"The Train of Small Mercies" by David Rowell

On a sweltering June day in 1968 a New York Central Railroad train traveled from New York to Washington carrying the casket containing the remains of New York’s recently assassinated senator, Bobby Kennedy. The train ran slowly and behind schedule, because of tragic accidents in New Jersey, and we learn of this in David Rowell’s remarkable and clever debut, “The Train of Small Mercies,” but this serves as backbone and binding arc to the vivid stories of a small but diverse group of ordinary Americans in the throes of living their own lives.

We glimpse these lives perfectly through Mr. Rowell’s versatile and energetic treatment. There is the young civil servant who has installed a pool in his back yard as a way of capturing some magic he feels must be fading from his life. We read of the fifth-grade boy recently returned to his home after being kidnapped by his father. A mother suffers when her daughter is injured in a fall; a clever and attractive would-be nanny assumes her interview with the Kennedy clan will not proceed; and the newly-hired NY Central porter spends his first day on the job on the funeral train; and perhaps most pointedly, a very young Vietnam veteran, just having returned home, must try to adjust to life after losing a leg in combat.

It’s hard to imagine a better cast to present this crystal-clear cross-section of America at that moment. Mr. Rowell takes on and very beautifully handles each of these diverse characters – their outlook and opinion, their strivings, their day-to-day concerns. There is just the right balance here of the timeless – two parents fretting over their injured daughter in the hospital – and the period-specific – the despair felt by blacks and other idealists in the face of the out-of-control violence in America, reeling from a third assassination in four-plus years, and the second in just a few months.

This is a balanced, mature work of fiction, which always takes me by surprise in a debut piece, somehow. Mr. Rowell snaps his shutter on a set of fictional events bound together by the Kennedy funeral train, and then steps back. He offers no solutions; each narrative is left almost as arbitrarily as it is taken up, and this strikes me as exactly correct. Mr. Kennedy, a hero only slightly less important to blacks than Reverend King, was killed before truly accomplishing any of the goals he had promised to his constituency, and the lives of mourning supporters and opponents alike are no less open-ended in our open-ended United States. I wonder if Mr. Rowell means the title in an ironic sense – not every set of characters enjoys a merciful turn in these events – they’re the minority, in fact. But running through each narrative is the thread of the redemption that people expected could come of Senator Kennedy’s efforts. And therein lie some of the yearned-for mercies. And certain of the characters simply hope their lives will benefit in more prosaic ways, and it is a very clear measure of Mr. Rowell’s success that we share the hopes right alongside them.

The author has provided a very apt and accurate portrait of America at a singular time, and in the process, has blessed us with an equally singular debut novel.

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"Call Me When You Land" by Michael Schiavone

Katie Olmstead deals with family issues throughout “Call Me When You Land,” and they threaten to grind her up. Our portrait of this almost-forty Massachusetts single mom is so close, I checked after finishing the book to see whether I was remembering it wrong – but no, it’s written in the third person, but the point of view is so Katie-centric that it has the feel of a first-person narrative.

The first event we encounter in this narrative is the far-off death of Katie’s son’s father, an event that shakes Katie and her son CJ. Something about this event also rattles the already-threadbare bond between mother and son, and drives Katie deeper into the bottle. In fact, Katie imbibes alcohol from the first page onward in this book, a habit that author Michael Schiavone very effectively shows to be quite alarming. CJ acts out on the hockey rink where Katie can witness it, and probably in other places where she can’t. Drink reduces Katie’s inhibitions and she drags a former boyfriend back to bed for incautious and self-absorbed gratification. Throughout, Katie drinks and drinks, and then drinks some more, and then drinks because her hangover is so bad.

Katie’s cluelessness and denial in the face of all the male characters cannot ultimately eclipse the gleaming, monstrous Harley Davidson Road King motorcycle which CJ’s father bequeaths to him. This ticket to ride, that CJ’s biological father leaves for his son, wonderfully encapsulates the idea that CJ can get away to a place where he can finally become the focus of his mother’s attention. And Katie’s reaction to CJ’s flight is one of the true keys of this well-told novel – a non-act that forms the heart of the action and sets Katie’s spiral on a more hopeful course.

Katie’s character wore me down for much of this story, I’ll be honest. I’m definitely glad I stuck with her, though, and with this debut novel of Mr. Schiavone’s. What he sets out to do, he does with style and depth. He’s definitely at one with telling the human story, and I do hope it’s a territory he explores again very soon, and very often.

