Book-Book (Read It)

Book Review: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

In this funny and ultimately moving debut novel, children's librarian Lucy Hull runs away with 10-year-old Ian Drake, whose  love of reading is thwarted by his fundamentalist parents.  Almost everybody pegs Ian as destined to be gay, and his parents send him to a re-education program run by "ex-gay" Pastor Bob. Little Ian doesn't know from gay, and he doesn't question his family's fundamentalist beliefs, but he defies his parents in reading "dangerous" books. He is an enormously appealing character, and one who rings true to anyone who has worked in a library.

A quirky picaresque adventure told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, lampooning certain elements of the Christian religion and touching on questions of emigration and ethnic identity: probably not destined for the bestseller list.  I loved it, for its droll humor, its heart, its reverance for books, and its depiction of libraries and librarians, which the author mostly gets right.

Book Review: The Coffins of Little Hope by Timothy Schaffert

An elderly obituary writer, Essie Myles, recounts the year that a young woman claims that her daughter Lenore was abducted. The media is transfixed - the story temporarily saves the dying newspaper run by Essie's grandson Doc - but some people think Daisy is delusional and doubt that Lenore ever existed. Meanwhile, Doc's sister Ivy comes back to her 13-year-old daughter Tiff, having abandoned her for a lover in Paris five years previously.

I loved the narrator's voice here: as I age, I'm susceptible to the charms of elderly people who are not doddering, and who are fully drawn complex people. The charm of the novel ended there for me, though, and I can't pinpoint why.  It was quirky, but I didn't find it funny.  The characters were real and should have been interesting, but they did not grab me.   I more or less enjoyed reading the book, but it just dissolved on my tongue. If you like the work of Alexander McCall Smith, you might love this book.  I don't, so I didn't.

Book Review: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Erik Larson is king of the "nonfiction for fiction lovers" genre.  Who didn't like The Devil in the White City?  His latest book, about the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany, is more serious in intent, but just as much of a page-turner.

William Dodd is a dry, plain, somewhat puritanical man and his daughter Martha is a free-spirited adventurer temporarily infatuted with all the beautiful Aryan men surrounding her. Dodd grows to be one of the early voices warning against Hitler, when the U.S. mood is isolationist and the State Department includes its share of outright Nazi sympathizers. Dodd is not particularly well-liked or successful in his job. Martha affronts the stodgy diplomatic community with her series of affairs.  The book deals only glancingly with the oppression of Jews; it goes in more depth about the internecine battles among German officials, including a harrowing account of the Night of Long Knives.

I didn't particularly like either Dodd or his daughter. Dodd was portrayed as a fussy bureaucrat whose abhorence of Nazism was sometimes overshadowed by his petulant dislike of other diplomats, but compared to his successor, and others in the State Department, he was prescient and a man of conscience. As for Martha - I have nothing against her promiscuity, it just seemed that she was somewhat vacuous and unserious. Is this true, or just or just Larson's sexism showing?

Book Review: The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt

This is a fat, sprawling book that spans the late Victorian period through World War I, about writers, artists, Fabian socialists, the arts and crafts movement, free love, the suffrage movement, theater, puppetry and war. If those subjects intrigue you on the face of it, give this book time to sink in: it's one of those lovely slow-paced books perfect for summertime, although its abundance of characters make for confusion at times. The story pivots around Olive Wellwood, a successful writer of children's books, and her many children, who must cope with the strains of their unconventional household and the discovery of several family secrets.  We also meet  Benedict Fludd, a mad potter, and Phillip Warren, the working-class boy he takes under his wing.

There is a lot of story here, yet the book is not plot-driven.  It's not character-driven either: most of the characterization is impressionistic.  The prose is unassumingly good, and dramatic episodes are rendered very quietly. I think the book is idea-driven, and dream-driven to an extent.  Motifs of underground pervade the book, from the museum basement where Phillip is first discovered searching for Art, to Olive's fantasy story for her son Tom, and finally to the trenches of World War I.  Fairy tales are used to convey both romantic illusion and grim nightmare.  I think that Byatt is limning the end of England's self-absorbed faux innocence as it is forced into modernity.