“Home in the Morning” reminds us that an excellent fiction can come from a close observation of human lives caught in the swirl and tide of grand social upheaval. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s, we encounter the lives of four people: two married couples, one white and one Negro. Their lives twine together, try to fray apart for a time, and begin to knit back up by novel’s end. Jackson Sassaport, a Jewish lawyer who grows up in Guilford, a satellite...
January 21, 2011
"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside
John Burnside/ madness/ Scotland fictionAuthor John Burnside leads us, the intrigued readers, on an intimate tour of the unaccepting and brutish heart of smalltown coastal Scotland in “The Devil’s Fooprints.” But that exploration serves as just the appetizer for the first-person narrator’s – Michael’s – descent into his own low-key, “elective” madness. The devil does indeed leave his footprints all over this story, and in some way, Michael, by turns willfully and unwittingly, follows them. Rather closely. As Michael grows up his parents...
January 11, 2011
"Miss New India" by Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee/ India fiction/ modernization of India“Miss New India” contains the story of Anjali (Angie) Bose, who grows from sheltered nineteen-year-old in a backwater India town into a sadder but wiser young woman with growing skills and ambition. It embraces a much larger canvas, though, nothing less than the dizzyingly rapid modernization of the second most populous nation on Earth. Angie Bose’s journey opens this transformation before our eyes, cutting a clear slice for us and laying it on a slide for our microscopes. Growing up quietly, steeped...
January 02, 2011
"Stations West" by Allison Amend
Allison Amend/ Oklahoma Territory/ settlement of OklahomaAllison Amend brings us the multi-generational saga of the Haurowitzes in “Stations West,” published by the Louisiana State University. It covers the settlement and development of Oklahoma from territory to state from the late 19th Century through the years of the Great Depression. We follow the lives of Boggy Haurowitz and his descendants through settlement, oil and the dust bowl. It’s typical of generational sagas: it deals with long lives of the principals, and in this example, not much of those...
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