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"The Laws of Harmony" by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Judith Ryan Hendricks gives us the tribulations and crankiness of Soleil (who goes by ‘Sunny’) in “The Laws of Harmony.” Even given the struggle of her childhood in a New Mexico commune, and all the resulting issues she has with her mother, we still find it hard to engage our emotions or hopes for her.

Sunny Cooper pushes people away from herself. Her large unresolved resentment of her mother Gwen precludes closeness with others, even the handsome, compelling Michael, who proposes to her. She balks and makes him wait for her to come around to the idea. But Michael’s duplicity, legal trouble, and disappearance generate not only the tension that pushes the narrative forward, but it pushes Sunny to move from Albuquerque to a remote island off the coast of Washington state.

Here she meets the permanent (non-tourist) population, a mixed lot who try to offer help and support, which Sunny feels ambivalent toward, and doesn’t want to accept. Ms. Hendricks makes an attempt to wrap up the story’s threads and does so at some basic level, but again, I found my emotions only half-engaged.

“The Laws of Harmony” spends a fair amount of its capital in expansive descriptions of mundane tasks: food prep and cooking, showering, tidying up, or simply walking through a ferry terminal. Events and thought process quite central to the novel, however, have a glossed-over feeling at times. Chief among these: Sunny’s near-constant anger and anti-social behavior. This does soften near the end, but I don’t think it’s adequately founded in the story. I don’t see her motivation. Sunny’s evolution from being someone with a hard, isolated outlook into a person capable of accepting and giving human kindness, starts by novel’s end, but the ending has an abrupt, rather arbitrary feel. There are sections that amuse, and I did find myself laughing at some of the dialog, but overall, I felt I could spend my time on projects with a greater reward.

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"Cost" by Roxana Robinson

Early in Roxana Robinson’s “Cost” we learn of Edward Lambert that he enjoyed finding fault, it made him feel competent and sure of himself, useful. Finding what was wrong with a certain situation, person, or idea put him in control, and made him superior. We feel for his grown daughter, Julia, a New York artist and college professor, and understand why his presence at her Maine summer home puts her on edge, and makes her resent him.

In this realistic, perfectly-paced novel, Ms. Robinson presents the tragic story of loss accompanying the deadly heroin habit of Julia’s son Jack, which wraps the family up in his inexorable downward spiral. It starts with Edward. He has sailed through his life as a distinguished brain surgeon; he loves the prestige and the notoriety, and the power this gives him; he has developed a powerful ego. He sees himself as a virtuous standard, a member of an extremely exclusive society, but very late in life his wife’s fading faculties trigger worry and memories that begin to tell him and us a different tale. The leucotomies, the enforced surgeries on mental patients, the use of humans as little more than experimental subjects, these all come back to him, and as the trying events of his grandson’s drug habit proceed beyond his control, he begins to understand his own failing facilities, and wonders if he really was as fine an individual as he liked to believe.

This story recounts the unbearable cost of the young man’s heroin addiction, in terms of heartbreak and financial capital, and it may cost him his life if he can’t kick it. However, there’s another cost running through this plainly- and effectively-told tale. The toxicity flowing from Edward, the embittered and estranged patriarch, generates coldness and distance in his offspring. His two daughters, Julia and Harriet, barely speak, and their brother in nowhere to be found at this time of family crisis (he lives on the opposite coast). This negativity and mistrust lead directly to Jack’s addiction. His suffering is the cost of the way this family behaves; he needs to be emotionally elsewhere, not part of this family.

“Cost” thus holds up the unfeeling Lambert family for our review, at odds, unloving, ultimately ineffective in dealing with its youngest member’s crisis. The author seamlessly shifts points of view, so that we get internal dialogs from all major characters. These are perfect. They guide us through the treacherous waters of this family strife, and we end understanding all. Ms. Robinson’s powerful novel exposes this fractured family at its worst time; it is artfully, thoroughly done, and so harrowingly real. A serious, excellent, and thought-provoking piece.

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"So Many Ways to Begin" by Jon McGregor

Author Jon McGregor establishes the unique and elegant framework of identifying his short chapters as numbered pieces in a museum exhibit. In this way, he unfolds the story of David and Eleanor, a loving married couple who abide each other through each partner’s lifelong frustrating or horrific issues with their respective mothers. The title, in fact, refers to the far-too-strong influence of random chance in changing people’s lives, of opening and closing paths that will or would have been followed for a lifetime.

David and Eleanor foil each other over this mother-issue: David desperately searches for a biological mother whom he only learns of at age 22; Eleanor shuns her mother and would shun the memory of the continuous physical and emotional abuse she inflicted if only she could. Mr. McGregor maintains a clean and thoughtful, a simple and effective prose throughout. He constantly poses other possibilities – alternate events – when recounting an important juncture in someone’s life, emphasizing life’s sometimes cruel chances.

