Book-Book (Read It)

Book Review: Emily Alone by Stewart O'Nan

Emily Alone is a sequel to O'Nan's 2002 novel, Wish You Were Here, which I have not read.  80-year-old Emily Maxwell has settled into widowhood. Living far from her children and grandchild, she relies on her dog and her sister-in-law Arlene for regular companionship. In the course of the book, she cares for Arlene after a hospital stay, buys her first new car, negotiates with her kids over holiday visits, frets over her will and final arrangements, and weathers the deaths of several old friends.

Understand: there is no real story here, no plot to speak of.  The strength of the book is Emily's voice: intelligent, vulnerable but seldom self-pitying, a tad controlling, perhaps a hair judgmental but not mean or aggressive. O'Nan does some interesting things with perspective here. While a third-person narration, we are definitely inside Emily's head most of the time, yet the reader can certainly step outside occasionally and see how her kids, for example, might occasionally be frustrated or bemused by her.

The realism of the character study is supported by an accumulation of ordinary detail, and I mean ordinary. How many novelists would devote any time at all to describing the difficulty of opening an economy three-pack of tissues?  I love Stewart O'Nan.

Book Review: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

This is the third book I’ve read by Elizabeth Strout, and it confirms her amazing talent for creating realistic, complex characters, vividly drawn with flaws either endearing or infuriating. The Burgess Boys is more sprawling and more melodramatic than Olive Kitteridge or Amy and Isabelle, but its characterizations and depictions of family relationships are just as trenchant and profound.

The Burgess Boys should really be titled The Burgess Siblings, as it concerns two brothers and a sister from a blue-collar background, and their often hurtful interactions.  The eldest, Jim, is the family success story, as an Ivy Leaguer and a renowned criminal defense attorney. Bob and Susan are twins, and are the family’s designated losers.  Bob is a lawyer like Jim, but he works as a lowly public defender and is Jim’s constant verbal punching bag.  Susan is challenged by her apparently slow-witted son, Zach, especially after he commits an adolescent stunt and is accused of a hate crime.

All of the characters are well-drawn and even as they exasperate us, we want to try to understand them.  I imagine that most readers, like me, will root for loser Bob, called “slob-dog” by Jim, who has very specific reasons for walking through life with low self-esteem.

Zach’s legal troubles were the weak point of the book for me, because I found the storyline unrealistic – amusingly, I found out it  was based on a very real incident, so what do I know?

Book Review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Somehow I never read this book by that "other Brontë."  It does not have dream-like psychological depth of Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, but is it a surprisingly modern and feminist portrayal of an intelligent and talented woman, Helen Huntingdon, trapped in a marriage to a dissipated alcoholic.  Some contemporary critics thought it "coarse"  and unfeminine, and even Anne's sister Charlotte did not approve of it. As a modern reader, I didn't mind the coarseness and dissipation, but was a little put off by Helen's strident religiosity and her cold defensiveness. It didn't keep me from liking the book, though.

Book Review: The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

This Pulitzer-Prize winning work presents the thesis that Lucretius' philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, discovered in a monastery by a former papal scribe Poggio Bracciolini, influenced modern thought on deity and science. The poem posited that the universe is made of atoms in collision with each other, that the soul dies with the body, and that there is no intelligent god.

I read this fairly fast, for my book group, and probably need to go back to it; frankly for me it was rough sledding at times. I perceived a surprising amount of speculation in this well-documented history book, as well as a pugnacious atheism which is probably going to annoy some of my book group cohorts.

Book Review: Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

I almost abandoned this book about a little boy, Robbie, who is abducted and sexually tortured for six years. The early chapters were just too disturbing.  Either I hardened my heart or I just got caught up in the suspense, but I’m glad I stuck it out.  It’s a riveting portrayal of a despicable monster and it raises interesting questions about how trauma and abuse shapes a child. 

Note: to this reader, the first few chapters were excruciating.  Describing the abduction of the boy outside a shopping mall, Oates repeats the same facts over and over from slightly different perspectives, and I lost patience quickly.  Then as the story changes over to Robbie’s life with the predator, Oates abandons the technique of repetition and the pace of the book speeds up considerably.

