HEIDI

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Heidi, Johanna Spyri, published in Switzerland 1880, 243 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Heidi was one of my most read books as a child. I think our family owned it so I could just pick it up and read it whenever I wanted to. I remember being entranced by the fact that Heidi's aunt made her wear ALL her clothes so there would be nothing to carry on the journey to Grandfather. It was a hot spring day when Heidi made that first climb up the mountain to her grandfather's cabin. I felt sorry for her being so over-dressed but I knew right away that the aunt was a "bad person."

As soon as they got to Grandfather, even though he was thought of as a "bad person," I could tell he was good. It only made the aunt more bad for leaving her niece with someone considered to be dangerous.

There you have the wonder of Johanna Spyri's writing. She didn't come right out and say who was bad, good, or otherwise but showed these qualities by her storytelling. Her heavy religious message did not bother me as a child because it fit right in with what I had been taught. It didn't bother me during this rereading either, even when Clara's grandmother was clearly preaching Christian theology, because it is done with so much love and understanding while doing no one any harm.

I did notice that the first half of the book is more interesting and exciting while the second half has more lessons, as it were, and gets a bit serious. It turns out that Ms Spyri wrote two books: Heidi's Years of Learning and Travel, then Heidi Make Use of What She Has Learned, later combined into one. Those titles hint at the shift in emphasis. I did always like the first half the most, but remember being so happy when everything turned out well for Heidi, Peter, Clara and all the grandparents. 

In any case, I loved it just as much as ever, I cried a few times, and was overjoyed to spend time with someone whom I once considered a friend.

(Heidi can usually be found on the Children's Classics shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore or can be ordered in a variety of versions.)

THE ACCURSED

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The Accursed, Joyce Carol Oates, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2013, 667 pp

Joyce Carol Oates!!! She is a force to be reckoned with. I haven't read her for several years but I grew up in Princeton, NJ. When I learned that her new novel was historical fiction set on and around the campus of the Ivy League University where she has been a professor of creative writing for over 30 years, I knew it was time to revisit both the author and the town.

I first read JCO in the late 1980s. Languishing in Los Angeles, where I was involved in an attempt to "go straight" after years of rebellion and excess, by taking a course in management training, I haunted a used bookstore on Franklin Avenue and picked up Marya: A Life (1986). Plunged into a world of impoverished grit and abuse that shocked my soul, I began to suffer from delusions of being followed by creepy people. I even managed to get mugged one evening. The novel reawakened all my deepest childhood fears.

Over the next decade I made my way through her first eight novels. I became aware of her mixed critical reception, including complaints about her overheated prolixity and the inevitable mockery that results from such relentless productivity. I moved on to other authors but never forgot her ability to take me to those dark places inherent in any human soul.

I am here to tell you that she has not lost her touch. The Accursed chronicles a curse or horror that fell upon the upper crust of Princeton society in 1905-1906. Just beyond the Gilded Age, during which the rise of railroads and steel and coal mining created the most wealth our young country had ever known, the early years of the 20th century saw the stirrings of socialism, muckraking, workers unions and strikes. This novel captures it all.

An array of well-known characters appear: Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University; ex-President of the United States Grover Cleveland; current President Teddy Roosevelt; Upton Sinclair, living just outside of town where he completed The Jungle; Jack London; Mark Twain; and even an individual claiming to be Sherlock Holmes. The main character though is none other than the Devil himself.

The issue addressed is passion in its variegated forms and the manifestations that suppression of passion creates in society: illness, abduction, oppression, abuse, injustice, and madness. All of these roil beneath a veneer of wealth, privilege, religion, and intellectual pursuit amongst the wealthy businessmen and professors and clergy of Princeton, disturbing their families to the point that most are convinced a curse is abroad in the town.

