Sense and Nonsense

Amnesiacs Galore

Amnesiacs appear to be all the rage these days, at least in literary circles.  Six weeks ago, I noted The History of History, the new novel by Ida Hattemer-Higgins about both an individual amnesiac and cultural amnesia in Berlin.  This week I encountered two other novels featuring a character with amnesia.

 

S.J. Watson's Before I Go to Sleep is a psychological thriller that was just released on June 14th and already seems destined to end up on this summer's best-seller lists. Ridley Scott (producer of movies and television series) has already acquired film rights. Amazon has designated it a Best Book of the Month for June.  Here's the plot summary by their reviewer, Miriam Landis:

Every day Christine wakes up not knowing where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep. Her husband, Ben, is a stranger to her, and he's obligated to explain their life together on a daily basis--all the result of a mysterious accident that made Christine an amnesiac. With the encouragement of her doctor, Christine starts a journal to help jog her memory every day. One morning, she opens it and sees that she's written three unexpected and terrifying words: "Don't trust Ben." Suddenly everything her husband has told her falls under suspicion. What kind of accident caused her condition? Who can she trust? Why is Ben lying to her? And, for the reader: Can Christine’s story be trusted? At the heart of S. J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is the petrifying question: How can anyone function when they can't even trust themselves? Suspenseful from start to finish, the strength of Watson's writing allows Before I Go to Sleep to transcend the basic premise and present profound questions about memory and identity. One of the best debut literary thrillers in recent years, Before I Go to Sleep deserves to be one of the major blockbusters of the summer.

I enjoyed this book very much.  Watson writes well and knows how to maintain tension in the narrative.  The reader has to suspend more than the usual disbelief in order to accept that Christine is writing such detailed and lengthy journal entries each day in order to keep track of who she is and what is happening to her.  But once you get past that hurdle, the book is utterly absorbing.   ★★★★☆

 

Far less successful, in my opinion, is Liane Moriarty's new novel, What Alice Forgot, whose protagonist wakes up from a fall and a bad knock on the head to discover that she is thirty-nine, has three children, and is in the middle of a nasty divorce. Alice has misplaced ten years of her life.

This is one of those books that makes me wonder about myself as a reader.  I see that many other readers have written glowing reviews at Amazon's site; they found the book compelling and interesting.  To me, it was neither.  I didn't care about Alice or any of the other characters.  The book is simply dead, which is also the state I kept wishing upon Alice.   Who knows: you might like it.  I didn't.  This was yet another book that I got a quarter of the way into and simply could not make myself continue reading.  ★☆☆☆☆

"To Be Sung Underwater," by Tom McNeal

Oh, my.  What a fine book we have here.  Tom McNeal's new novel, To Be Sung Underwater, is a beautiful story, focusing on his main character, Judith Toomey, at two different times in her life -- first as a high-school girl in Nebraska, and later as a middle-aged woman in Los Angeles, working as a film editor and feeling the unease of a marriage coming apart at the seams.  The time periods alternate, and McNeal's characters develop with extraordinary depth and texture as they deal with the consequences of hard choices.

Parts of this book remind me of the writing of Richard Russo; the characters are totally authentic, and the reader develops a real affection for them. Parts remind me of the writing of Wallace Stegner; the scenes set in the Great Plains are deeply evocative of place. But McNeal's novel need not be compared with those of others to be seen as a terrific piece of writing. He has real talent; others should aspire to be compared with him.  As I read this book, I repeatedly thought how charming it is.

It was Cynthia Crossen's short review comment in last week's Wall Street Journal that sent me to this book, for which I'm grateful.  Crossen is totally correct in saying:

Mr. McNeal writes a kind of prose that's almost endangered today: natural, smooth and subtle. There's not the smallest hint of him thinking to himself, "What a clever turner of phrases I am." Yet he produces one extraordinary sentence after another as he unspools two irresistible tales. If you despair of the vigor and grace of modern fiction, read this.