David becomes a museum curator basically as an act of will; as a child he found and documented an endless catalog of scraps and trinkets from craters in bombed-out Postwar England. When a museum is established locally he earns his apprentice’s position, and his career is born. He meets Eleanor – the attraction is immediate and mutual – on a business trip to a museum in Aberdeen, Scotland. David and Eleanor have difficulties like all married couples: she tends to severe depression while he tries to channel his frustration over the surprise of his background. They stay true to each other, however, and the end consists of a quiet, gratifying celebration of their enduring love.

This author has impressive skills drawing realistic characters, certainly, but his skills hardly stop there. He has given this fine book a structure in which our two protagonists each struggle in their own private fight, but somehow manage to do it in tandem. They do battle on opposite sides of the deepest of familial issues, but have enough capacity for each other to somehow make the journey worthwhile. And this is what I find I’m taking away: the universal nature of every person’s internal struggle, which is put aside long enough to make a beautiful life-affirming relationship work, and make life worth living for the beloved partner. An excellent, thought-provoking, if a little somber, read.

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"Expiration Date" by Sherril Jaffe

“Expiration Date” explores the feelings and thoughts about death in every way imaginable. Flora has a dream – but it’s more than a dream, more than a premonition, it’s frighteningly real, the heavenly court that convenes and sets the date of her death. Flora, very happily married and with grown children, learns that she will not reach her 60th birthday, that her “expiration date” is the day before. Flora’s mother Muriel maintains a sound mind and a youthful body for someone quickly approaching 90. In contrast to Flora’s blissful marriage, Muriel is widowed during the novel’s events and starts relationships with a few different men as the plots progresses.

In fact, chapters alternate between Flora with her expiration date, and Muriel with her seemingly endless lease on life. Flora considers the implications and the exigencies: as the date approaches, she wonders, will this be the last time I walk with my mother, see the Golden Gate Bridge, make love with my husband? It turns out this is the thrust here, albeit one that grows slowly: Flora stresses, in an oddly calm and circumspect way, about her supposedly imminent death, while Muriel, the mother, compares her various men to her definitely-not-sainted late husband. The constant consideration of death’s many changes dominate this slender book, and they form its backbone, its major chord. This is a Jewish family, and Flora’s husband Jonah is a rabbi. He recounts many stories from the Talmud with regard to the coming of the Angel of Death; Flora considers whether she can trick him by always being on the move, or by changing her name, or by some other means.

For me, this book never tends toward a conclusion; the mother and daughter progress toward imagined ends or intermediate events, and events never gave me an inkling of what to expect. Author Sherril Jaffe keeps us guessing until the very last. This can be considered a virtue, certainly, but I doubt the author intended a thriller climax. She gives us instead a final open-ended thought that summons the Buddhist principles into which she immerses us as she wraps up. Her lesson: death isn’t the point, living each moment is the point. Long-lived Muriel’s story cautions instead of congratulates: carpe diem, rather than slave away in a secure but unloving marriage. Flora should be proud after all: she manages to live her life of love with a sense of wonder and gratitude for all that she has.

This story will clearly resonate with those who face the challenge of illness, or who have lost loved ones, and it includes well- and subtly-told lessons on the art not of dying but of living and loving life.

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"Trespass" by Rose Tremain

Sometimes when watching a TV ad for a fragrance or a soft drink or almost anything, my wife or I will jokingly say, “Go ahead. Find the unattractive person in that ad.” We say it because it’s impossible to do. While reading Rose Tremain’s weighty “Trespass,” one could say the converse: “Okay, find the attractive or sympathetic person.” Because you pretty much can’t. “Trespass” portrays the lives a small number of people in late middle age as they progress into dotage. It also contains a hard-won balance, a magisterial justice, along with its brilliant depictions of Cevenol France. Along the way we witness true, anguished, human motivation, and at the end of the day, we have the unmistakably brilliant Rose Tremain behind it all.

Our intrepid author introduces us first to Anthony Verey, a once-almost-wealthy antiques dealer with a shop in a posh section of London. He realizes during a dinner with rich friends that his chance at real wealth has passed him by somehow, and that his celebrity isn’t what it once was. He realizes with excruciating pain that he is no longer spoken of in hushed terms at art openings, he no longer was "the" Anthony Verey. This timid, jealous, inadequate, precious mama’s boy must find a way out of his over-the-hill predicament. He settles of course for moving to the south of France, to the Cevennes Mountains, to be with his beloved sister so they can sort it all out. What gets sorted out, however ghastly it is, actually serves Verey rather well. Ms. Tremain presents grand timeless issues, like gentrification of old land holdings, jealousy, betrayal, greed, and the cruel horrors perpetrated within families. She sets these forces forward in an inexorable march of tragedy and retribution. It has a cinematic feel to it, one in which the audience may cheer for the wronged to come out on top, no matter the means. Our author even puts this Hollywood image into the head of one of her protagonists, as events unfold, and police inspectors ask their inevitable questions.