 

Oates speaks through the measured narrative voice of an historian, son of one accursed professor; also through the hysterical journal of a rich matron reduced to invalidism due to an "unspeakable" accident suffered during her honeymoon; and even through Woodrow Wilson's letters to his wife as well as to a love interest. When she is portraying the scenes of violence and degradation stemming from the curse, the voice is unmistakably hers.

 

Not one character escapes the underlying satire wafting through this tale. While the novel masquerades as historical fiction it brings the reader face to face with our hypocrisies, our Puritan heritage, and our cruelties. As I said, Joyce Carol Oates has not lost her touch.

 

I finished The Accursed feeling as ill as some of the characters, as insane as others, and as despairing. There are villains, there are heroes, there is evil and God, but who is who and which is which had confounded me for almost 700 pages. The world we see" is not the world that is. As one of Oates' titles exhorts us, "You Must Remember This."

(The Accursed is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN

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The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton, Atria, 2009, 549 pp

I am almost ashamed to admit I liked it, but The Forgotten Garden pleased me in many ways. Mostly I fell in love because it put me back into the delicious reading mode of The Secret Garden, one of my most loved books as a young girl. In fact, this piece of women's fiction is The Secret Garden for grown-up females. Frances Hodgeson Burnett even makes a cameo appearance.

The book has everything: an orphan, a mystery, three generations, Australia, an English manor house, romance, and a secret garden, and two awesome heroines. The writing is pretty good, with some odd quirks. Though the plot is predictable she still keeps you guessing until the very end. That end is a long time in coming but I was a happy reader on almost every page.

The accomplishment is that Morton took the elements that made The Secret Garden so captivating to me as a child and that made me a lifelong voracious reader, and adapted them to a contemporary novel. Really she did not miss a trick. 

 

I realized why I like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield so much, why I love Tana French and even Joyce Carol Oates. All of these authors (and more like Charles Dickens, Charles Frazier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to give the boys a chance) create a magical brew of storytelling wherein the mundane facts of daily life are imbued with the wonder and somewhat supernatural essence that hides behind the illusion of what we call "real life."

I look for many different experiences when I read but most of all I look for that magical brew.


(The Forgotten Garden is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BEAUTIFUL RUINS

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Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter, HarperCollins Publishers, 2012, 292 pp

You can read all the reviews and reader comments and blog posts and blurbs, but you never really know about a book until you read it yourself. I was excited to open Beautiful Ruins but my high hopes were gradually but steadily reduced to disappointment.

Too bad because the premise was great: aspiring actress finds herself in the midst of the filming in Rome of  "Cleopatra," a movie that was plagued by the contentious love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, budget overruns, and box office disaster. It was the early 60s and Jess Walter's descriptions of the Italian coast are great.

But description hardly makes a novel. Unfortunately most of Walter's characters are flat. I don't mind a novel that jumps back and forth in time but in Beautiful Ruins the jumps are awkwardly placed. Much of the drama in this tale of life's disappointments is written without originality and did not move my emotions.

A few sections are excellent. His portrayal of Richard Burton shimmers with that actor's power, alcoholism, and self-absorption. A chapter where a washed up rock star tries to make a comeback at a festival in Scotland gets the details, the sordidness, and the exploitation just right. The long-suffering reluctant hero, Pasquale Tursi, a young Italian man in love with two women and with honor, was the character who held the story together and made me keep reading.

As uneven as the shores of Italy's Cinque Terre, the novel has peaks of stark wonder and slimy pools of quite mediocre writing. It kept me off balance and hoping but ultimately left me bruised and tired.

In this year's Tournament of Books, the book was paired against The Song of Achilles and both suffer from similar problems. Beautiful Ruins won that round but fell to Gone Girl in the quarter finals. If I had been the judge of either round Beautiful Ruins would have won both times. Comments anyone?

(Beautiful Ruins is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID

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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson, Random House, 2007, 404 pp

I read Bryson's memoir of growing up in the 1950s as research for my own memoir. As he did in A Walk in the Woods, he had me laughing out loud, long and hard. But the biggest revelation for me was the huge disparity between life as a boy child and life as a girl child during that decade. 

