"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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"Endless Love" by Scott Spencer

In this 1979 novel, Scott Spencer brazenly presents the first-person chronicle of a tortured-in-love, obsessive young man. In portraying these adventures and misadventures, Mr. Spencer sets the bar improbably high for the type of destructive-behavior fiction he engages in – he proves the remarkable “Endless Love” is no fluke in “A Ship Made of Paper” (2003).

High-school senior David Axelrod loves Jade Butterfield literally to distraction. His passion – their passion – consumes them so completely that when Jade’s father Hugh decides David must not see anyone in the family for 30 days, he sets fire to the family’s home, with the idea that they will at least have to leave the house and be unable to avoid talking to David. This conflagration serves as the perfect metaphor for David’s passion: its speed and heat endanger the entire Butterfield family. It turns out that Jade’s mother Ann is aware of the extreme ardency between the two, and it excites her own nature to more passion than she’d ever known. The family generally knows about the two, however, and accept David, essentially adopting him into their family – for a time, at least.

David’s arson happens on an evening when the entire family, down to the barely-teenaged son Sammy, has dropped LSD for a family trip, and David must work at a Herculean level to rescue them. As punishment David is sent to a rather relaxed, permissive mental institution, where his only concerted effort is to deceive his psychiatrist into thinking he is changing, losing his obsession for Jade. Eventually David worms his way back into the family and resumes his life with Jade, only now he must hide a ghastly secret to do so. The reunion of David and Jade shows them at their passionate and destructive height.

The love-addled David addles the Butterfield family and while breaking parole, indirectly causes an accident that splinters it entirely. The passion the two young people have lights the entire narrative ablaze – and at the end David still, against all reason, keeps his passion for his long-gone lover. Scott Spencer succeeds brilliantly with this difficult task. In this timeless story of dangerous passion, David comes across as unquestioningly focused, blindly self-absorbed, and lucid in his madness. Mr. Spencer has a stunning gift for this theme, and retains an ardent admirer in this reviewer. Be prepared to be completely absorbed when you pick this up.

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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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"Home in the Morning" by Mary Glickman

“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 town of Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, forms the focus of this sweeping fiction. He falls rather hard as a teen for Katherine Marie, the beautiful black girl his own age who works as a servant in his home. He understands his love cannot be requited, and he learns that Katherine Marie has also become the love-focus of Bokay Cooper, a powerfully-built and God-fearing local black teen. Jackson and Bokay go back a long way themselves, and Jackson swallows his passion and supports the two in their effort to make a life together. When Jackson goes away to Yale he meets and falls in love with Stella, the charismatic and strong-willed princess of a powerful Boston merchant family.

The energy and conflict derives from tumultuous race relations on the grand scale and from Jackson’s criminal younger brother on the small scale. Jackson’s brother, Bubba Ray, is rather derivative in my opinion: a spoiled, aggressive, lazy lout, who possesses and displays all the worst qualities of a bigoted Southern white. He commits the stereotypical proto-violence in the narrative, and this precipitates much if not all of the novel’s drama. Personal reactions to this violence border on overreaction in my view, but the resulting portraits wouldn’t be as clear or compelling without them.

These portraits are the book’s great strength. Jackson navigates his way through his life, barely keeping his women folk happy. Bokay Cooper morphs into the militant minister, Mombasa Cooper, victimized by his own following and his own folly. Stella and Katherine Marie, tied together by family, conflict, and political activism, stand together as the great striving duo, united at the end to everyone’s great relief and satisfaction, especially Jackson’s. Author Mary Glickman also instructs her readers in the cultural divide between the South, with its traditional manners, and “Yankeetown,” that generic Northern center of unheeding rudeness. The North is also shown as a hypocritical center of activism for civil rights, pursued from the safety of the rear echelon.

Read this book for the love that flows through it – it’s the love of an honest and wise author for her subject. It shows that the road of progress in race relations, with all its legal roadblocks and cultural landmines, can be followed to the promised land of harmony if the individuals are strong and determined enough.