Also see the editorial reviews at Amazon.  This book deserves all the praise it's receiving.  ★★★★★

"State of Wonder," by Ann Patchett

Those of you who love Ann Patchett's novels (among them, Run, The Magician's Assistant, and, especially, the unforgettable Bel Canto) are in for a treat.  Her newest novel, State of Wonder, was released this past week. It's absolutely marvelous.  Here's Jessica Schein's synopsis for Amazon's Best Books of the Month (June 2011):

"In State of Wonder, pharmaceutical researcher Dr. Marina Singh sets off into the Amazon jungle to find the remains and effects of a colleague who recently died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. But first she must locate Dr. Anneck Swenson, a renowned gynecologist who has spent years looking at the reproductive habits of a local tribe where women can conceive well into their middle ages and beyond. Eccentric and notoriously tough, Swenson is paid to find the key to this longstanding childbearing ability by the same company for which Dr. Singh works. Yet that isn’t their only connection: both have an overlapping professional past that Dr. Singh has long tried to forget. In finding her former mentor, Dr. Singh must face her own disappointments and regrets, along with the jungle’s unforgiving humidity and insects, making State of Wonder a multi-layered atmospheric novel that is hard to put down. Indeed, Patchett solidifies her well-deserved place as one of today’s master storytellers. Emotional, vivid, and a work of literature that will surely resonate with readers in the weeks and months to come, State of Wonder truly is a thing of beauty and mystery, much like the Amazon jungle itself."

Looking for a book that takes you to another place? This is it. Looking for vivid characters who face monumental challenges and dilemmas, physical as well as moral? This is it. Patchett is a captivating writer, and this novel is a great work of art.

The only negative thing I have to say about the book is that the ending, in my opinion, is weak -- and too quick. As I've noted many times before, bringing a story to a satisfying end must be the hardest thing about writing a novel because otherwise excellent books are so often marred by a feeble ending.  While there is nothing implausible about the ending to State of Wonder, I'd almost have preferred a resolution that featured a giant anaconda or poison-tipped spear.

 Still, this book is a wonder.   ★★★★★

"We Need to Talk About Kevin," by Lionel Shriver

I am grateful to my friend Austin Diaz for calling my attention to Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin.  It's an outstanding book.  Shriver is a powerful, engaging writer.  Since I'd rather spend my time reading than writing synopses, here's the storyline from Publishers Weekly:

A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling and thoughtful.

Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an accident that befalls little Celia. The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.

As I read this book, I alternately winced with pain and laughed out loud. Kevin is such an evil kid; his malevolence is evident even as a toddler, and his mother's reaction to his character is delicious.  I read this book on my Kindle and I bookmarked so many passages that I thought were fabulous -- something I don't usually bother to do because I know I won't go back and read those paragraphs again.  But I did, and I did. 

Shriver is an exceptionally fine writer.  This is not a frivolous novel at all.  Nor is Shriver a frivolous writer.  This book is full of important insights about the parent-child relationship, about marriages, and about American society.  Shriver is a journalist, and this book reveals her journalistic sensibility.  If, like me, you somehow missed reading We Need to Talk About Kevin when it came out in 2003, do yourself the favor of reading it now.  This is a compelling, breathtakingly impressive book.  ★★★★★

"Exposure," by Theresa Fowler

I learned about Theresa Fowler's new novel, Exposure, from a comment about it by Janet Maslin in last Friday's New York Times.  Maslin likens this "new entry in the torn-from-today's-headlines genre" to "Romeo and Juliet with sexting thrown in."

"It’s the story of Amelia and Anthony, two super-nice high school kids whose parents want to keep them apart. [Actually, it's just her parents, who disapprove of Anthony's modest economic circumstances.] Their love is perfect, their use of technology less so. One day, while his clothes are off, and she happens to have a cellphone camera in hand, Amelia tells Anthony: “You look like a statue of some Greek god — Apollo, the god of prophecy and truth.” Prophecy: big trouble. Ms. Fowler avoids shrillness as she coaxes drama out of this timely issue. Anthony’s experience is based on something that happened to her own son."

The fact that Fowler and her family lived through a similar event -- with the same kind of brutal exposure to a judgmental public and an overtoweringly idiotic judicial system -- gives this book unusual verisimilitude.  The story progresses through chapters that alternate narrators -- sometimes the kids, sometimes the parents. Throughout, the emotional reactions to the unfolding events seem spot-on. Fowler's own views about the idiocy of prosecuting kids for such incidents are (understandably) quite evident, and she makes a persuasive case for her point of view.  The story is very compelling.   ★★★☆☆

 

 

By contrast, there is (in my opinion) nothing even remotely compelling about the story in Tessa Hadley's new novel, The London Train. I decided to read it after seeing a review of it by Jean Thompson in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review. This, Hadley's fourth novel, is a story (according to Publisher Weekly's summary):

". . . about Paul, a poet and father of three going through a midlife crisis in a small town outside of Cardiff, Wales, and Cora, a woman from his past whose impact on his life is minimal, and yet, for the reader, pivotal. What begins as an argument with a neighbor spirals into a domestic meltdown that sends Paul storming out and traveling to London to find Pia, his daughter from a former marriage, who, as it turns out, is pregnant, has dropped out of school, and is living in an illegal flat with her boyfriend. Paul, unsure how he should act, teeters back and forth from father figure to thrilled participant in her chaotic existence. Cora, on the other hand, has taken refuge from London in her recently deceased parents' house in Cardiff after separating from her husband and now enjoys the simplicity and the quiet of the country."