At least from his point of view, boys had much more freedom to roam, they were encouraged to be physical (sports, getting into fights, etc) and daring (trying cigarettes and booze, ditching school.) Emulating superheroes played a huge role in establishing a boy's identity. 

His mother worked outside the home; mine stayed at home being a housewife. His dad was a sports writer and traveled often; my dad was a secret writer but was home every night. Making parallels is always tricky.

I was reminded of the polio scare, how bad it was at the dentist, the things we didn't worry about such as fallout from nuclear testing, food additives and those clouds of DDT spray.

When I returned to my own writing, I had been fairly annihilated. Compared to Bryson's hyperbolic humor, my own recounting sounded serious, perhaps dull. It took a while but as I found my own voice again I also had to admit that for this female, growing up in the 1950s was not that funny.

(The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS

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The Light Between Oceans, M L Stedman, Scribner, 2012, 319 pp

I must say, my reading group picks so far this year have pleased me. This one is clearly women's fiction but was overall a rewarding read addressing heart-wrenching questions about motherhood.

Tom Sherbourne, an Australian WWI veteran, took a post as lighthouse keeper on a remote point in SW Australia. He had emotional wounds from the war so the solitude and required orderliness of his tasks suited him.

One day during his biannual leave, he met Isabel, the bold, rebellious, and only surviving child in a family who lost two sons in the war. Eventually they married and she moved to the lighthouse with him.

Though they were happy together, two miscarriages and a still birth had cast shadows over the marriage. When a small boat washes up carrying a dead man and a living baby, Isabel convinces her husband they should keep the baby, who is the answer to Isabel's prayers. So Tom compromises his moral principles and falsifies the lighthouse records to make his wife happy.

Of course, anyone who commits such treachery, no matter how good the reasons for doing so, must suffer eventually. Tom and Isabel pay in perhaps more ways than are plausible when the baby's real mother appears.

What I found intriguing about the story was the historical event of WWI having caused the loss of so many young men. A side of war not often considered is the pain, especially for mothers, of all those lost sons, not to mention the dearth of available young men to marry. Isabel suffered the loss of her brothers along with her parents. She remained their only living child and I thought she felt compelled to give her parents grandchildren. In her small town, there was not anyone she wanted to marry until Tom came along.

The birth mother of the found baby lost her husband due to war related issues. The baby was all she had left of a man she had loved dearly. Ultimately both women went to extremes over the little girl, producing loads of melodrama and tragedy for many people. I could see how such a result was traceable to the havoc of war.

While these conflicts were drawn out past the point of suspense to weariness for the reader, the novel rings true. Those two mothers had been driven to desperation and so could not find a way to reconcile. I'm not sure the effects on the child were realistic. The bittersweet ending felt less true. Can people really heal from war related familial damage in just one generation?

(The Light Between Oceans is currently available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE PICTUREGOERS

The Picturegoers, David Lodge, MacGibbon and Kee, 1960, 238 pp

The Picturegoers is David Lodge's first novel and it read very much like one. He has continued to release novels for over 40 years, was short-listed twice in the 1980s for the Booker Prize, and always gets respect from British book reviewers. Therefore he is included in My Big Fat Reading Project. Therefore I read his first novel.

The charming aspect of The Picturegoers is its portrayal of the end of an era when everyone went to the movies because there was not yet any television. The movie theater of the novel works, somewhat awkwardly, as a micro-environment for several disparate characters and their stories.

The key character, Mark Underwood, is a self-centered literature student who comes to board with a Catholic family. Mark falls in lust with the family's eldest daughter (a convent-raised 19 year old recently rejected in her desire to become a nun) and pretends to return to the church from which he had lapsed. As the daughter falls in love with Mark and becomes a modern woman, Mark falls back into Catholicism and decides he may become a priest.

