on the storm-strewn beach of Rathlin, a small island off the northern coast of Ireland. This brief encounter marks Mary, such that all the islanders and Mary herself believe that she has been “away”, that is, taken by the otherworldly “them” and returned changed forever. The priest, Father Quinn, finds Mary a husband on the big island where she manages to lead a semblance of a normal life until the Hunger forces them to emigrate to Canada.

Later, Eileen herself, having traveled from the backwoods homestead of her childhood to the house on the lake, is touched in turn by a fleeting relationship with a man who is described by the men around him as “the best of us”, a man who could dance the world into being.

Urquhart is one of my favorite writers. Her prose sings with poetry, not just the songs the women compose and sing in their altered states, but everyday sentences imbued with a bardic lilt that makes me hold my breath and listen. This is Mary in the northern Ontario forest: “The woods suggested, in their uncertainties of space, transparencies of light—their rumours of entities glimpsed, then lost—that some magnificent event was always on the edge of taking place . . . “

If I had read this book when I was twenty, I would have seen only romance. In those days I read Faulkner's Wild Palms and grasped only a woman setting her eyes on a man for the first time and saying yes. I managed to ignore all that came later. Reading this book now in my cynical late middle age, it is old Eileen's voice that rings true to me: be where you are. I take this to mean: don't be seduced by all those lovely stories.

Subtly Urquhart expands that idea beyond the usual “First comes love; then comes marriage” to include all the romantic stories we use to frame our lives: the islanders with their myths, the two elderly brothers in Puffin Court living out an Anglo-Irish aristocratic fantasy and not perceiving the blight destroying their tenants' crops, the immigrants with their fight for Irish nationalism, the Canadians with their dream of a dominion that will magically wash away all inequity.

The book has won many awards, deservedly so. I have a few minor quibbles, disappointment, for example, at how skimpy and unmemorable Esther's own story is, surprise that a mother would do what Mary did, but these are minor indeed. This lovely story, with its warnings about the ability of stories to enchant those who believe them, will stay with me for a long time.

Those who follow this blog know I'm a fan of Parker's work (see http://bmorrison.com/blog/210/robert-b-parker-an-appreciation). In recent years I've heard complaints about his later work, that it lacks the narrative complexity of his earlier work, that the brusque dialogue with its recurring booms of he said/she said makes the stories impossible to listen to on cd. Opening this book reinforces these criticisms: there's a lot of white space on these pages and only an abnormally large font gives the book enough heft to seem like a full novel. Yet I continue to read Parker's work, and not just out of loyalty or nostalgia for the days when I could bury myself in his world and come out changed. I still delight in these books. No matter how slender, they are still full of heart.

We say of some crime fiction that it is hard-boiled. Resolution seems to me boiled down to the essence of what makes a western. A man with a gun comes to town and is hired to keep the peace. He is the kind of person others look to. As Elmer Kelton said of one of his characters: “He knew what to do and was man enough to do it.” He is joined by a friend, and together they face the anarchy of a town where there is no government yet, no one to keep the peace, no one to turn to when you are in danger, no rules or laws to appeal to.

Everett Hitch is hired to sit lookout in the saloon owned by Amos Wolfson, who also owns the store, the bank, and much of the land outside of town. Yet he wants more. Not content with building a community that will become steady customers, Wolfson plans to extract every penny from the farmers, whom he contemptuously calls sodbusters, foreclose their mortgages and resell their land to a new crop of gullible marks.

His competition for richest and most powerful man in town is O'Malley, owner of the copper mine, who uses intimidation to take what he wants. Stark, owner of the sawmill, is different in that he takes the long view of investing in building a town and a community. The story reminded me of Deadwood, a tv series that Jake recommended to me which brilliantly traces how a society is created and how people and the town must change to accommodate the new social structures that evolve. I was curious as to how a group of strangers thrown together in a place with no society, no culture to dictate roles and behavior, would organise themselves, how a leader would be chosen or emerge, how mores and laws would develop. I don't think Lord of the Flies is the last word, that we would turn to crude violence and power-mongering.