As always, Rose Tremain presents vivid pictures, both of outward nature, and of inward nature. The desperate ambition, the envy, the smugness of the socially superior, the grasping of the commercially opportune – our author lays these all out for our inspection, and in doing so, holds our modern adoration for money up in a mirror for us. She also reminds us that each society has its victims, and some of these victims so utterly lack for any protection or redress, that only tragedy can follow.

Ms. Tremain also invites us to decide which transgression lends its name to the novel. The British antiques dealer mulls over whether to purchase the French farmhouse, and the locals consider this a form of trespassing. Audrun, the current owner’s sister, unwell, ashamed, suffers the further indignity of being accused of trespassing because of her bungalow’s location. Anthony trespasses on his sister, and her happiness, and we also see how the locals trespass on the living forest that blankets the hills.

Once again, Orange Prize-winning Rose Tremain reinforces her powerful reputation. She has turned out a deep and serious piece of fiction, without perhaps the soaring, dreamlike escape of “The Colour” or the comic touches of “The Road Home.” This is a more contemplative work, filled with cautionary examples of greed and injustice, but also containing a grandeur, a momentous justice, wrought by the book's character seemingly least capable ot it. Recommended very highly.

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"Tinkers" by Paul Harding

Every book has its individualism. Every book has the chords that it plays, and its events, its moods, its peculiar light. “Tinkers” by Paul Harding has gray and black, done in chiaroscuro, contrasting hues that represent the universe and the deep insides of people’s souls. This remarkable, dense little book presents so many challenges in its brief pages – it’s like slicing into a geode of quartz and finding that the crystals lead to other mountain ranges, which you would have to shrink to go to, before returning to your normal size. I’m glad to quote Marilynne Robinson here, however obvious and inadequate it is: “‘Tinkers’ is truly remarkable.”

Instinct tells me that propounding the plot would do this book a disservice, but maybe we’ll let it take us to an appreciation. “Tinkers” consists of the story of father and son, each their own type of tinker. The father is the itinerant kind, who tries to make a living driving a cart with goods for sale around the countryside during the first quarter of the 20th century. The story also introduces his son, who approaches death’s door at the novel’s outset. The narrative features in stunning and clear language, the conflict that arises when individuals throw in together but are hopelessly, grandly, mismatched in their abilities to cope with life and the world. That, however, makes up but a small part of the energy and raison d’être of this book.

The salient outward event of the story comes when Howard, the older character, realizes his wife wants to institutionalize him because of his epilepsy, and he leaves her and his family one night during the dinner hour and never goes back. The following passage, illuminating his understanding that he has misread his wife’s taciturn ways, gives a glimpse at the depth of feeling Harding evokes, and the soaring language he puts in his tinker/poet’s mind. As he drives past his own house and his own family seated to dinner, never to return, we can hear him wail:

“God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoeshine and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes. God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets and slip hooch into pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters … because my wife’s silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving.”

Such is the strength of Harding’s diction; page after page contains language powerful enough to startle us and make us pause, to make us pull out our notebooks and transcribe at length. Another I must share: on the day Howard’s mother takes his own failing father away into the care of others, “My mother opened the outside door and the light came in and carved every object in the kitchen into an ancient relic. I could not imagine what people had ever done with iron skillets or rolling pins.” In the interests of space, I will not relay any of the numerous other examples so chock-filling this book.

I will, however, observe that Mr. Harding includes a vein running through the story, consisting of a high-toned phenomenology embraced by Howard, by any measure the main character. Our first glimpse comes when Howard imagines what happens when his grand mal seizures hit. He perceives that a door opens, a door which in normal times is disguised as the natural world, and that needles of a constantly-flowing electricity find him and stick fast to him, cleaving him in the middle, holding and holding to something inside him. Howard wonders at the forces that find him at these moments. He thinks he sees death from a different vantage from ordinary humans; he is allowed glimpses of the cosmos other must die to see. Aside from this admittedly inadequate discussion, please let me assure any potential reader that this facet of the story is worth the price of admission itself, and raises the chicken-and-egg question: is Howard a poet because of his affliction, or is he blessed with these hard-won insights because of his poetic nature?

