Patti's Pages
Taking Looks at Books
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas
This novel made me think of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. As in Albee’s play, the plot focuses on two
couples, all four of whom write and teach at a small, pricey New England
college—upstate New York, in this case.
The first-person unnamed narrator here is the wife in the older of the
two couples. She and her husband have an
open marriage, but he is facing possible termination due to a series of affairs
he had with female students, some of whom have filed grievances. To be clear, these occurred before the
college outlawed such relationships, and all of these students were consenting
adults. The narrator merely shrugs off
her husband’s infidelities, because she has had several flings of her own. Now her lustful imagination is going wild
over a new professor named Vladimir, and a teaser at the beginning of the novel
hints at weird things to come. The
narrator goes completely off the rails, but the only consequences she suffers
are for seemingly being complicit in her husband’s sexual peccadilloes. As in the Albee play, this is a boozy bunch,
but I don’t mean to sound judgmental. In
fact, one major theme here is that one couple’s marriage contract should not be
the subject of speculation or disapproval by outside parties. I agree wholeheartedly with their right to
choose the parameters of their marriage, even if theirs is not the type of
marriage that most of us want for ourselves.
In any case, this is what good writing looks like, and the author kept
me engaged throughout. However, the
editing sorely needs some grammatical improvement. For example, on page 190, a sentence begins
with this phrase: “The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working
together.” Ouch. That makes my teeth hurt.
Wednesday, October 9, 2024
NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason
A novel spanning centuries is usually about multiple generations of a family, but that is not the case here. An apple orchard in western Massachusetts is the tie that binds as this book chronicles the lives of its owners, and what a curious bunch they are. Just as I would become engrossed in the story of, for example, an artist who falls in love with a writer, we abandon their story and move on to the next inhabitants of the yellow house on the property. Then some of the residents never really leave; they live on as ghosts who may annoy a subsequent resident, causing that resident to be deemed mentally ill. One would expect life surrounding an apple orchard to be serene, but this property sees murders, a séance, a narrowly avoided lobotomy, wild animal attacks, you name it, not to mention the ghosts’ shenanigans. It’s more like an enchanted forest that is not immune to devastation itself, as it suffers blight, insect invasions, and clearing of the land by humans, of course. I really enjoyed Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner and especially The Winter Soldier, but, for me, this is more of a novel to admire than to sink your teeth into. I have to say that the ending is absolutely my favorite part—not necessarily the storyline but the way the author so skillfully and stealthily misleads the reader, offers clues, and then enlightens.
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
SWIFT RIVER by Essie Chambers
Diamond is the only Black person left in Swift River, now
that her father has disappeared. She is
a 300-pound teenager who lives with her white mother. She has never met any of her father’s family,
but she gets to know them via letters that start arriving from her father’s
cousin Lena. Since her mother does not
drive, forcing them to hitchhike from place to place, Diamond has been tucking
away some of her earnings from her job at the local motel so that she can take
driving lessons. She has aced the written
test and now finds herself practicing driving along with her classmate Shelly
under the tutelage of a frisky young man. This would all be funny if it weren’t
so sad—Diamond’s eating habits, her loneliness, her mother’s poor judgment, and
especially the uncertainty of her father’s whereabouts. He is presumed dead, but Diamond and her
mother have had to wait seven years to obtain a death certificate that will
free up his life insurance money. In one
flashback Diamond’s father gives her a $100 bill when she loses a tooth while
they are away from home. This is not a
family that can afford tooth fairy gifts of $100, and I did not understand why
her father did this. Diamond and her
mother are both shocked, but the ultimate fate of the $100 bill is even weirder. Thanks to superb writing, though, this book
was a joy to read. On the one hand, I
did not love having most of Diamond’s family history conveyed via sometimes
lengthy letters that appear in the book.
However, this technique limited the number of timelines in the rest of
the narrative to just stuff that happened during Diamond’s lifetime and made it
easy to recognize what was ancient history. Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free copy for review.