I think this rather TV sitcom type plot was meant to be tongue in cheek, but it made me queasy. David Lodge admits as much in his introduction to the 1993 Penguin reissue. So I will continue to read his novels as I move through the decades and see where he went from here.

(The Picturegoers is out of print but the Penguin paperback is available from used book sellers.)

IVYLAND

Ivyland, Miles Klee, OR Books, 2011, 528 pp

It seems that every year the Tournament of Books features one off-beat, somewhat experimental novel by an under known author. Ivyland takes that spot this year.

A sort of post apocalyptic, disjointed, phantasmagorical romp by way of multiple voices, it left me confused and reeling.

At least it is set in New Jersey, where I grew up, so I am familiar in a hazy way with Trenton and the Pine Barrens and the Jersey shore. The characters are mainly teens from broken families but everyone suffers from a Big Pharma created scourge, either economically, emotionally, mentally, or because of a gruesome physical disability. Everyone is also on multiple drugs plus heavy alcohol intake.

So the story is a nightmare, owing much to Kafka, Bob Dylan and television...I could go on but I would only be showing off or feeling more confused. Underlying all the weirdness is a deep, pulsing sadness, festering like a wound not healing properly. By the time I reached the end I felt quite hopeless about the future of anyone or anything.

Did I like Ivyland? Not really. But somehow I kind of respected whatever Miles Klee was trying to do. I would read his next book just to see where he goes from here.

(Ivyland does not appear to be available through independent bookstores, except through the Kobo Reader link at Once Upon A Time Bookstore, but can be obtained on-line from OR Books. I read it as an eBook from Barnes&Noble.)

SERMONS AND SODA WATER

Sermons and Soda Water, John O'Hara, Random House, 1960, 328 pp

O'Hara hit the 1960 bestseller list twice. This collection of three novellas was #10 and was originally released as a boxed set of three volumes. (I found the three volumes at my local library without the box.) I liked these novellas better than any of his novels so far. He curbed his wordiness and made excellent use of his skill with dialogue. They each went down like eating ice cream.

Some male friends from O'Hara's usual haunt of Gibbsville, PA, turn up in each novella so you get a picture of their lives as young people growing older and wiser. The period covers the stock market crash of the 1930s and the years beyond.

The first thing I read by O'Hara was his debut, Hellbox, a short story collection. He had written most of them for The New Yorker and had the sound of a hot new writer on the make. Again it was his snappy dialogue that impressed me. I think he was at his best when he was not taking himself so seriously.

In Sermons and Soda Water, you really get the feel of the 1920s wildness being drowned in the troubles of the Depression and can see what life was like for the middle class in those days. I realized that while his female characters are drawn in ways annoying to me now, they are portraits of how women were then due to how men perceived them.

(Sermons and Soda Water is out of print. Try your local library or used booksellers.)

MAY WE BE FORGIVEN

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May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes, Viking Penguin, 2012, 466 pp

I started out almost hating this book and ended up loving it. A M Homes appears (if you believe everything you read on the Internet) to have a prickly reputation for upsetting people and going out on limbs as a writer. This is the first I have read by her.

She DID upset me for the first long while in the novel. Despicable George, the younger asshole brother, who by the way is the only character who changes not a whit. All the violence, gratuitous to the max. I thought I was in for a slog through our dysfunctional, medicated, materialistic world including horrid kids.

Then there is Harry, the older brother. Such an interestingly complex character who changes big time from indecisive, sexually weird victim to responsible, caring human being. In fact, the degree of change is almost not believable except that A M Homes so competently chronicles his every experience and his inner life through a first person voice without excess of any kind. By the end I was wishing there were more men like him in the world.

Lest I have made it sound like this is merely a sad, heavy story (actually it is), let me assure you that great heaps of absurdity, satire, and laugh out loud moments abound. Did I mention the kids? Yes, she does kids perfectly and they are not wholly horrid.