Hitch's friend and former mentor, Virgil Cole, is the most interesting character to me. A former lawman, he wrestles—mostly silently—with issues around when it is right to use his gun. When he was a lawman, even if he and Hitch mostly wrote the laws themselves, it was easy for him to justify shooting men who broke those laws. Now, being just a man with a strong sense of right and wrong and skill with a gun, it is less clear.

The dialogue is terse. These are not men who talk a lot. There’s not a lot of description of waves of grain and purple mountains. Instead, there is the matter-of-fact building of tension as the various characters become more and more themselves.

A couple of other themes are relevant for today. What could be more contemporary than Wolfson’s desire for instant gratification, his desire to scrape every cent out of the people around him, even though he has no place to spend it? Also, there is much here about what it means to be a man. Men like Boyle, the rookie gunman, and Redmond, the farmer, brag about their courage and ability, wanting respect but unwilling or too impatient to develop the skills that will earn it. Much has been written lately about how boys are failing in our society, outpaced in education and achievement by girls. The Women’s Movement has done a good job of freeing girls from past restraints and opening doors. Attention now needs to be paid to our boys, and a conversation begun about how boys become men and what it means to be a man in our society.

Parker’s work, as always, goes to the heart of these important questions. What are our responsibilities to each other, what makes a man a man, how do we build communities when the greedy few are determined to take all the wealth and power for themselves: these are questions that affect how we envision what our society will look like in the future. I will miss him.

O'Faolain is the author of the well-regarded memoir, Are You Somebody? I haven't read it yet but will. Her prose is gorgeous, absorbing. I can't remember when I last lost myself in a novel as I did in this one.

My Dream of You is another novel about a woman who journeys far from her native Ireland. Kathleen de Burca is a middle-aged travel writer based in London who, when not scouring the world for material for her articles, lives in a dark and dismal basement flat off Euston Road. Where she really feels at home, though, is the small office on the top floor of a Victorian building “right up under the slates”, with its big window looking out over the rooftops of London and the green of the linden trees in the square below.

Kathleen shares the office with Jimmy, her fellow writer and best friend, Roxy the secretary who fills the window with Busy Lizzies and geraniums, and their boss Alex, whose constant presence and meticulous consistency grounds them all. Kathleen and Jimmy are so attuned to each other that they carry on elliptical dialogues of gestures and code words that baffle Alex completely. The two of them come up with off-the-wall ideas for articles (reminding me of the bizarre tours suggested in The Biographer's Tale). At Christmas, Jimmy takes her home to his family in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where being gay isn't half so bad as not being a jock. Kathleen does not take him to Ireland. In fact, she hasn't been back since boarding the ferry at 20, carrying away her anger and tears.

Although confident and assured while exploring foreign cities, Kathleen is curiously passive when it comes to men. She reminds me of some women I knew in the first flush of the sexual revolution in the 1960s who seemed to feel obliged to sleep with any man who asked. However, Kathleen's behavior seems unbelievable now when we know so much about HIV and other STDs. Yet so much rings true: her recklessness, her lack of concern for herself, her belief that going to bed with a man is the only way to truly know him. Being in the body is for her being alive.

When a sudden loss throws her world into disarray, Kathleen takes refuge in the idea of researching an old court case from the 1850s, just after the worst of the Hunger. Richard Talbot, a wealthy Anglo-Irish landlord, sought a divorce from his wife Marianne on the grounds of adultery with a servant. A note at the beginning of the book tells us that the excerpts from the Talbot Judgment are quoted from the actual Talbot divorce case.

The case has interested Kathleen for years, ever since her first love, Hugo, casually handed her a copy of the Judgment. What fascinates her is the larger picture of a young, pampered Englishwoman taking up with a rough Irish stablehand. Did he even speak English? During this time when landlords were evicting their Irish tenants wholesale and razing their cottages, whole villages were emptied, the strong emigrating, the weak dying, and the few survivors dug into holes in the ground for homes, out by the bogs. Within this larger picture of the relationship between their two countries, the image of a sweet and enduring love that emerges from the legal papers seems to Kathleen worth pursuing. She abandons her job and goes to Ireland to research what she hopes will become a book.