Father and son are both tinkers; the son collects antique clocks, fixes and maintains them in his business. We read a series of excerpts in the book, from an 18th-century guide to repairing clocks, which are tinged with the supernatural and philosophical. These are in fact, fitting additions to the off-the-charts language employed here. The story presents the universe as an impossibly complex machine, not unlike an antique clock. In the final flashback showing a healthy GW Crosby (the son tinker), the author guides us to the dark basement, with its numerous ticking clocks and its dark wallpaper. A solitary 40-watt wall lamp illuminates the workbench, and a grandchild is instructed to watch as GW hums and tinkers to no apparent effect. On rare occasions the tick-tocking of all the clocks would synchronize, only to diffuse again into a chaotic pattern. And then in this dark, apparently boring scene, our heroic author lets the child-guest watch the dust float in the light of the jeweler’s lamp and imagine “miniaturized ships exploring inner space: The giant is fixing the time machine.” Thus does Harding turn our space and time inside out, miniaturizing space travel and making a tinker’s basement into the center of the universe.

Time and perception blur as we grope our way along this unique trail. Like David Mitchell and Marilynne Robinson, Paul Harding once again reinforces why we read, why we look forward to the next experience of crackin' open a new one.

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“Pere Goriot” by Honoré de Balzac

This classic piece was my introduction to Balzac. This canny Frenchman is a close and knowing observer of human nature. The hopes, desperation, greed, and cynicism so rampant every day in our world, are fully on display here.

The tale is told through the viewpoint of Rastignac, a 21-year-old law student and newcomer to Paris. Rastignac's ambitions are the common ones, to be rich, fashionable, and carefree, and to take a mistress. These ambitions shift over the course of the story. He becomes enamored of Pere Goriot, understanding what a virtuous man he is. Balzac shows us the destructiveness of 19th-century Paris society: Goriot's two worldly daughters waste his means over time and leave him impoverished. Goriot himself, however, is as much a supporter of worldly amibitions as anyone, but it bankrupts him and at length, at least indirectly, kills him.

Here is post-Napoleon Paris, described closely if not lovingly by Balzac. This author's fame as a canny observer of human nature and human folly is richly deserved. If you haven't yet taken up Balzac, this is an outstanding place to start. Go for it!

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"Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Having wound up as one of Oprah's Club books (congratulations to Eugenides!), "Middlesex" has received a lot of focus and a lot of ink. Eugenides manages to give first-person flesh-and-blood life, in almost mundane language, to an individual with an extremely rare and extremely personal abnormality. This is its main accomplishment, and it's something Eugenides should be honored for (and Oprah wielding her personal weight to support it deserves honors too). The author uses particulars from his own life to flesh this story out, and that's the canniest of tricks. Excellent!

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"Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson

In "Housekeeping" Marilynne Robinson establishes herself as the very best of living American authors. This novel perches on the fraught balance between living and dead, drowning and flying, orthodox and outcast.

In a lonely town in the Far West, where "the history of the world happened elsewhere," there is a house owned by Sylvie and Ruth's family. Sylvie is Ruth's aunt and is very little more than a drifter. Lucille is Ruth's younger sister and she occupies the house. This remote town sits on the shore of Lake Fingerbone, a deep and dark expanse of water that has claimed, in circumstances dark or disastrous or both, the lives of some of Ruth's forebears, including her mother. Sylvie comes back to the house with Ruth, but has no intention of staying. In one of the book's very significant episodes she and Ruth try to traverse the lake by crawling along the railroad bridge that arches over the water, and although this attempt fails, we know where Sylvie's heart, and eventually Ruth's too, lie. They want to traverse Fingerbone (to abjure working their fingers to the bone, as it were), take to the road, and see what tomorrow brings. They ultimately do not want the anchor of the house. Lucille, the orthodox member of the family, cannot understand the impulse, and is completely willing to settle down and make a go of things. Every feeling we get from this character is that she will succeed at it.

This was my introduction to Ms. Robinson, and I was completely stunned, awestruck. Her striking gift with words is well-known (see "Gilead" and "Home" and assorted non-fiction), but it's her gift with the larger issues in her stories that sweeps me away here. She poses an age-old question: how do you measure success in life? Are our hopes for material success doomed endlessly? Is an orthodox career through life as heavy as a lake, as suffocating as a bottomless body of water?

This is one of the best books I have ever read, or will ever read. Ms. Robinson fills me with wonder at her conception and her execution. Read it for the thrill of having a classic in the author's lifetime.