Sounds like it could be okay, doesn't it?  It's not. In fact, the story is so flat and uninteresting, the characters so featureless and dreary, that I finally had to stop reading.  

I'm going to start paying as much attention to who is reviewing books as to what they say.  In this case, the reviewer, Jean Thompson, wrote: "Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces."   That sentence blinded me a bit to the otherwise unenthusiastic review.  More important, I should have paid attention to the fact that I recently had to stop reading Jean Thompson's own new novel, The Year We Left Home, because it is so monumentally boring.   Tessa Hadley's book:  ★☆☆☆☆

Faith, Lies, Denial, and Secrecy

Faith, Jennifer Haigh's new novel, is about the past decade's crisis in the Catholic church involving priests who abuse children. Haigh is a superb writer, and I have been a big fan of her previous novels, including Mrs. Kimble, The Condition, and Baker Towers. I think highly of her writing in this book, too, but am conflicted about the story she tells.  

I'm wary of giving away too much of a complicated plot, so I'll simply say that the narrative involves a priest who is accused of abusing a young boy whom he had come to know through the boy's mother and grandmother.  But the whole story isn't known to the authorities.  Nor is it immediately known to the priest's family members, some of whom crumble under the news that the priest might be one of the church's pedophiles.

The characters are vivid and the plot is engaging.  But what makes me uneasy is this book's blithe explanation for the accusation in this case.  Surely it is the case that some of the priests around the country -- indeed, throughout the world! -- who have been accused of abuse are innocent of the charges, victims of unscrupulous people looking to make a profit from salacious accusations. But it's also surely the case that such cases constitute a small minority of the whole. As much as I admire Haigh's skills as a writer, I really dislike what she has done with this story. 

In interview notes on the Amazon website, Haigh says: "I was raised in a Catholic family, spent twelve years in parochial schools and had extremely fond memories of my interactions with Catholic clergy. It’s no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood."  That's quite apparent from her book.  It's too bad that, instead of offering up a story, as she did, that delivers an unexpected explanation for this one case of fictional abuse, Haigh didn't train her formidable powers of observation at the members of the church hierarchy, whose corruption and evil should put them in an even hotter place in hell than that reserved for the child predators they enabled.

To be fair to Haigh, I read this book in the week following the latest absurdity involving the Catholic Church.  I'm referring to this widely reported news item:

A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.

Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.

There you go!  There's a reasonable explanation for you: the Sixties are to blame! Never mind that clergy of other denominations and faiths also went through the 1960s and 1970s without being turned into pedophiles.

Whatever the explanation for the extraordinary concentration of this problem among Catholic clergy, there is no denying that an equally egregious crime was its cover-up by bishops, cardinals, and other people high up in the Catholic hierarchy.  And THAT is a problem of institutional culture. The Catholic church is a morally bankrupt institution that is based on a culture of secrecy and deceit. I know this all too well from my own observation of the Catholic institutions in which I have worked most of my adult life. Leaders of Catholic institutions tend to be secretive, duplicitous, and protective of their own power and that of others around them. They're abusive toward those without power.  They pay lip service to Christian virtues but violate them constantly in their day-to-day interactions with others.

I was interested to find my view affirmed recently by Rev. Bob Hoatson, a Catholic priest who is  co-founder of an organization called Road to Recovery, which provides support to victims of sexual abuse. He is also a survivor of sexual abuse himself. Recently, interviewed on National Public Radio about the bishops' report that shifted blame outside the church, placing it on the looseness of the Sixties and Seventies, Hoatson said: 

This report does not get to the heart of the issue, and the heart of the issue is deceit, cover-up, silence, secrecy and an internal culture that doesn't let anybody else in.

He's right. Dead right. And Haigh comes close to acknowledging as much in her novel at the end when she alludes to the secrecy, cowardice, and perfidy of Cardinal Bernard Law and his coterie of mitered enablers in place when the Boston scandal exploded.  