Aside from the sheer beauty of her prose, what O'Faolain does so brilliantly is to work in scenes from the past so that they become a seamless part of the narrative. Knowing where to place parts of the backstory, how much to reveal at one time, what transitions to use to ease readers in and out of the past: many writers, including me, struggle with these issues. Yet O'Faolain pulls it all together, seemingly without effort, dipping back at just the right moment to give us tales of Hugo, adventures with Jimmy, Kathleen's mother, and what went wrong with Alex. Every time I go back and try to analyse how she does it, I get caught up in the story again, enchanted, engrossed.

Toibin is one of my book club's favorite authors. We've read The Master and before that The Heather Blazing which I picked up in a used tools and books sale in a small town in England. We are impressed with his versatility, but what we really love is his ability to pack so much meaning and emotion into a single scene, a single gesture. We selected his most recent novel for October, a safe choice I thought until I read it. Then I feared that this unassuming story of a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to the U.S. in the 1950s would not provide much fodder for discussion. However, it prompted one of our liveliest and most sustained discussions.

Eilis Lacey lives in a small town with her widowed mother and older sister Rose. At 30, the lovely and self-confident Rose works as a bookkeeper at a local mill and plays golf with her many friends. Eilis herself is taking accounting courses and is obviously quite smart but held back by the limited employment opportunities in town. Rose conspires with Father Flood, visiting from New York, to arrange for transportation, lodging and a job in Brooklyn for her younger sister. Faced with leaving her home and friends and the life she has always assumed she would have, Eilis is miserable but complies.

This setup for her life in the New World contains what I saw as the main flaws in the book. First, whenever the slightest hint of a problem or conflict arises, a solution immediately presents itself. Second, everyone, even people who don't know her, go out of their way to help her: the priest, her cabinmate on the ship, her landlady in New York. Third, Eilis herself seems passive, allowing other people to make the major decisions in her life, not just Rose, but her boyfriend in New York, her supervisor, Father Flood.

Many in the book club loved the story, one saying that it was the kind of book she used to read, that made her love reading: a linear narrative with one point of view and a slow pace. “No bling” as she put it. He lets the story tell itself. It's true that we've read a number of more or less successful experimental novels lately. However, I disagree with my friend. I think that in spite of its traditional format, Brooklyn is a very experimental novel. It seems to me that Toibin has challenged himself to write about an ordinary young woman leading a life that—outside of her journey to America—is remarkably uneventful, and still make it an interesting, readable story. He succeeds. One person mentioned that nowadays when authors are steeped in Chekhov, we expect every plot point to be significant, but life isn't like that.

Others in the book club talked about how much they liked Eilis. She has a moral compass which gives her strength in spite of her apparent passivity. She is not judgmental in a time when people in the U.S. were very judgmental. She stays true to herself and does the right thing, such as taking a new boarder to the dance. One person suggested that her apparent passivity is really just the way life has of turning you one way or another. A different person pointed out that most of the people in this book don't actually talk to each other; they don't say the important things. Eilis doesn't tell her mother and Rose that she wants to stay. Rose doesn't share her own plans and problems with Eilis. Choosing not to talk about things was only too common in those pre-let-it-all-hang-out days.

Where I most felt a hole in the book was the lack of conflict. Whenever a difficulty arises, such as a locked bathroom door, someone provides a solution. Gifts fall into Eilis's lap: the first man she meets turns out to be Mr. Right; his family loves her even though they are not Irish; all potential roadblocks dissolve. Conflicts that could have generated entire books in themselves—integrating the store where she works, a suggestion of sexual harassment—are no big deal and immediately dropped. Everybody loves her. Is it really possible to have so charmed a life?