Instead of a slog, I was treated to a romp through our dysfunctional, medicated, materialistic world which addresses the true questions of our times: what is the meaning of family anyway and how do we recreate it out of the mess we have made?

Out of a list of 16 novels for the 2013 Tournament of Books, I have found six so far that are exceptionally good and May We Be Forgiven is one of them.

(May We Be Forgiven is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

OURSELVES TO KNOW

Ourselves to Know, John O'Hara, Random House, 1960, 408 pp

Either John O'Hara got better as the years went by or I am getting to know him better as an author. This novel earned him the #5 spot of the 1960 bestseller list and I liked it more than his earlier novels.

He works over most of the tropes found in the popular fiction of 1960: sex, psychological insight, homosexuality, and bad women. The main character is one of the richest men in his small eastern Pennsylvania community. He has issues, especially with women. When in his forties, he marries a 19-year-old sex-crazed woman and eventually murders her. (No spoiler: you learn about the murder early in the book.)

Though he kept me turning the pages and took various turns I wasn't expecting, I was bothered because the guy got away with it due to his wealth and connections. Certainly the double standard when it comes to women and sex was in full force in the early 20th century when the story takes place. But it still enrages me to read about it. If he had killed his wife's lover he probably would have been sent to prison, but it was "understandable" that he would murder an unfaithful wife. End of rant.

The psychological portrait of the protagonist was more interesting to me as well as a sort of meta-fictional technique which put the reader into the consciousness of the man telling the story. 

O'Hara claimed that he wrote to record what American life was like before World War II and I suppose he did. At the same time he was obviously keeping up with literary trends and sneaking them into his potboilerish best sellers. He was no Thomas Wolfe or William Faulkner, but he tried hard to make the grade.

(Ourselves to Know is out of print, available at libraries and from used book sellers.)

THE ROUND HOUSE

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The Round House, Louise Erdrich, HarperCollins Publishers, 2012, 317 pp

I wish I could say I have read all of Louise Erdrich's novels. She has written 14 for adults and 6 for children. I've read 3 of the adult novels, one of the children's, and each time I have finished with a sense of fulfillment and of having had some of the mysteries of life made clear. I can't ask for more from an author.

That Erdrich won the National Book Award for The Round House was a wonderful, if somewhat long in coming, acolade. I suppose the award led to the novel being chosen for the Tournament of Books. She has written another masterpiece.

Let's say you are a member of that utterly dispossessed segment of America known these days as Native American. Then let's say you are female, educated, a wife and mother, as well as dedicated to keeping good records of the parentage of all children in your community. I would call such a woman a saint, a rare and vital link of spiritual proportions between the past and the future. Let's say that you were brutally raped and survived due to equal parts chance and bravery.

That is the story of Geraldine Coutts. The Round House is the story of thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts and his quest to solve the crime spurred on by his devotion to his mother. I suppose such a story has been told before in novels, but this is the res. The law does not fully apply there so Joe must go outside the restraints that cripple his father, a tribal judge, in finding any justice for Geraldine. As Bob Dylan says, "To live outside the law you must be honest."

As usual in a Louise Erdrich novel, there are numerous threads, so the story is rich with tribal lore, reservation survival tactics, and intricate webs of family relations and loyalties. All of this plays out in what amounts to another world juxtaposed with contemporary American life.

Joe is one of Erdrich's better creations. You would think she had once been a thirteen-year-old boy. The incessant hunger, the sexual urges and antics, the primal love for his mom, and the bravery of an Indian on the cusp of manhood. It is enough to break your heart. It broke mine, but also filled it with thanks because I too have good sons.

(The Round House is available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released on 4/13/2013.)

THE DAY I BECAME AN AUTODIDACT

The Day I Became an Autodidact, Kendall Hailey, Delacorte Press, 1988, 278 pp

I consider myself an autodidact (a self-taught person.) I dropped out of college midway and decided to learn what I wanted to learn by reading books. When Kendall Hailey's 1988 memoir came across my radar, I had to check it out.