So, Haigh's novel is well done and it addresses an important contemporary social problem.  But in my view it trivializes the problem by offering a benign -- even romantic! -- explanation for what happened in this fictional case, and fails to grapple head-on with an even more serious problem in the Catholic church, a problem that will exist long after the abuse crisis fades from the news.  Still, this is a novel, not a nonfiction analysis of the church and its problems, so it would be unfair to judge Haigh's work on anything but her writerly craft.   She's a master.  ★★★★☆

 

"Eleven," by Mark Watson

Mark Watson's new novel Eleven is about how connected our lives are -- how an action by one person has consequences all down the line for lots of other people.  In this story the chain reaction of events starts with a young boy getting beat up by neighborhood toughs.  He goes home bruised and bloodied.  His mother, a journalist and food critic, upset about what happened to her son, gives a poor review to a new restaurant.  The owner and chef, frustrated about the review, which he considers singularly unfair, vents his anger by firing a lowly kitchen worker.  Etc., etc., etc.   The main character is Xavier Ireland, a lonely host of a late-night radio show in London, who gives out advice to his listeners about how to fix up their lives.  His own life is pretty pathetic, stemming in part from a regrettable mishap in his own past. But his life starts to perk up a bit when he meets Pippa at a speed-dating event and, discovering that she is a housecleaner, decides to hire her to clean his own miserable flat.  As things develop, she turns into a more important person in his life, improving not only his flat but everything else in his life. It's an appealing story and -- another plus! -- Watson knows how to end a novel in a satisfying way.

I liked this book.  As Susannah Meadows noted in her short comment about it in the New York Times:

The surprises come in the language. Leicester Square is said to be “sulky with drizzle.” A film director has “a gut which imposes itself through an inadequate tuxedo like somebody mooning through a gap in curtains.” And at a party, people take out their BlackBerrys each time they shuffle to another conversation “as if the gadgets contain instructions on how to move.” Which is all to say that in the telling of this story, Mr. Watson, a British comedian and writer, can be rather charming . . . 

I agree. In the first paragraph, Watson describes snowflakes in London settling "in scarves around the necks of parked cars."  I knew immediately that I was in for some interesting writing. Fortunately, I got a good story, too.    ★★★☆☆

"Long Drive Home," by Will Allison

Two books to note this week.  

 

The first is Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian author whose virtues I extolled after finishing his novel The Snowman a few days ago. While it's clear from this book that Nesbø truly belongs on the must-read list of any fan of crime fiction, this book is not as successful as The Snowman, at least not in my view. Here Nesbø weaves together two intricate plots -- a series of carefully orchestrated bank robberies and the murder of the lead detective's former girlfriend -- in a way that few authors could pull off.  Though Nesbø is surely a master storyteller, the tension in this book doesn't match the intensity it reaches in The Snowman, so I was a little disappointed.  Still, this is a fine thriller and worth the read. I'm looking forward to reading Nesbø's The Redbreast soon.   ★★★☆☆

 

 

 

In this past Wednesday's New York Times, I saw a short note by Susannah Meadows about A Long Drive Home, a new novel by Will Allison, which "looks at how a snap decision causes one American family to come undone." 

"A man driving with his 6-year-old daughter in the back seat gets a case of road rage after a teenage driver cuts him off on a quiet residential street. As the car careens toward them a second time, the dad, Glen, decides to teach the teenage boy a lesson, turning into his lane to give him a scare. The oncoming driver swerves into a tree and dies. While narrowly focusing his lens on the event and its consequences, Mr. Allison still manages to take in a panorama of human behavior. Not knowing what his little girl was aware of, Glen doesn’t admit his role in the accident to his wife or the police. Mr. Allison’s gift is in making that lie — and each new one it inevitably spawns — understandable, showing how this story could be anyone’s. Part of the book is written as a letter from Glen to his daughter, to read when she’s 18, explaining the consequences."

If you want to read a really frightening, unsettling book, this is it.  Don't bother with Stephen King or crime stories. There's nothing more disturbing than a normal person's life falling apart inexorably as a result of completely understandable actions and reactions. Will Allison's tragic tale is a true horror story. His prose is taut and gripping, utterly compelling.  You'll keep imagining yourself in Glen's position. Every few pages, as things keep getting worse, you'll find yourself saying outloud, as I did, "Oh, shit!" ★★★★★ 

"The Snowman," by Jo Nesbø

Holy cow!  What a book! 