Without conflict a character doesn't change, and indeed while her outward appearance changes, Eilis is the same person at the end as in the beginning. So why did everyone like the book so much? It is a good read; Toibin's marvelous prose made me want to read just one more paragraph, one more chapter. We like spending time with Eilis. One of our members, an emigrant herself, talked of how true to life the description of the emigrant experience is, particularly the way when you are in one world, you have no connection with the other world. The slower pace and lack of big scenes made us more aware of subtle successes, such as a scene in a bookstore where Eilis is overwhelmed by the number of books, and the brilliant, understated portrayal of the first two women of color to enter the store. Middle-aged, glamorous, wearing cream-colored woolen coats, they chat with each other, never looking directly at the salespeople. They have the same self-sufficient dignity and integrity that Eilis has.

Toibin still manages to create tension, even without apparent conflicts. The unspoken truths add tension. Also, at any moment her life could go either way. I guess I was the only one who was a bit disappointed, but I applaud Toibin's accomplishment. The book is loving portrayal of a person and a time, all the rough edges smoothed away, nostalgic without being sentimental.

This is not the book for a casual reader looking for a good yarn. As with most of Byatt’s books, this extended rumination on the art of biography repays thoughtful attention and rereading. Admittedly, I am occasionally an inattentive reader, but it is only on this, my second reading, that the book begins to yield up its treasures.

It opens as Phineas G. Nanson realizes that he cannot bear to continue his graduate work in postmodern literary theory. He needs facts, things, not semiotic theories picking away at the veins of intentional and unintentional meanings underlying words and phrases, most of which come to seem an imposition of the analyst’s privileged thoughts on those of the writer.

Uncertain what to do next, he consults a professor, one of the heads of the department, Ormerode Goode, who suggests he read Scholes Destry-Scholes’s three-volume biography of Sir Elmer Bole. Nanson marvels at the breadth of knowledge that Destry-Scholes attains in order to—literally and figuratively—follow in Bole’s footsteps, reading everything that Bole read, going everywhere that Boles went, mastering languages, becoming an expert in Byzantine mosaics, tulip cultivation, and Madagascan lemurs.

Elmer Bole himself devoted at least part of his life to following a 17th century Turkish traveler, Evliya Chelebi, even taking on Evliya’s nickname, Siyyah, the Traveler, thus opening an intriguing hall of mirrors of endless reflections. We are never able to identify the ur-life that started this endless trail of study and imitation. Nanson determines to write a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes and, like his subject, he plans to read everything Destry-Scholes read, go everywhere, and so on. “But no string has an end. Like spider-silk unreeling.” Therefore, Nanson thinks that he will be satisfied—thrilled—to add a few footnotes, a clarifying tidbit based on more recent science to Destry-Scholes’s storehouse of knowledge.

Byatt’s book is short on story and long on jumbled snippets of scholarship as Nanson discovers fragmented research notes on three historical figures, presumably in preparation for writing a joint biography. As Nanson struggles to order and understand these fragments, we are given them intact to make of them what we will, just as we were given chunks of transcripts and stories, and even Frederica’s cut-up journals in earlier books. The mind struggles to hold all the disparate bits and invent a narrative to tie them together, all the while wondering if it is just a fool’s game, like Destry-Scholes’s niece spending hours comparing his collection of marbles to the list of their names, trying to determine which name belongs to which marble.

Such a style of writing reflects our frenetic and fractured world, its hyperlinks and jump cuts challenging our attention and attempts at sustained and critical thought. Since this whirlwind is precisely what I wish to escape when I pickup a novel, it may be obvious that this is not my favorite style. However, I am, as always, seduced by the intelligence behind the games and by the perennially fascinating question of what in fact we can know about another person.

I turned to this book a second time because of its focus on 19th century natural historians and arcane collections, thinking still about cabinets of curiosities. I also wanted to reread it because I have been thinking a lot about the shape of a life and the legacy left behind. We may have the bits and pieces we can learn about a person. We can rearrange these tesserae trying to form a pattern, trying to recreate the person’s thoughts. But ultimately the past is a foreign country and its people strangers to us. We impose our own thoughts on the tracings left behind, creating a palimpsest that may bear no resemblance to the actual person. And of course it is not just the past. Everyone is a stranger to us, even those we think we know well, with stories our only way into their minds and hearts.