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"Seven Years" by Peter Stamm

Alex pursues a career as an architect: he passes his exams, he draws, he puzzles over his influences, frets over the lack of creativity he sees in himself. He marries Sonia, a gorgeous, intelligent, ambitious fellow architect who represents everything he wants in a woman. Or almost everything.

With “Seven Years,” Peter Stamm has come out with the story (translated from the German by Michael Hofmann) of Alex, the weak and selfish young professional who splits his long-term commitments between a happy-on-the-outside marriage and an affair with a plain, uninteresting woman who immigrated to Bavaria from Poland. This bifurcation and its effect on everyone represent the bulk of the plot. The first-person narrative alternates between the current time and a sustained flashback which dictates the novel’s unsurprising outcome. Alex sees his wife Sonia as an ideal partner, principally because he sees that everyone else would think it. But he returns to undemonstrative, monosyllabic Ivona, his Polish lover, again and again, to make callous use of her. He finds her puppy-like devotion by turns infuriating and degrading. On the one hand, Hr. Stamm gives us Alex’s outward striving, where he looks for his place in society, viz. the successful firm, the beautiful wife and home. On the other, we get his yearning for dim, plodding Ivona. Ivona is the one who presents Alex with offspring; I always had the feeling that although she checked out physically fine, Sonia represented sterility, or the emptiness of our modern striving.

Hr. Stamm portrays his characters with high skill. Every action and reaction rings true in today’s image-conscious world. In the end we nod appreciatively as Alex learns he must cope with life with only his own devices, such as they are. Our appreciation for this outcome shows how successfully Hr. Stamm has drawn out his modern, cautionary tale.

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"The Widower's Tale" by Julia Glass

All hail the retired, erudite, put-upon, devoted Percival Darling, hero of Julia Glass’s “The Widower’s Tale.” He endures the frankness, foibles, and utter foolishness foisted upon him by friends and family. Ms. Glass presents us a cornucopia of au courant issues through this exceptional character’s thoughts and statements: homophobia, gentrification, immigration reform, environmental awareness, even the vicissitudes of health care. I noticed all the issues and how current they were, but given the engrossing cast of characters here, the extravagant plot, and the thoroughly engaging prose, I didn’t mind. More precisely, I enjoyed this confection thoroughly.

Percy Darling has lived in the same ancient house in a leafy Boston suburb for nearly five decades. Only a small fraction of that time was he blessed by the presence of his beloved wife Poppy, who he loses when his two daughters are in the eighth and ninth grades. Alone, Percy raises his daughters, pursues to retirement his career at Harvard’s Widener Library, and goes his own way in terms of interacting with the world. In a very beautiful sustained feat of realistic and sympathetic character-drawing, Percy flaunts his erudition and his wit, and doesn’t pay much attention to people’s reaction. His progress through the thicket of this plot molds him into someone a little more guarded in his speech. He needs the reformation, but it doesn’t stop him from striving to help his loved ones.

The story opens with the refurbishing of the barn behind Percy’s home and its conversion to a nursery school for the children of the village’s elite. For Percy, this is a very painful process and it presages changes even more painful. We meet teachers and administrators, Percy’s grandson who attends Harvard, his daughter the prominent oncologist, his other, far-less-organized daughter, and a careless and charismatic ecoterrorist whose prankish tricks lead to the very surprising denouement. Percy starts to date again, at age 70, but this sweet excitement turns grim as events Percy couldn’t predict nor particularly deserve crash into his retired life. The grandson, Percy’s closest friend in the world, becomes unwittingly entangled in criminal acts, and his “problem” daughter faces yet another crisis and yet another career change. Ms. Glass has plotted the novel tightly, and we see the elegance of the intricate interactions.