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"Lost Nation" by Jeffrey Lent

One begins to see a pattern in Jeffrey Lent. Prior to "Lost Nation," he brought out a masterpiece, "In the Fall." Each of these is an epic multi-generational drama ("Lost Nation" deals with subsequent generations only in a postlude), each concerns itself with violent men in warlike, bloody activity, and each portrays men who have eroded themselves, ruined themselves with ancient guilt.

"Lost Nation" refers not only to a territory in the far north of New Hampshire which is orphaned between the U.S. and Canada in the early 19th century, but more importantly to the life which our protaganist, named Blood, has lost, or rather, has avoided living. We find Blood, this fugitive from his own life, and the young and clever whore Sally, newly arriving in the Indian Streams area of New Hampshire. He is running from a version of himself with which he cannot live. It's tragic, in the strictest classical definition, what the delusional Blood believes of himself. His undying effort to leave his past behind is the energy behind the narrative. But in the thematic words of the untutored Sally, "It's the big lies that aren't worth it."

Lent informs his language deeply with the primitive country, the backwardness, the courage, and the brutality of the early backwoods trappers and settlers. The laconic speech of his characters, the unadorned descriptions of nature, livestock, and wild animals, the straightforward portayal of murder, betrayal, and butchery - this plain approach to the telling paradoxically elevates the narrative by just letting it do its monumental job. And it is a monumental job. I don't think Lent ever will want to write of small or subtle issues, or if he does, I'm sure his language will be adapted to the job. I think the world of this writer.

Something I found myself considering: what are the demands of blood? It requires vengeance where needed, loyalty of family always, an outlet when riled, and always a full reckoning. Blood the character insists on excoriating himself on the basis of his family history. When he discovers that his sons have found him, it's too late. He's too much at odds with the world - he has no route to reconciliation, even if he does imagine how it might be. It looks to me like Mr. Lent wanted to consider how blind and wasteful such an emotional approach to life can be. And since it's Jeffrey Lent, we get gorgeous language and unforgettable characters, acting on an epic stage.

Get ready for watershed events in lives that are a struggle. Men and women strive against nature, hostile natives, each other, but most notably themselves. Lent sees clearly into the nature of things, here as elsewhere. This is his great strength - that and the skill to set it down and take the lucky reader on very, very memorable journeys. Don't waste time; if you haven't taken this one up, don't delay!

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"Olive Kitteridge" by Elizabeth Strout

"Olive Kitteridge" consists of a series of short pieces written about the personal and internal lives of folks in a town on the coast of Maine. These glimpses show us so clearly, in language unerring and deceptively simple, folk that aspire against all hope for love, fulfillment, even survival. Sometimes the piece illuminates an episode from Olive's life, sometimes Olive plays only a cameo in this or that person's current crisis.

And the crises abound in this collection. Lives and marriages and families tread the razor's edge, hoping for the day when that blade can become something a little more stable, a little less threatening. Mostly, though, we get a character's forced accommodation; he or she must give up the grand hope or design for the lesser but more realistic outcome. Disappointment, even desperation, inevitably follow, and Olive is no exception. People struggle with inner demons here, some more severe than others. Olive's own demons put her at odds with others, often for no overt reason. Olive has little patience for anything or anyone, especially after her affable husband Henry becomes ill. Her son, from whom she feels estranged, and with reason, invites her at length to New York to meet his second wife - he didn't tell her he'd married again - and after Olive loses her composure and her patience, he confronts her calmly with the fact of how difficult she is. To Olive, it's an outrage, and she feels cast adrift again.

Olive Kitteridge the character is one exceptionally fine fictive creation. We come to know her, loudmouthed and irascible, through a series of encounters, and we know how she will react in any situation. This very slowly and very subtly changes over the course of the stories, and in this under-the-surface mutability Strout performs her ineffable and exraordinary trick: Olive the obdurate, Olive the obstreperous, begins to discover, very, very late in life, what it might mean to acknowledge her own and someone else's need.

Ms Strout takes us along at a careful pace, but doesn't spare the emotions. These oblique peeks into these tortured internal lives and dialogues capture us and capture our sympathy. And Ms Strout has certainly captured an avid fan.

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"Then Came the Evening" by Brian Hart

How is it that so many debut novels are released that all have well-paced plot development, weighty themes, and such deep and fully realized characters? "Then Came the Evening" by Brian Hart represents yet another impressive debut effort in my list. I found "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl, and the stunning "In the Fall" by Jeffrey Lent in particular, to be exceptional. Also "The Monsters of Templeton" by Lauren Groff, introduced me to another new author worth following.