McClelland & Stewart put out a special, hard-back edition of this short story by the author of Such a Long Journey (winner of the Governor General’s Award) and three other books, with royalties going to World Literacy of Canada. The story is an old man’s monologue that starts with his being awakened in the night by a scream outside his window.

Although set in India, the narrator’s concerns are universal as he struggles with his declining abilities and his growing conviction that his family is secretly working against him. He believes, for example, that they put ice on the cement ledge where he likes to sit, making it even colder and more uncomfortable for him. He relates how they pretend that the servant is his grandson, even letting him sit at table with them. He uses long and unfamiliar words—fifty-cent words such as caliginous, hypogean, galimatias, sesquipedalianism—to demonstrate that he still has his wits about him and is still smarter than his family.

The language is superb, such as the narrator’s description of sleeping all together in the back room, before he was banished to the front room. He speaks of listening all night to “their orchestra of wind instruments, their philharmonia of dyspepsia”. I loved the small details of daily life, such as the description of the chanavala selling gram and peanuts, with his tin can of spices.

The book is illustrated by Tony Urquhart using different types of paper, including the marbleized paper sometime used for endpapers of books, tempera and gel pens. Dreamy and slightly abstract, the illustrations add depth and texture to the story. For example, illustrations with snippets of a keyboard tumbling through the air contribute to the sense of disorientation, the fear that one cannot trust reality.

As I approach a significant birthday, I find myself thinking a lot about aging, about the small gains and losses each year. I appreciate this rant, this raging against the fading of the light, more than any sweet, consolatory fairy tale. However mistaken the narrator may be in details, his sense that he is being left alone to suffer the ravages of age and his belief that something is being stolen from him are only too real.

I met a man yesterday who claimed to have died and come back to life. He was being taken to the hospital when his ambulance collided with a firetruck. Pronounced dead at the scene, he was taken to the morgue in a body bag. Being an organ donor, he was taken from the morgue to have his organs harvested. By the time he regained consciousness, having been told (he claimed) that it was not yet his time, the doctors had removed one of his kidneys. I found his story hard to believe and almost asked, Thomas-like, to see his scar, but his story did make me wonder about negotiating with death.

This week I am mourning the sudden loss of a friend, beloved by many, gone too soon. I will miss him, and miss too the further wonderful things he would have accomplished had he lived a bit longer. Thinking of this story, I realise that much as I fear going too soon, I fear even more hanging on too long. I fear dementia more than death.

Post Captain is the second book in this famous series which I never got around to reading until this summer. Actually, I listened to it in the car, narrated by Patrick Tull. I found the first book, Master and Commander, rather slow going. It starts at a concert in Port Mahon, Minorca where Jack Aubrey gets so excited by the music that he beats time—not entirely accurately—to the consternation of the man sitting next to him, Stephen Maturin, a doctor of half-Irish, half-Catalan heritage.

Despite this inauspicious beginning the two become friends, and Jack invites Stephen to join his sloop, the Sophie, as ship surgeon. Stephen, who is in some financial difficulty, agrees. Thus they are launched on their adventures, protecting British vessels and tracking down French and Spanish ships during the Napleonic Wars.

Jack treats is all as a great adventure, coming off as a rather simple fellow most of the time. However, he shines in battle where he comes up with daring and ingenious ploys to outwit the enemy. Stephen's mind has a more serious cast. Interested in natural history, he collects and studies specimens during their travels and deplores not only the carnage of battle but also some facets of sailing life, such as the regular consumption of rum and the occasional flogging.

Much of the tedium of the first book for me lay in the long expositions on sailing craft, as Stephen is instructed by his kind crewmates. While I see how these sections might be fascinating to some, I know too little to be able to picture what was being described. The two characters speaking were looking at the ship's masts, sails, rigging, etc., so of course had no need to describe them to each other, leaving me somewhat at sea. Perhaps knowledge of such things as what a topgallant might look like is assumed, but more narrative description would have helped me. Anyway, I'm always more interested in the relationships between characters and the conflicts that arise between them, and there were enough of these to send me to this second book.