I whizzed through the first half, delighting in Hailey's open minded parents (her father a playwright, her mother the author of the backlist classic, A Woman of Independent Means.) Along with her younger sister, they led a free-wheeling literary life of opening nights, book signing, and travel.

Kendall started her self education at the age of 16 by reading Will Durant's Life of Greece as well as most of the famous dramatists, philosophers, and historians from antiquity. She then went on to Caesar and Christ, Durant's history of Rome and its empire, then another reading list of ancient Romans. Boy, could I relate to that as I am doing a similar, though less thorough, study.

But about midway, the whole thing bogs down, becomes repetitive and loses its zing. Looking back on the reading experience a week or so later, I can see that the narrative arc went from cocky, self-determination to emotional dithering and then petered out.

In a recent interview on Book Riot, Ms Hailey comes across as breezy and contented, but I can't help thinking that she lost her courage at some point and settled for less than her 16-year-old dreams imagined. I know that happens to many dreamers, myself included, but I was looking for a heroine and didn't find one.

(The Day I Became an Autodidact is out of print. It is best found in libraries and from used book sellers.)

TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM

Trustee From the Toolroom, Nevil Shute, William Morrow & Company, 1960, 311 pp

The #9 bestseller from 1960 took me completely by surprise. The title invoked boredom and also made little sense. But On The Beach, Shute's bestseller from 1957, had made a big impression on me and gave me hope.

The trustee of the title is Keith Stewart, one of those unprepossessing fellows from postwar England who bumbles along, doesn't expect much, but is an honest and honorable sort. These days he would be considered a world class nerd.

In his basement workshop he makes miniature models of engines, clocks, motorcycles, etc, carefully milling and lathing his own machine parts. He also writes a column for a niche magazine, the "Miniature Mechanic." Though he receives letter from all over the world and conscientiously answers every one, his take home pay is as minuscule as his models. 

Then, in the way of any good story, upheaval arrives when his sister and her fairly wealthy husband perish at sea, leaving Keith and his long suffering but supremely practical wife as guardians for their nine-year-old niece. Keith is also named trustee for the little girl's inheritance which turns out to include a valuable stash of diamonds lost on a corral island near Hawaii.

Soon enough this man who has never left England and rarely ventures from his hometown, has an adventure by air and sea the likes of which he had never imagined. Somehow, despite the unlikelihood of several coincidences, the story hooked me.

It is one of those tales where uprightness and hard work pay off. In our current world where dishonesty pays until it doesn't, where our heroes usually turn out to be false, I fell for the heartwarming simplicity of a guy who faces hardship to do the right thing and who, because he is skilled and clever and willing to go every extra mile required, wins in the end.

I made my husband read it. He is an engineer of sorts himself and a practical guy. It brought a tear to his one good eye, as we like to say about him when he (rarely) gets emotional, and pronounced it great. 

(Trustee From the Toolroom is out of print but available in libraries and from used book sellers. Also, curiously, many novels by Nevil Shute, including this one are available as eBooks from the two big eBook sellers who shall remained unnamed.)

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

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How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti, Henry Holt and Company, 2012, 306 pp

What is it about Canadian women who write? The level of intelligence is somehow a bit higher. Readers of this blog know my opinion of Margaret Atwood as one of the most intelligent women alive. Then there is Emily St John Mandell.

How Should A Person Be? touched many a nerve among readers, some pleasurably, some unpleasantly. I loved it as an honest look at the perils and responsibilities of friendship between women. That the women in the story are both artists (one a painter, one a playwright) only made it more intense for me.

I also dived right into Sheila's troubles with being married. The question of this novel set in the interrogative mood is how to be faithful (not necessarily sexually) without sacrificing one's own personhood. Another aspect of the question is how to stay in love with another person and still be selfish when one needs to be. 

