ASK AGAIN, YES by Mary Beth Keane

Brian and Anne Stanhope live next door to Francis and Lena Gleeson.  Soon it becomes apparent that Anne is unstable.  Her son Peter and the Gleeson’s youngest daughter Kate are playmates who begin to consider becoming more than just friends as they grow older.  However, a tragic event throws both families into turmoil, with the result that Kate and Peter do not meet again until college.  I became engrossed in this story though not immersed, if that makes sense.  The characters are all flawed to varying degrees and undergoing circumstances that at times resulted from a lack of communication, among other things.  Late in the novel Kate knows she has to confront Peter and initiate a frank and painful conversation with him but finds herself constantly backpedaling.  For me, this section is the most moving, and Kate’s uncertainty is very vivid.  Anne is a singularly unlikeable character, but I had to keep reminding myself that she is mentally ill and that I should not hold that against her.  I would say that maintaining an open mind about Anne was a challenge, and Kate’s missteps and coping mechanisms were quite exasperating.  The struggles of these two women are the heart of the book.  The main male character is Peter, and I found him to be completely enigmatic.  His career decision comes out of nowhere, and his transformation over the course of the book left me scratching my head.  There are hints that he has psychological issues himself, though not on a par with his mom, and I was disappointed that the author never really elaborated on what these issues were or how they manifested themselves.  All of these characters need therapy for PTSD, and that suggestion comes up at the end of the novel.

THE SON by Philipp Meyer

I would classify this book as a western but more in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian than Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.  For me, it lacks heart.  Each chapter is devoted to one of three characters, all in the McCullough family but generations apart.  Eli is the patriarch who lives 100 years, including three years with the Comanches.  After a raiding party murders his mother and siblings, he becomes their captive.  A young member of their band wisely advises him to be less passive, enabling Eli to progress from slave to apprentice, learning to launch arrows from horseback.  His son Peter’s chapters are diary entries in which Peter describes his family’s vengeful assault on a Mexican neighbor’s home—an event which haunts Peter with guilt for the rest of his life.  Peter is the conscience of the family, but the rest of the McCulloughs view him as a pariah.  The third protagonist is Jeannie, Peter’s granddaughter, who transforms the family’s struggling cattle business into an oil empire.   What stands out about this novel is the stark realism.  The author does not pull any punches when describing “how the West was won.”  That victory cost thousands of lives on all sides and decimated countless native American populations.  If the thought of reading about scalping makes you squeamish, skip this book.  However, my favorite passage in the novel is about a different aspect of human behavior that is still true today:  “The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful.  He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor’s riches are inextricably linked….”  It’s baffling to me that people in poverty cozy up to rich people without grasping that those riches are often gained at poor people’s expense.

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY by P. D. James

I am not sure that Pride and Prejudice needs a sequel, but P.D. James has undertaken to write one, and I am all in.  Darcy and Elizabeth are all settled at Pemberley with two sons, and Bingley and Jane live nearby.  All seems smooth and cozy, but there is still the matter of Lydia, married to troublemaker Wickham.  Lydia decides to crash the annual ball at Pemberley, although Wickham is unwelcome.  They sneak upon the estate by way of the woodland, but Wickham and his friend Captain Denny exit the coach after an argument.  When Lydia and the driver hear gunshots, they hurry on to Pemberley, where a hysterical Lydia fears that her husband has been shot.  In fact, Denny is dead, and Wickham cries that he has killed him, although he may not have meant his confession to be taken literally.   The ensuing investigation is not exactly thorough, and the trial is somewhat speedy.  I kept wondering why no one questioned Lydia, and by the end I was even more puzzled as to why she apparently did not know the substance of the two men’s quarrel.  Let’s face it:  Jane Austen would never have written a murder mystery.  However, the style of this book is so Austen-like, you will almost feel that a posthumous thriller has somehow surfaced.  Darcy takes center stage throughout most of this book, rather than Elizabeth, particularly as he wrestles with mixed feelings about Wickham’s plight.  He strives to strike just the right unbiased balance in his testimony but then laments that he may have sealed Wickham’s fate.  Honestly, if P. D. James were to write another Pemberley installment, I would be on board in a heartbeat.

NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen

Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland joins a childless couple for a month in the town of Bath.  There she soon attracts two suitors—the delightful and handsome Henry Tilney and the loathsome and boring John Thorpe.  She tolerates Thorpe when she is desperate for a dance partner or eager for a visit to a castle she wants to tour, but her heart belongs to Tinley.  Thorpe turns out to be even more dastardly than we thought and puts Catherine, more than once, in a difficult spot.  Catherine has no experience of treachery the likes of which Thorpe is capable and thus is slow to comprehend that someone could be so intentionally deceitful.  I liked this book so much more than Mansfield Park, which took me on a long and arduous journey that at times challenged my attention span.  This novel, on the other hand, I read in two days and enjoyed every minute.  Granted, there may not be a lot of substance here, but no matter.  There are several particularly humorous sections, including one in which the author takes lighthearted potshots at readers and writers of fiction as being frivolous, even as we discover that Catherine and Tinley both love gothic novels.  This shared interest later leads Tinley to describe his family home to Catherine as a mysterious place with dark, scary passageways.  Catherine hangs on every word of his depiction, knowing it to be in jest, but then when she actually goes to Northanger Abbey, her imagination goes wild.  I can’t help wondering if Charlotte Brontë, stole part of the storyline for Jane Eyre from Jane Austen.

LONGBOURN by Jo Baker

Longbourn is the name of the Bennet estate in Pride and Prejudice.  Jo Baker’s novel has the same setting but focuses on the servants, particularly Sarah, a teenage housemaid.  The novel opens with Sarah doing laundry, and it’s an unpleasant task, making Sarah’s hands raw.  From my perspective, this was not an auspicious beginning, but the storyline does improve, although the pace is pokey at times.  Besides Sarah, the cast of characters includes Mrs. Hill, who manages to gain Mr. Bennet’s ear from time to time, and Polly, a child who is sort of Sarah’s apprentice.  A mysterious new footman named James Smith arrives on the scene, and his backstory, although pertinent to the plot, occupies a few too many pages that particularly drag.  However, he provides the necessary spark to a novel that is mostly about women, including the five Bennet daughters.  This novel feels very Jane Austen-like, although I suppose it never would have occurred to Jane to write about the personal lives of the servants, even though their problems have much more heft than those of the Bennet family.  Not that the Bennets are unkind to the servants; they are, like Jane, just oblivious.  The novel also emphasizes what few options and freedoms the servants really had.  The particularly slimy Wickham preys on Polly, who basks in his attention, even as Sarah is constantly vigilant to make sure that Wickham doesn’t “interfere with” Polly.  Basically, though, this novel is a love story that in some ways parallels that of Lizzie and Darcy.  Not everything is fully resolved at the end, leaving me to wonder if the author expected the reader to draw a particular conclusion.  She chooses to flesh out Polly’s future in some detail but left everyone else’s somewhat unsettled.

MANSFIELD PARK by Jane Austen

I like Jane Austen, but, honestly, the flowery nineteenth-century language causes me to have to reread too many passages.  There are those passages, however, that are worth reading multiple times.  Early in the book, Mary Crawford says, “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”  What??!  I think the speaker is serious, but the author is not.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  The protagonist of this novel is Fanny Price, who comes to live with her well-to-do aunt and uncle, Lord Bertram, at Mansfield Park when Fanny’s poor mother bears her ninth child.  Fanny becomes sort of the Cinderella of this story, although her new family is not particularly wicked.  Her most trusted friend and ally is her cousin Edmund, who is destined for the clergy.  By the time Fanny becomes a teenager, all of the young characters are pairing off, although they may change partners from time to time, especially when they decide to put on a play while Lord Bertram is out of the country.  The assignment of roles becomes sticky and certainly telling with regard to budding relationships.  Fanny herself is smart and pretty but very introverted and carries a torch for Edmund, who only has eyes for Mary Crawford.  As in other Austen novels, I kept wondering if some of the characters would ever come to their senses, but then ultimately I usually find that their judgment is better than mine.