Post Captain starts during the Peace of Amiens when commanders and common seamen have been thrown out of work. Jack takes a house in the country, and he and Stephen become friendly with a nearby family that includes several young women. However, this Austen-like interlude is abruptly terminated when two reversals of fortune leave Jack not only bankrupt, but on the run lest he land in debtors' prison. While he and Stephen are in Europe, war breaks out again, catching them unaware and placing them in great danger isolated in enemy territory.

I liked this second book tremendously. The storylines related to the young women continue through the book while the relationship between the two men deepens and becomes more complex. And the battle scenes are stunning. O'Brien braids in sensory details—the taste of powder in the air, the booming of the guns—without diluting the suspense and excitement. I understand from O'Brien's introduction and Wikipedia that the author based these scenes on the real exploits of Lord Cochrane and other naval heroes. Writers steal people's stories all the time. For example, Faulkner frankly confessed that his stories were based on family tales and the shenanigans of his neighbors in Oxford.

In both these books I also enjoyed the interplay among the crew. Only a few emerge as individuals, but O'Brien manages to convey shifting tides of relationships between individuals and the crew as a whole in just the briefest of scenes. There are some promising—indeed tantalising—storylines here that I hope will be followed up in future books.

Writing a series like this gives a writer huge scope for developing his characters. I wonder how much O'Brien plotted out the series before he started. J. K. Rowling says that she had the out line for the whole Harry Potter series before she started writing. Other writers stumble into it, meaning to write only one book and ending up with many, such as Agatha Christie who famously bemoaned having stuck herself with a Belgian detective. These stories have the air of plunging ahead, the author discovering along with us what happens next, but that could just be good writing.

In the midst of a rather trying week, I selected this mystery to read. Mysteries not only absorb me into another world, but also fill most of my available brain-space with a puzzle to be solved.

Nora Kelly is an architect at the New York Museum of Natural History, where much of the story takes place. I went there for the first time a couple of years ago and was entranced. I wish I'd known about it earlier, when my boys were young. So I was delighted to plunge into descriptions of the museum's public areas and exhibitions, as well as the nether regions where scientists pursue research and archives collect dust.

Nora is approached by Special Agent Pendergast, who carries an FBI identity badge although his actual position within the FBI is unclear, who captures her attention by presenting her with a skull. He ropes her into investigating a construction site where the giant excavator has broken through to a foundation from the 1880s and discovered a cache of human remains.

Together they try to untangle the ancient crimes, with the assistance of Nora's sometime boyfriend, who is an investigative reporter, and the policeman assigned to Pendergast as a liaison. Although initially Nora doesn't want to get involved, being preoccupied by squabbles with her boss back at the museum, a small clue found at the site suddenly brings home to her the humanity of these relics, that these bones were once people, young people, with their own dreams and responsibilities.

The emotional journeys undertaken by all four of these major characters combined with the puzzle make for an absorbing read. One of the parts I liked best was the historical context of the cabinets of curiosties assembed by 19th century amateur naturalists. I've long been interested in that period's gentlemen-scientists, when untrained men with money and leisure pursued an interest in natural history or exploration or military science, sometimes with tragic consequences such as with Shackleton and Scott whose mistaken ideas led their Antarctic expeditions into danger, or the military officers whose inexperience and incompetence contributed to the grievous casualty lists in the Great War.

I call them amateurs because, unlike today, there were no educational programs in these fields to train potential scientists in an established curriculum, no gatekeepers to validate a self-proclaimed authority's credentials. Even the word “scientist” didn't exist before 1840, according to the OED. Granted, the military had training programs, but becoming an officer had more to do with social class and longevity than with leadership ability or military expertise.

Naturalists of the period assembled their own quirky collections, as described in some of A.S. Byatt's novels. Many went on to exhibit them as cabinets of curiosity. As part of a recent renovation, the Walters Art Gallery (itself based on the collection of Henry Walters) opened a series of rooms they call the Chamber of Wonders which is a recreation of such a personal collection, combining Etruscan artworks, coins from ancient Greece, and rare specimens of birds, to name just a few.

