"Jenny Kidd" by Laury A. Egan

 

 

 

 

 

In Jenny Kidd author Laury A. Egan expertly assembles colorful, but not-quite-what-they-seem characters to animate this dark thriller. Set in Venice, her story features art forgery, theft, multiple murders, and an age-old noble family awash in mystery and decadence. It’s a slender piece, paced like lightning, and edge-of-your-seat suspenseful — a truly gripping read.

The eponymous character, a gifted young American artist, has abandoned New York in favor of Venice for a couple of months so that she can sharpen her skills. The attractions, both personal and cultural, exert their irresistible pull on Jenny immediately on her arrival. In short order, she meets an enigmatic but charming British woman, two young aristocratic members of Venetian society (under whose spell she can’t help but fall), and a pushy American man who seems to turn up wherever Jenny goes. And even that’s not all: add in her fretting, emotionally distant, and disapproving parents, back in America, and you have a young woman whom trouble will inevitably find. And sure enough, in very short order Jenny’s apartment is burgled, she is seduced — and learns a lot about herself in the process — and ultimately, imprisoned.

Egan taps this bewitching cast with her magic wand, and they misbehave in quite unexpected ways. And she keeps us, her breathless readers, pulled this way and that in suspense. We guess at who’s guilty of crimes and who isn’t; sometimes a character’s activity paints them in a suspicious light, and sometimes we suspect them for reasons of our own. Jenny’s captivity stretches out, occupying a considerable portion of the narrative; her multiple attempts at escape come a cropper, one after the other. 

Come for the culture, the world-class scenery, and the plucky heroine. Stay for the ingenious skulduggery. Don’t miss this chilling, and emotional, adventure!

 

 

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"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

In The Bookshop (1978) author Penelope Fitzgerald presents the determination shown and the obstacles faced in her English heroine’s path as she moves to coastal Suffolk and opens a humble bookshop. She spices her story with generous doses of wryly observed humor, but beneath it all is England’s ossified class structure, with its nasty  oppressive dealings, small and large. It is a slender volume, full of quirky observations, laugh-out-loud humor, and all of it done with exemplary economy.

Set in 1959, the story of widowed Florence Green’s foray into retail contains the minutely observed challenges she faces in running the town’s only bookshop. She must deal with such vicissitudes as a vicious and implacable local society matriarch, an onsite storage facility with permanently wet floors and walls, and a cranky poltergeist. 

Along the way, Fitzgerald manages the utmost clarity with the stingiest word use. Florence meets Milo, the slouching, somewhat glamorous BBC employee, whom she captures as going “through life with singularly little effort.” The evil society matriarch has a nephew in Parliament (who facilitates her aunt’s scheming); Fitzgerald sums him up as “brilliant, successful, and stupid.” We learn from David Nicholls’s 2013 introduction that the protagonist shares liberal political views with the author, in that she divides the world into “exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given time, predominating.” 

The author allows us a peek into the internal dialogue of a charming, ambitious, and kindly heroine. Unfortunately she must contend with English village tastes (provincial), rural characters (quirky and plainspoken), and mores (circumscribed). Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore. Clearly, this was a novelist who knew her craft, and plied it with world class skill. The Bookshop is unblinking, economical, charming, and brilliant. Set aside some time, and get acquainted with this lovely accomplishment.

 

 

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"Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line" by Deepa Anappara

Debut author Deepa Anappara follows the lives of a handful of school children in a slum in northern India in Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line. She graphically chronicles their lives in the poverty and utter squalor in which they grow up. They and their struggling families number among the tens of millions of unwanted, willfully neglected human afterthoughts in India.  It’s cruelest for the youngest, the children who are born into the endless cycle of lack of education, systemic apathy, and by the economic and caste prejudice that plagues their society.