Through all this, Ms. Glass devotes her considerable skill to drawing us into Percy’s circle, and we wind up wanting what’s best for him. She renders certain chapters in Percy’s first person, making this book truly his tale. I was non-plussed by the inclusion of quite so many of today’s hot issues; they balance well with the plot and characters, but I would have wished for a more subservient role. I think political issues should always rank below characterization, structure, and theme, as they do in Ms. Glass’s previous efforts which I have read (“Three Junes” and “The Whole World Over”). But that’s just me. Judge accordingly for your own taste.

I would be very hard-pressed to name an author publishing today who produces more realistic, or simultaneously, more sympathetic, characters. In itself, that is quite an unlikely achievement. And it says all you need to know about Julia Glass. While I may not rank this as her best work, I will remember it, and appreciate having spent time with it.

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"Bound" by Antonya Nelson

Author Antonya Nelson populates her latest, “Bound,” with frail human beings who exhibit their weaknesses for the reader, and leave us with the question, how does one rise above temptation? However, the specific question Ms. Nelson poses at the novel’s end, where she directs our attention to the similarities between a serial adulterer and a serial murderer, strikes at the true heart of the issues.

This novel consists of the stories of a handful of Midwestern American women, known to each other, who come from a variety of backgrounds. Misty Mueller, killed in a car accident early on, was high school best friends with Catherine Harding. These two could not have come from more diverse backgrounds: Misty’s home is full of sullen male relatives who keep engine blocks on the kitchen table; Catherine’s mother has achieved prominence as a strong-willed no-nonsense professor at the University. Misty surprises: she's the one who becomes a mother, and the plot revolves around the eventual unification of Catherine with Misty’s orphaned daughter, Catherine’s namesake, called Cattie. Catherine is also Oliver’s third wife. He, pushing 70, is a generation older than Catherine, and has retrogressed to a still-younger generation, having fallen in love with the Sweetheart. Oliver provides the full force of the conflict here. An inveterate philanderer, always "trading up" from young to younger. Cattie’s arrival signals an end to these episodes, he seems to realize, and he finds by story’s end he has more in common with his wife’s mother than with any other woman in the book.

Ms. Nelson does a decent job of balancing the bad (Oliver) and ghastly (the serial killer occupying the news in the background) men, with the nobler, put-upon women in her story. She does this by portraying the women as shrieking harridans, or vapid nobodies, or sullen, rebellious 30-somethings who have failed to emerge emotionally from high school. Cattie's arrival at Catherine's and Oliver's home, brings him up finally, to a point where he realizes his game is up. This next-generation distillation of Catherine and Misty triggers a new and promising comprehension in our reprehensible Oliver.

At the point of wrapping things up, the author sets up a rather heavy-handed comparison: in the background, a serial killer binds, tortures, and murders a series of victims. Oliver, of all people, sees how his own failure to resist his urges corresponds at some level to the murderer’s dark impulses. I wanted to be careful comparing these two, because I wanted to be fair to Ms. Nelson’s intent. I believe finally, that the author set up the serial killer as a shadow figure, to give Oliver's antics a deep, sinister accent. And if we pay attention to Oliver's own cogitations, where he finally realizes that evil and self-absorbed impulses can indded be resisted, then the damage he inflicted - two ruined marriages and a third one threatened - can be viewed in better perspective. Serial adultery is like serial killing in attitude but not degree.

It did at length occur to me: among other things, the “Bound” of the title clearly indicates the nature of women’s relationships with men. Ms. Nelson, formidable, all-seeing, shows us our weaknesses in the unblinking light of her highly professional, yet distinctive, prose. There may be writers out there exhibiting characters as real as these, but none are any more real, or more honestly portrayed.

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"How to Read the Air" by Dinaw Mengestu

I try never to let an emotional reaction to a book’s characters or events interfere with an appreciation of the writer’s prowess. And Dinaw Mengestu evokes such a sad and hopeless mood for the two marriages portrayed in "How to Read the Air" that I want to make sure readers know up front this is definitely a highly skilled writer. For all of the emotional and physical cruelty exhibited, this is a subtle piece, a piece that makes you dig for its significances and its lessons. Whether the story supports the lessons is open to debate.