It's a fascinating exhibit. I was reminded of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia, both eccentric personal collections left intact for public view. According to the account here, the Museum of Natural History got its start buying up local cabinets of curiosities as their owners were forced into bankruptcy after the museum opened with free admission.

Another feature of this book that interested me was the partnership of authors. While reading, I found myself wondering how they divided up the work. Did they write alternate chapters? Or did each pursue a different part of the story? Slate is currently running a series on the creative potential of partnerships as opposed to the stereotype of the lone struggling genius. It makes for interesting reading.

Since horror and the paranormal/supernatural do not interest me, I confess I just ignored those aspects of the story. The mystery alone was sufficient suspense for me and distracted me from my trying week just as I'd hoped. At a writing workshop I was leading, I met a young woman who said that when she was sad or upset, she would lie down on her bed, pull up her favorite quilt, and lose herself in a book—exactly what I did with this mystery. Whatever else this book may be, it is a most effective transportation device.

This 2009 novel, winner of the National Book Award, was chosen by my book club for this month’s selection. The story follows a number of characters, each narrating his or her section of the book, all linked by the day that Philippe Petit (unnamed here) made his famous walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center. It was more than a walk; it was a dance, a gloriously daring and joyful performance, captured in the film Man on Wire which I highly recommend.

Although the book is truly a portrait of New York City, the first narrator is an Irishman, Ciaran, describing his childhood and his younger brother, Corrigan, whose idea of helping Dublin’s bums is to find common cause by getting plastered with them, an idea which seems likely to lead him either to the priesthood or the gutter. Eventually Ciaran follows his brother across the ocean to South Bronx where he finds Corrigan ministering to prostitutes. Other sections are narrated by a nurse, a photographer, a Park Avenue housewife, a single Black mother, a prostitute, a judge, among others. Most of their stories interconnect, some only glancingly, but all circle back to the day the man walked the wire.

Their stories are of grief and loss, inevitably, I suppose, since these are the dramatic moments of our lives, the moments when we feel most cut off from others. Yet, in this cross-section of the city at a particular moment of time, McCann gives us moments of redemption, though they are not easy, and of connection.

The reactions of my book club were mixed. Some people liked the book a lot, feeling that it represented the New York that they knew, saying that the book may be messy and uneven but you could say that about the city as well. Others found the book boring and the characters flat and their voices indistinguishable. My reaction was influenced by the medium: I listened to the audio book, in which each narrator was played by a different actor, all them excellent, bringing the characters to individual life. With their voices in my head, I cannot go back and look at the words on the page and judge whether they by themselves are sufficient.

Back in college, I took a course called Oral Interpretation taught by the inestimable Esther Smith, where we learned to go inside a piece of writing—play, poem, prose—and create and perform our own interpretation of it. We dissected nuances of body language and intonation. While I cannot say I ever excelled at the art of oral interpretation, the course did make me aware of what an actor brings to the performance—it is more than just a reading—of an audio book. I cannot tell how much of my reaction to each section is mediated by the actor’s performance.

Each of us in the book club liked some sections more than others, though not the same sections. For instance, one person liked best the part about the nascent friendship between the Park Avenue housewife and the single Black mother, which I thought too much of a stretch, while others didn’t believe the section that moved me most, the one in which a woman believes the distant figure on the wire was her son, who had been killed in Vietnam. The lawyer among us found the judge’s section true to life. And we all liked the very short section of the book narrated by the unnamed acrobat describing his training and the walk itself.

The book has been described as a 9-11 novel. Although, the story takes place in the 1970s and the future destruction of the World Trade Center is never mentioned, I too found it impossible to read this book without thinking about that horrific day. In 1974 when Petit made his famous walk, the towers had only recently been opened and were considered “the ugly stepchild of New York’s skyscrapers” as Jonathan Mahler put it in his New York Times review. With this book I felt that I held within my hands the birth and death of the towers as well as the lives of the characters and, indeed, those of my friends who died there that day. I began to understand the proposition that time is not linear after all, but folded in upon itself, our future encapsulated within our present.