And yet, Anappara tells their story with considerable humor, through the eyes and voice of a nine year-old boy. The boy, Jai, decides, after a couple of young children have disappeared, to investigate, the way they do on TV police dramas. He enlists the help of a couple of friends, but they wind up sharper and more observant than he could hope to be, much to his embarrassment and frustration. But the tragic story comes frightfully close to home, and the author makes extremely effective use of her character’s point of view to make the tragic story crystal clear and immediate.

In an afterword the author cites the shocking statistic that India loses as many as 180 children each day to traffickers, organ harvesters, and other seekers of easy gain. The author trains her unerring focus on so effectively that no one who reads this book will ever forget it.

I honor Anappara. She took the mission to draw the world’s attention to this appalling story, and executed it extremely well.

 

 

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"The Leaning Tower," and other stories by Katherine Anne Porter

 

Katherine Anne Porter demonstrates both her uncommon mastery of the short story form, and the idiom in which Americans speak, in this collection. This group was first published in 1944; the stories are at that date timely, topical, thought-provoking, and deep. She tackles childhood physical and psychological trauma, family dynamics, and international relations in crisis. Additionally she covers race issues in America, Depression-era political corruption, and rampant xenophobia in 1930s Europe.

This is truly a wide-ranging collection, and it benefits from Porter’s wise and all-encompassing treatment of the issues involved. Two stories stand out in this sampling. The title story features a bootless young American man who has traveled from the U.S. to interbellum Berlin on an ill-advised search for culture, or maybe a muse to move him. He finds a small group of men his age, but each individual signifies the frozen, even ossified, position of European countries caught in the grip of the prior war’s waste and economic ruin. 

Another story, “Holiday,” has a full and vivid description of a close-knit Texas farming family from the viewpoint of a visiting woman on holiday. It cites the patriarch’s worldview, strongly influenced by Das Kapital, and his decision to lend out money at less than market rates, so that young people can get started with a farm of their own. But principally, the visitor watches the family from up close; the climactic drama, with its outsider’s charity and its reverberant observations, is worth the price of admission by itself.

This brief five-story collection shows great depth and vivid storytelling. Highly recommended.

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"The Children's Book" by A.S. Byatt

 

Author A.S. Byatt leads us on a tour of the artistic and social zeitgeist of the end of the 19th Century in The Children’s Book; the War to End All Wars explodes across Europe  and alters forever the hopes, schemes, artistic ambition, and most of the social activism of the time. The book presents its idyll that will only lead to a catastrophic end; it wrenches all the principals out of their self-absorption, and forces Europe out of its untenable standoff.

The author introduces us to a handful of families, concentrating on the younger generation and its juvenile and coming-of-age issues. Olive, a children’s book author in the south of England, is the matriarch of a goodly brood, and we learn of her children’s quirks and talents as they encounter neighboring families, and their children. Each has talents and exercises them in their own way. As the book progresses these children endure their growing pains; some shine in their various arts and crafts but others must make do in more prosaic ways.

Byatt constructs a multi-level narrative: in one, she paints vivid stories of various families as the young ones and their elders run afoul of life’s harsh realities. Principally it’s the young people who have the hard knocks along the way, but as usual, these knocks result from negligence, or wickedness, or failings, of the elder generation along the way.

The second level deals with Europe’s ultimate hard knock, the Great War. A number of the young hurtle themselves into the conflict, both as combatants and as medical staff. The war makes casualties of everyone: every family is ground under the heel of the great catastrophe. The war puts paid to the fantasy of the international socialist movement, but also breaks the grip of gender-centric roles to which women had been assigned. Their service in England’s war effort smashed the stereotype of women’s aptitude and function in society, and these changes led ultimately to full suffrage for women in 1928.

Byatt uses specific lives and relationships to spin a sprawling tale of English society leading up to the maelstrom of the war that shreds it. We get a full and desolate sense of end times as the dreams and illusions of the fin de siecle fade and evaporate. This is an ambitious book, and meets all expectations which the author set for herself. It triumphs over its rough and rugged subject matter with grace and force and clarity. Well recommended.  

 

 

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