If you're a fan of thrillers, click away from this page right now and go to Amazon and buy The Snowman, a novel by the Norwegian author Jo Nesbø.  If you live near a real bookstore, run over there right now and try to buy it.  Start it tonight.  Go!  Don't dilly-dally here. Do it.

Nesbø puts everybody else to shame.  Stieg Larsson? A pretender. Henning Mankell? A sham.  Nesbø?  The real McCoy.  Let's also give credit here to the translation by Don Bartlett.  This book zips along in wonderful, taut prose, thanks in part to Bartlett's work.  As Michael Connelly, America's best-selling writer of thrillers has said, "Jo Nesbø is my new favorite thriller writer." Ditto.

Here's Amazon's synopsis by Miriam Landis:

"On the first day of snow, a child wakes up to find his mother has disappeared during the night. Outside, a snowman has appeared out of nowhere, the calling card of one of the most terrifying serial killers in recent fiction. A letter from the perpetrator draws Detective Hole further and further into the case, and together with his new partner, Katrine Bratt, he hunts the Snowman through twists and turns that become increasingly personal and may drive Hole to the brink of insanity. Brilliantly crafted, this credible and dark page-turner fully fleshes out the characters, especially Hole, a hardened detective with sharp instincts and real heart. What is the link between the victims? Is the Snowman a suspicious doctor, a notorious playboy, or one of Hole's peers on the force? The police keep thinking they've caught the criminal, but Hole's astute observations may steer him around the red herrings and right into the hands of the cold-as-ice killer."

This is the best thriller I've read in a long time. Nesbø is amazing.  See this terrific article by Wendy Lesser at Slate about Nesbø's work and that of other authors of dark Scandinavian mystery/thrillers. (Thanks to LG for this.)

You're still sitting there, reader?  GO!  Buy it!  ★★★★★ (and more!)

"Attachments," by Rainbow Rowell

Rainbow Rowell's Attachments is a perfectly entertaining novel -- light, breezy, funny, and observant. Jennifer and Beth, two young women who work in the newsroom of a small-city newspaper in the Midwest, use their employer's internal email system to exchange messages about their love lives. Jennifer's husband wants a child; she doesn't.  Beth's live-in boyfriend is a rock musician who resists making any commitment to her.  Beth and Jennifer are unaware that their messages are being read by Lincoln, a lonely guy newly hired in the IT department, charged by his boss with monitoring employees' use of the computer system for personal emails, porn, etc.  Lincoln can't bring himself to shut down the constant exchanges between the two women, in part because Beth's emails reveal her to be so sweet of heart and he also discovers that she thinks he's attractive.  Sounds sort of moronic, I know, but in Rowell's capable hands, the story moves along at a good clip, and the emails that zip back and forth between Beth and Jennifer are very witty.   Good beach reading, at the very least.   ★★★★☆

 

 

 

Last Sunday I read two reviews of Jean Thompson's new novel, The Year We Left Home -- this one in the New York Times, and this short take in the Boston Globe. The reviewers' comments made it seem like a book I'd enjoy a lot. Thompson writes well, but I got over 200 pages into this 325-page book and decided to drop it because I just didn't care enough about any of the characters.  Maybe you'll have more luck with it.     ★☆☆☆☆

To be fair, it's possible that it's my mood, not Thompson's characters, responsible for my unwillingness to stick with her story.  I say this because the same thing happened this week with my third (!) effort to get into Ann Tyler's Back When We Were Grownups.  Tyler is one of our finest novelists, and I usually thoroughly enjoy her quirky characters and slowly unwinding narratives.  But after 70 or 80 pages, I still haven't found any of her characters interesting in this one.  I'll give it one more try soon. 

 

 

Sarah Pekkanen's Skipping a Beat looks like chick-lit, but it's not.  Here's Booklist's synopsis:  "High-school sweethearts Julia and Michael have left their humble West Virginia roots far behind for a glamorous life in Washington, D.C. As they achieve more in their careers—she as a high-end events planner, he as the CEO of his own sports-drink company—they lose themselves as a couple. After Michael has a near-death experience, he decides to give away all their wealth and focus on his relationship with Julia. But she’s not ready to forgive him for choosing his work over her when she needed him most. Pekkanen’s novel traces the couple’s attempts to make amends for allowing success to replace love."   Good characters here -- and a tender and insightful story.   ★★★☆☆