In "Then Came the Evening" Mr. Hart unfolds the story of the Dorners, a splintered Idaho family that reunites when the son comes of age and decides to rebuild and claim the abandoned homestead. His father has been incarcerated and does not even know of his existence until a short time before he sees him in prison on his way to the family land in Idaho. The son, Tracy, seriously injures himself while laboring on the house, and his mother, Iona, rushes to him from Spokane, while at the same time trying to detoxify herself. His father Bandy, very ill, is released from prison, and all three embark on the halting, winding path of repair and redemption at the family ranch. The fits and starts of this three-sided relationship is one of the main charms here. Mr. Hart shows a sophistication and a very humane touch while presenting this painful progress, where a slim hope begins to emerge. Fate intervenes when Bandy is extorted into doing the bidding of a so-called friend from prison, and our shaky hopes for his family begin to unravel.

The family farm to which these three damaged souls repair offers hope for themselves as individuals and as a group. As young Tracy begins to work on it, he invests his sweat and hopes and a good portion of his bodily health to this chance, this ideal. He has more energy for the task of redemption than either of his parents. They learn a bit from him, which is good as far as it goes, but it turns out Iona has a secret in the past that bears on the present, and finally overwhelms everything they are trying to build. The son benefits from the destructive but resigned impulses of his parents - he works hard and his future promises much more - quite a bit more than his parents ever hoped for.

Brian Hart has produced a debut work of fiction that promises an exceptional career. His characters come fully alive, his plot is sophisticated and seems inevitable (a very good characteristic in a plot), and he treats his family and other characters with a plain-spoken dignity, and an unblinking honesty. I found this piece to be a compulsive page-turner - I had not read a novel in a single day in some years. This piece rises above the run-of-the-mill with its set-piece morality and the ineluctable destiny toward which personalities and events take us. I recommend this book in no uncertain terms, and look forward to recommending future efforts from this impressive new author.

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"Pretend All Your Life" by Joseph L. Mackin

Where to start with the themes, symbols, and moral stance in this magnificent little novel? Richard Gallin, M.D., plastic surgeon, collector and alterer of masks, promiser of a better life, vain aspirer to honor, has lost his son in the 9/11 bombings. It’s obviously impossible to tell; there are no survivors, are there?

At the novel’s outset, Dr. Gallin, in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers, seems unable to get back on track – his relationship is deteriorating because of his own boorishness, his practice is sinking, his assets erode as his debts mount. He’s also being hounded by a second-rate journalist who is trying to avenge his lover’s firing by Dr. Gallin because the lover, a surgical nurse, had contracted HIV. He meets an art dealer/appraiser who greatly admires his collection of African tribal masks, and who agrees to find a buyer for them. Apparently she also greatly admires Dr. Gallin; and that same night the flabbergasting, miraculous appearance of a new character triggers a series of events and consequences that spiral beyond control.

This tight-knit, closed-within-itself piece brims over with moral questions – or perhaps has a single answer to all our ethical quandaries: you may think you know the answer, but chances are you don’t, and even if you did, there is no way to ensure an act is right, anyway. Dr. Gallin felt he had no alternative but to dismiss the surgical nurse on his staff because the man had contracted HIV. The man’s lover, an unhappy aspiring novelist, attempts to extort money – on ethical grounds – from Dr. Gallin to avenge the firing. Dr. Gallin is mugged and stabbed, only to be rescued by a local immigrant tough, to whom the doctor makes the promise of a new appearance and a renewed chance at life once he does the doctor’s dirty work on the extortionist.

Life and death flow through and around our protagonist. An extremely memorable fictional invention, Dr. Gallin struggles in the end to find the right way, to give of himself so that others may live a better life. Mostly. The motif of the masks is brilliant, and when you ally it with the unfinished sculpture by the doctor’s widowed daughter-in-law, it reverberates with added meaning. The characters’ personal internal processes convince and compel, they lift us up and take us along, as we feel the pain and doubt. The book relies slightly too much on coincidence, but we forgive this completely, for the sharp physical focus, and the contemplative rewards we get along the way.

My congratulations to Mr. Mackin. I recommend this unreservedly. How is it that a debut piece can be so polished, deep, and effective?

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"The Gathering" by Anne Enright

The occasion of her brother's death triggers a harrowing spiral of memory and soul-searching in Veronica Hegarty, a 39-year-old Dublin wife and mother. Veronica comes from a family of 12 children, but it is not a particularly close family. Veronica, her (now dead) brother Liam, and little sister Kitty were shunted off together to live with their grandmother for extended stretches of their childhoods. During these stays in a Dublin neighborhood called Broadstone, Veronica and her brother suffer at the hands of their grandmother's landlord.