I think what raises Heti's novel above the navel-gazing of which she has been accused is its philosophical underpinnings. Now that I consider that last sentence, I realize that at least a couple of my favorite philosophers were quite the navel-gazers. Didn't one philosopher say that the unexamined life is not worth living, or something like that?

I thank Sheila Heti for examining her life and having the courage to write about it. I also thank the Tournament of Books folks for putting her book on the 2013 list.

(How Should A Person Be? is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LISTENER

The Listener, Taylor Caldwell, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1960, 332 pp

I did not like one thing about this book. The perils of my self-imposed Big Fat Reading Project. I only read Taylor Caldwell because she keeps showing up on the bestseller lists. There will be four more, but finally in the mid 1970s she fades away. Ever since she got on her weird variety of Christian writing, she went right downhill in my opinion. But people who read books for comfort or reassurance from a Christian standpoint seem to like her which explains how she made #8 on the bestseller list for 1960.

The Listener is not even really a novel. It is a collection of stories connected by the visits of each character to an odd sort of shrine in an unnamed midwestern city. The shrine is named The Man Who Listens. People from various walks of life come and talk to a curtain, tell their troubles, then open the curtain and realize they have been talking to God. They see the answers to their problems and then go straighten out their lives.

It felt highly contrived and gave Caldwell a platform from which she preached in a reactionary tone about the evils of modern society. I confess, I did a lot of skimming but kept on to the end. It did not get any better. In fact it got worse until I was gagging when I finished.

(The Listener is out of print, available in libraries and from used book sellers, also curiously, it is available as an eBook from your usual eBook sellers.)

HHhH

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HHhH, Laurent Binet, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012, 327 pp

Facts: Laurent Binet is French. This is his debut novel and won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel in 2010; the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The book I read is translated from French and is on the Tournament of Books list for 2013.

Opinions: Anyone who can write a historical novel set during World War II and do something new is alright with me. Laurent Binet bravely, perhaps recklessly, put himself as author into the story, all very meta-fiction, and created an absorbing read.

It was cool to go straight from reading The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set partially in modern Prague, to reading HHhH, set in 1939-1942 Prague. The title is an acronym for "Himmler's Brain is called Heydrich." If you don't know who Himmler and Heydrich were, don't worry. Binet is a teacher by profession and knows how to teach history while making it exciting.

This is a tale about assassination and bravery and evil Nazis and war and people. Despite the authorial intrusions, or maybe even because of them, there is not a dull moment or paragraph. In fact, the intrusions create suspense.

I have not had this much enjoyment from historical fiction since I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I have gotten the biggest benefit so far from pushing myself unmercifully to complete the Tournament of Books list by March.

(HHhH is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK

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The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart, Riverhead Books, 2002, 452 pp

I read Gary Shteyngart's debut novel at fever pitch because I started it late for a reading group discussion. Fever pitch was the correct approach; it matches the pace of the story.

In the grand tradition of immigrant novels, Vladimir Girshkin is a young man of Russian descent adrift in a sea of confusion. He works at an immigrant resettlement agency in New York City, making non-profit wages. His girlfriend is a dominatrix by night, his father is an MD who scams Medicare, and his mother-well I never figured out exactly what it was she did but she was trying to beat the Russian immigrant odds in the 1990s by going straight.

I suppose the novel isn't for everyone. The two reading group members who showed up at the meeting at least tried but "couldn't get into it." I loved it the way I loved Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March; the way I loved Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker; the way I loved Isaac Asimov's autobiography In Memory Yet Green. The book is part of a huge story called "How I Became an American" fraught with identity crises, family strife, and hilarity.

The post-Soviet Union Russian criminal element is well represented but done with heavy sarcasm. A good part of the story is set in Prague, that city's celebrated Baroque soul swamped in the tatters of two world wars and one Cold War. Shteyngart's Eastern European characters are raised to a level of slapstick often seen in film but rarely in novels.