Book Review: And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

Heloise Lewis, born Helen, is an upscale madam in suburban Maryland with a son, Scott, from her former pimp Val, serving a life sentence for murder.   She begins questioning her career choice when another madam is murdered.  Through flashbacks, we learn about Helen’s abusive father and passive mother, and the various men, most crucially Val, who exploited her.

As usual, Lippman crafts a good plot and creates complex, believable characters, including, maybe especially, the villains. I did not enjoy it quite as much as What the Dead Know and I’d Know You Anywhere and I’m not sure why yet. I don't want to say "I didn't like the main character" but that is part of it in this case - I couldn't understand her life choices and I didn't buy her defense of "sex workers."

Book Review: The Dinner by Herman Koch

This very odd little page-turner about parental devotion starts out as darkly funny and ends up just darkly dark. The dinner of the title takes place at a swanky restaurant where Paul and Claire Lohman meet Paul’s brother Serge and his wife Babette to discuss (or to avoid discussing, in Paul’s case)  a despicable crime committed by their teenage sons.  Paul, the narrator, clearly dislikes his brother, and it takes awhile for the reader to cotton on to the fact that Paul’s judgment might not be reliable. I guess that’s all I’ll say.  The first half of the book was engrossing. The second  half of the book was un-put-downable.

Book Review: The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

Bhima is a poor Hindu servant, abandoned by her husband. Sera is her employer, a middle-class Parsi woman whose late husband was abusive and whose mother-in-law was a nightmare. The space between them, due to class, is undeniable, despite their shared experiences as women. One of the questions the book poses is whether class or gender is more definitive of Indian women's lives.  We could, of course, pose the same question in any culture.

I ran hot and cold as I was reading, but ultimately liked this one.  lIt is smaller in scale than A Fine Balance, my favorite book set in India, and sometimes I feared it was going to descend to "women's fiction" territory, but its seriousness of purposes creeps up on the reader.  I also enjoyed the language of the book, especially all the Indian rhyming slang.  In its evocation of slum life and the rapidly changing economy and culture of India, I could see it being read as a complement to Behind the Beautiful Forevers - like Katherine Boo, the author is a journalist.

Book Review: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson by Alfred Habegger

Gee, what to say?  I'm not qualified to assess this book in terms of its value to scholars, only in the pleasure it may afford to readers.  It has been decades since I have read the Richard Sewall biography, but my memory of that work was that it was less dry and more fun to read than this one.  It is a very careful book that seldom strays from verifable information and therefore does not present a grand thesis that might catch one's attention.  That makes it more trustworthy but less readable  than those biographies that essentially create their own Emily. I think it's well nigh impossible to write good biography of Dickinson  - the information just isn't there. Habegger fills in the knowledge gaps with very detailed information about Dickinson's family members, but if you believe that geniuses are born, not made, information about family life, schooling and town politics are of limited value in getting to the heart of the subject.

For those who keep score, Habegger is a proponent of the Wadsworth-as-Master theory.

Book Review: Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

This novel is more of a short-story cycle about various horrific acts experienced or committed by a group of children in a dreary German village, somewhere post-war, pre-reunification. The writing style is plain, the tone is quiet, noncommittal and almost unfeeling, even when truly diabolical acts are described.  It’s truly odd.  I almost gave up along the way, but it’s short, and I’m glad I stuck it out, because there was an element of thematic resolution at end, if no resolution for the characters.

In these social media book reviews, is it better to record my objective opinion of a book or my personal experience of reading it?  It seems unfair to the author of this one to say that I couldn’t keep the characters straight or that the short-story format made it hard for me to remember important points.  Is it the fault of the author or my own poor memory and inability to concentrate?

I will say that the one-star reviews this one is getting are probably the fault of the marketing department.  The blurbs promise the reader a scary horror novel a la Shirley Jackson or Stephen King.  The (really cool!) cover evokes The Bad Seed and Village of the Damned.  But this is emphatically not genre fiction; I would never recommend this to a horror fan, and those who pick this one up based on cover or blurbs are getting a bum recommendation.