In "The Gathering" Anne Enright captures in the first person the oblique, lurching brush with madness induced in the surviving sister - a stunning achievement. The sentences in this novel - the recorded thoughts of an angry, haunted woman - rush and burrow and spike their way into Veronica's and our conscious view. Veronica struggles her way through a crisis, and decides after a half-hearted attempt at running away, that maybe she'll embrace her life.

The language in "The Gathering" slowly and subtly gains clarity, perfectly reflecting the hero/narrator's state of mind. The dramatic internal dialogue is the V-8 engine roaring under the hood of this suped-up vehicle. Don't look for an intricate plot; the intricacies here involve the internal struggle to come to grips with a highly toxic past - some of us succeed and some don't. Veronica's brother Liam committed suicide under the burden.

Ms. Enright has written a remarkable book in a way that defies expectation or definition or classification. It's a highly personal, scary, death-defying journey that won the Man Booker Prize, and for this reviewer, there is no wonder in that at all.

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"Any Bitter Thing" by Monica Wood

Monica Wood never disappoints. Her easy prose serves her difficult issues extremely well, and while we may be lulled into a sense of security that we really know what's going on, Ms. Wood slyly pitches us a surprise curve at which we swing and miss every time.

Lizzy is orphaned very early in life and her uncle, a Catholic priest, takes over custody and raises the little girl while also tending to his parishoners. The resentful busybody of a housekeeper thinks she sees something untoward, and Father Mike must go away and never see Lizzy again. One thing I really love about this book is that a child services counselor, in her determination to find something wrong, is one of the villainesses.

I think I prefer "My Only Story" among Ms. Wood's work; but as I say, Ms. Wood never disappoints. She deals with issues arising from family crises supremely well. Her characters, major and minor, are full, understandable, and well-shaded. She reliably rewards her readers, and I look forward to getting through all her work.

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"The Emperor's Children" by Claire Messud

Set in New York in 2001, this novel chronicles the yearnings and failings of three friends, Danielle (perhaps our main protaganist), her best friend Marina, and their gay friend, Julius. Along the way, Claire Messud instructs us very skillfully about love and loss, about idealism and disillusion, honesty and hypocrisy.

An innocent would-be disciple moves to New York and secures a position with his hero. He finds himself disillusioned in due course (where a more worldly apprentice might not), and writes a hatchet-piece in all starry-eyed honesty. Predictably, the hero banishes the youth from his employ, who moves to a Brooklyn hovel and is perhaps lost when the twin towers are hit on September 11. Whither truth? Whither idealism?

Ms. Messud is particularly strong when reflecting the thought processes of her characters. Emotional forces running through friends and family ring true; I was never confused over motivation, nor by emotional cause and effect. The prose is graceful and fluid, touched perfectly by idiom. This is a writer who knows her milieu and puts you square in the middle of it. She's very effective.

Character, plot, style, and theme meld ineffably here. Most definitely worth your while.

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"Coastliners" by Joanne Harris

One might assume all of Ms. Harris's fiction deals with French women and rich men (see "Chocolat"). One would by the same token assume all her fiction deals with an open and truthful heart about life's important issues: family, love, life, death, greed, hauteur. "Coastliners" tells the story of Madeliene - "Mado" - and her mute father on an island off the Vendee coast of France. We have a land grab, a con game, partisanship, religion, and superstition, and life lived stubbornly on an island which can barely support it. Through all of it - the greed and cynicism, the baggage of family life, the changing coastline - life muddles on, and our heroine learns a little of what it takes.

This is a reasonably good story, and if you're interested in France, or this corner of it, you could do worse.

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"The Curve of the World" by Marcus Stevens

Here we have the story of a man held hostage in the Congo after a plane crash strands him and all his fellow passengers in a remote spot. Lewis, our protaganist, takes off into the jungle when the captors let their guard down - never mind that the release of the hostages is in the works.

Lewis runs, gets lost, falls ill, is almost killed. He's running hard from something - perhaps his marriage, which seems brittle enough. A native boy, Kofi, saves him, and after a time of recovery, Lewis feels he must go back and save Kofi in turn. Here Lewis's journey heals, becomes moral, redeems. After rescuing Kofi, he deserves to return to his family: his wife Helen and their blind son, Shane. At the end, Lewis lies in a hospital bed and sees Kofi and Shane on the balcony. Helen's hand rests on his shoulder; she doesn't realize he's awake.

Pregnant with moral meaning and vivid action, some of it life-threatening, "The Curve of the World" recounts the life-changing and life-saving journey of a man in need of a new start. You won't be sorry you picked this up.

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