It was not clear to me whether Vladimir actually found himself or love or even a career, but he found safety. Just writing this now it occurs to me that safety is the rarest commodity of all for an immigrant. Rather than riches or enough to eat or religious freedom, safety is in the end what the displaced person craves most.

(The Russian Debutante's Handbook is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS

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When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alfred A Knopf, 2000, 336 pp

I have only read one other Ishiguro novel before: Never Let Me Go. I once saw him speak about that book at a reading and learned that he is rather obsessed with memory and how it is related to sense of self. On the experience of reading two of his six novels, I would call him difficult to read but emotionally deep.

The emotional depth is not in the writing which is almost without emotion. By some alchemy though, I felt or maybe even contributed emotion while reading. Was I trying to add it in because it is so submerged into the text or what? At this point I am not sure.

Christopher Banks was born to English parents in Shanghai a few years before the Japanese invasion, raised in its International Settlement, and his best friend was a Japanese boy. His parents disappear when he is about ten leaving him effectively orphaned, so he is sent back to an aunt in England. He grows up to become a famous detective.

Christopher is the most unreliable narrator I have met in fiction. He has almost no awareness of his effect on other people and pictures himself differently than anyone around him does. He is attracted to a woman who also displays a fractured sense of who she is, but he proceeds through life in complete denial about the attraction.

Eventually he returns to Shanghai in his thirties, having become convinced that his parents were kidnapped. Operating under the delusion that he can find them after all these years, he feels that he can also save China from some terrible fate. I think he is actually trying to save himself.

This is a most confusing tale written in segments that alternatively move the story forward while revealing the past. Each time the narrative returned to the present, some character or situation not previously mentioned would spring up, making me feel I had missed something.

Finally, despite numerous clues, I realized that Christopher's story was not the real story. By almost the last page I saw that Ishiguro had been ruminating all along as to how well we really know ourselves, how incorrectly we sometimes perceive the world and people around us, and how trauma and displacement can render a personality into fragments. I found all of this disturbing. I was left thinking that I got what he was trying to do but was not sure he pulled it off, but I'm not sure he didn't.

(When We Were Orphans is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LOVELY AMBITION

The Lovely Ambition, Mary Ellen Chase, W W Norton, 1960, 288 pp

This novel was both a lovely surprise and an example of the split personality of the 1960 bestseller list. In among the somewhat shocking contemporary books about sexual and political matters of mid 20th century life, the #7 bestseller concerns family life and the power of religion.

I should have known it would be good because Mary Ellen Chase was an excellent writer. The Lovely Ambition is every bit as good as my best loved book of hers, Windswept.

A British family at the turn of the 20th century makes the amazing transition to life in the United States. John Tillyard, an unassuming, earnest young Wesleyan parson, accepts a call to take over a Methodist parish in downeast Maine. Though the move is from one rural setting to another, the contrasts are many between their English village with its conflicts between high church and low to an American community where democracy is only constrained by local habits.

Tillyard has a brilliant but long-suffering wife and three children. He is a dreamy sort of guy who loves to read and take long walks. He also has a love of sheep, shepherds, and the lambing season. In other words, an impractical sort more interested in people than in making a living.

Once the family is settled in Maine, John becomes a part-time chaplain at an asylum for the mentally deranged in the nearest city. Before long he begins to invite some of the patients for visits to their home. His belief is that by interacting with "normal" people in a calm and loving environment, they can heal from their personal traumas. Naturally, the results are mixed.

While the sexual is certainly not emphasized, the psychological questions of the time are. This aspect makes for an interesting relation to The Chapman Report in terms of examining the best ways to approach human problems.

In tone and writing style, I was reminded of some novels by Elizabeth Goudge, also of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, both of which feature unreliable fathers as seen through the eyes of their daughters.

The Lovely Ambition is out of print and hard to find but I am glad I tracked down a used paperback from Alibris.