ELIGIBLE by Curtis Sittenfeld

When I first began reading this book, I found it to be frivolous and concluded that perhaps transporting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to 21^st century America was not such a great idea.  However, I soon changed my mind and became completely engrossed in this guilty pleasure.  The five Bennett sisters, all unmarried, have come home to the family Tudor mansion in Cincinnati to help out during their father’s recovery from heart surgery.  Actually, only the two oldest—Jane and Liz—have come home, because Mary, Lydia, and Kitty already live there.  Jane and Liz live and work in New York, while the other three have failed to launch.  Liz soon discovers that her family’s fortune has now been replaced by a mountain of debt.  Mrs. Bennett, whose lack of good sense is appalling, secures an invitation to a party at which Jane meets and eventually falls for Chip Bingley, a doctor who has just appeared on a reality TV show in which he was expected to choose a wife.  Also at the party is Chip’s friend Fitzwilliam Darcy, a neurosurgeon.  Liz overhears Darcy making snide remarks about the women in Cincinnati, and the two soon become verbal sparring partners and more, especially since they seem destined to keep running into each other.  Their relationship is juicy, delicious, and sexy, and they are too busy insulting one another to realize how much they really enjoy one another’s company.  I would love to see a movie based on this version of a story we’ve seen time and again on film.  It would be so fresh and fun.

THE VANISHING HALF by Brit Bennett

My expectations for this book were too high.  I know it’s probably not PC to say this, but I thought Phillip Roth’s similarly themed The Human Stain was better.  It is also about a character passing as white, but Roth’s book is dripping with irony, as a college professor sacrifices his career for his secret, whereas owning up to his heritage would have gained him a pardon for a seemingly racist comment.  Here we have a woman, Stella, who, along with her twin sister Desiree, grow up in a Louisiana town populated with light-skinned black residents. The twins run off to New Orleans, where Stella gets a job as a secretary.  Everyone in the company, including her boss, whom she marries, assumes that she is white.  Desiree, in contrast, marries a very dark-skinned man and bears a daughter, Jude, whose coloring is like her father’s.  The novel eventually focuses more on Jude’s story, alongside that of Stella’s privileged daughter Kennedy.  It’s no surprise that Desiree and Jude are more grounded, comfortable in their own skin.  Stella, on the other hand, has completely divorced herself from her family and actually fears that black people will recognize her for who she is.  Kennedy is the stereotypical vacuous blonde whose strained relationship with her emotionally distant mother renders her a little unmoored.  I think that all of these characters could have benefited from a little more depth.  My favorite character is Early Jones, who hunts missing persons and has been carrying a torch for Desiree for years.  When he finds her, he has to decide whether to convey her whereabouts to her abusive husband or tarnish his perfect record on the job.  Finding Stella is an even more difficult task, but Jude manages to do that without even trying. Their meeting is such a far-fetched coincidence that it threw the whole authenticity of the book into question for me.

FINN by Jon Clinch

I liked the idea of this novel a lot more than I liked the novel itself.  I even reread Huckleberry Finn so that the storyline would be familiar.  The author here builds a colorful but violent backstory for Huck’s father.  However, I had several problems with this book.  First of all, it’s hard to improve upon Mark Twain.  Although the author seems to know his subject matter, the flavor is so much darker than that of Huckleberry Finn.  Secondly, the timeline is not sequential, and I really did not understand the need for this.  The author periodically alerts the reader as to where we are in the saga of the life of Huck Finn’s father, but I still managed to get confused and have to flip back to find out when the current action was taking place.  I’m glad I was reading a physical book, because this rereading would have been too annoying to attempt in an ebook.  Except for knowing from the beginning the fate of the despicable main character, I think that a more sequential timeline would have made for a better read.  Also, the author fails to explain why Finn adopts the lifestyle that he does, given his genteel upbringing.  Is he just a sociopathic alcoholic?  I couldn’t feel sympathy for him at all, but perhaps a little more insight into what makes him tick would have helped.  The author does introduce one significant wrinkle into the Huck Finn story that I have mixed feelings about.  The story of Huck’s mother here is plausible, I suppose, and gives this novel its raison d’etre.  Mark Twain might have raised an eyebrow, or applauded, in response to Clinich’s take on Huck’s birth, which leads to a lie that is as poignant as it is understandable for the time.