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
MECCA by Susan Straight
The title refers to a small agricultural town in southern
California, inhabited by a number of characters in this book, along with their
extended families. The first such
character is Johnny Frias, a highway patrolman, whose family has lived in
California for generations. Matelasse,
originally from Louisiana, works in a flower shop, supports her two sons, and
is separated from her husband, who wishes he were Brazilian. Ximena works in a cosmetic surgery spa, and
then later becomes the housekeeper for a very wealthy woman, who calls her “X.” Ximena is an undocumented Mixtec woman from
Oaxaca who speaks almost no Spanish. The
fly in the ointment for all of these characters is ICE—the acronym for the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
All of these characters are connected in some way, and this book is
ultimately about family, whether blood-related or not. One person’s problem or mistake becomes the
entire family’s problem to solve; everyone has everyone else’s back. Many characters have little to no
relationship with their biological parents, and an “uncle” may have served as a
father, even though he may be a friend of a relative, rather than an actual
relative. These relationships are hard
to keep up with sometimes, and the cast of characters is quite large. A character may appear briefly and then
reappear in a more important role. In
other words, the plot is a rather intricate jigsaw puzzle, which I liked
theoretically but found a bit challenging to piece together.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
SUDDENLY by Isabelle Autissier
This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction. Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a remote island on which visitors are forbidden. A violent storm comes up, and the unthinkable happens. Actually, it is quite imaginable, given the circumstances, but Louise and Ludovic are ill-prepared for it, in either experience or equipment. This pair is deeply in love, but they could not be more different in temperament or stature. Ludovic is tall, handsome, charming, affable, dangerously optimistic, and has zero common sense. Louise, although a very petite woman, is an experienced climber, and she knows when the conditions dictate caution. Despite being the sensible one of the two, she yields to Ludovic, frequently against her better judgment, with life-threatening results. At one point she makes every effort to do what obviously needs to be done, but he thwarts her with his own ill-conceived, impossible plan. She ultimately faces a moral dilemma and makes a fateful decision that is her decision alone, in order to maximize the chance of survival. This decision is the crux of the entire plot, and I would argue that she makes the right one. However, her actions afterward are hard to endorse. Even when she later grapples with guilt about the decision, I don’t believe that she ever confronts the horrific and selfish mistake she makes afterward.
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell
Cassandra Williams, our first-person narrator, is 12 and her
brother, Wayne, is 7 when Cassandra tries to rescue Wayne from drowning. She loses consciousness on the beach from the
effort. When she awakens, she knows that
Wayne is dead, but his body is nowhere to be found, and a stranger drives
Cassandra home. Closure is impossible,
Cassandra’s parents divorce, and her mother forms a foundation called Vigil for
the families of missing children, holding out hope that Wayne is still alive. The remainder of the book is largely a series
of Cassandra’s encounters with the now-grown Wayne, which I assumed to be
dreams. These events are all described
in intricate detail, but there are similarities among all of them, not the
least of which is some sort of apocalyptic disaster during the encounter. This series eventually becomes a bit
redundant, causing me to say to myself, “Here we go again.” Then everything changes, and we are in a different
narrative altogether with a different first-person narrator—a man this time,
with the same name as Cassandra’s brother.
What?? The title initially refers
to ocean waves but then seems to encompass other wave-like natural dangers,
especially earthquakes and tsunamis, and one philosophical character describes
time, not specifically as having furrows, but certainly with that
implication. So…maybe Cassandra’s
encounters with her brother were not dreams but were intended to represent some
alternate reality. This book is
enigmatic, especially the ending, and not always one I was eager to resume. It was not hard to follow, though, and from
time to time I can appreciate a book that I can’t completely get my head
around.
Wednesday, September 4, 2024
JAMES by Percival Everett
This book has received so many accolades, but I just did not
love it. I did love that the author
elevates Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn on his adventures
down the Mississippi River. Jim, in this
retelling, hides the fact that he can read and write and is familiar with a
smattering of erudite philosophers, especially Voltaire. He and other slaves disguise their intellect
behind a mask of dialect that they employ only in the company of white
people. Even on the river, Jim becomes a
slave to the white people he encounters, including the notorious con men, the
Duke and Dauphin, despite trying to convince them that he is Huck’s slave. In an unusual exchange, Jim becomes the
property of a blacksmith, but a blackface minstrel group admires Jim’s singing
voice and pays the blacksmith to release Jim to their custody. They assure him he is not a slave, but yet he
can’t leave the group because of their investment. So…OK, he’s an indentured servant but with
no timeline in which he’ll be free?
Jim’s creativity in trying to survive while on the run sometimes
backfires, as in the case where he pretends to be the slave of another runaway,
Norman, who can pass as white. The
scheme is for Norman to sell Jim so that Jim can escape and be resold again and
again. Then two of them will split the
money, but I cannot fathom how they neglected to account for the possibility of
Jim being beaten and shackled while in the possession of their first buyer. Also, as in Twain’s original, Jim does not
disclose until late in the book that a body found at the beginning of their
journey was that of Huck’s cruel father.
Given that Huck is on the run from his father, why would Jim withhold
this information when he could set Huck’s mind at ease? I would have liked the author to have offered
an explanation for this deception. For
me, the idea of this book is just way more appealing than the book itself,
which drags, especially in the beginning.
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