Jonas Woldemariam, the son of Ethiopian refugee parents, narrates in the first person. He tells the story of his own marriage, and includes the meticulous truth about his own compulsive lying. He also re-creates the events of his parents’ marriage, the ill-fated union that led to his life, and he feels it is a worthless life. Here is one of Mr. Mengestu’s subtleties, perhaps the chief one: he has his first-person narrator fill in details of a story he cannot possibly know. The narrator apparently needs to piece together the story of his father and mother to make sense of his own seemingly marginal existence. This narrative takes on a vividness and reality as the author takes it over, and gradually the narrator’s part in the telling disappears. The story of the ill-matched parents consists in large part of a car trip from Peoria to Nashville, in which Yosef, Jonas’s father, takes a wrong turn immediately after he and his wife have a small, slightly-less-acrimonious interlude in the car. Neither partner wants to acknowledge that they took the wrong turn, and the upshot is one of the worst disasters described in the book.

So Mr. Mengestu keeps us a step removed from the parents’ story, possibly because his narrator must make it up as he goes along. In fact, he has always felt the need to prevaricate in the face of every important person or pressure in his life. He lies to his employer, his mother, and most devastatingly, to his wife Angela, another needy soul whom Jonas cannot fulfill in any long-term way. Toward the book’s conclusion, Jonas makes up an elaborate story of his father’s refugee life in Africa, only very vaguely based on the man’s life, and embellishes it for his English class students. He combines this fiction with a car trip in the same route that his parents took, and he begins to have an insight into his parents’ lives. As he finally breaks up with his wife Angela, a surprisingly amicable split, he assures her that even apart, they will have meaningful lives. How he comes to this apparently spurious conclusion is a bit of a mystery. He has some internal revelation and feels his life is affirmed. It feels tacked-on at some level – it doesn’t have an adequate foundation in the story. I hate to say this about this book, because other aspects of it are so impressive: the prose, the parallel narratives, Mr. Mengestu’s assured understanding of human nature.

Mr. Mengestu’s first book, "The Beautiful Things Heaven Bears," was an award-winning work, and though I have not read it, I’m sure, from my exposure to this book, that it must be a very gratifying piece. I cannot help but think "How to Read the Air" must represent a lesser accomplishment.

Listen to Dinaw Mengestu read from "How to Read the Air":

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"All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost" by Lan Samantha Chang

As I progressed through “All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost,” I felt the hand of a careful artist, demanding the highest performance of her lean language, and observed her continued bountiful success in meeting that demand. Lan Samantha Chang has given us a deep, arresting, memorable piece, whose characters stay with us long after their story ends.

Young Roman Morris strives to write poetry and succeeds brilliantly – he wins an early fellowship and later in life, the Pulitzer Prize for his deep, unique, heartfelt verse. He lives a life in academia, and it’s a cushy life, except that something gnaws at him: he thinks his onetime mentor and lover Miranda, herself a brilliant poet of personal observation, may have exercised nepotism in vaulting him into his early recognition and success. Roman has doubts about himself as a result. He wonders whether he deserves his accolades and treats those who love him with a hard-to-forgive combination of coldness and mistrust.

We understand Roman’s inability to level with any of those around him, although we may think ill of him for it. The characters he abuses deserve better, particularly Miranda and later, his wife Lucy, who both suffer at his hands, but in rather different ways. But Bernard, the friend and shadow-character, plays perhaps the most intriguing function in the story. As Roman’s foil, he sometimes represents the Path Not Taken, for Bernard is another gifted poet who has worked on a long piece all his adult life, with no outward success. Bernard lives a far more virtuous life, Roman sees to his chagrin, and perhaps stands as the conscience Roman has never paid much attention to. This all comes to a head at the unhappy end of a long visit Bernard pays Roman and Lucy. Roman feels threatened because he didn’t realize Bernard had such impressive gifts – he even suspects Lucy and Bernard of misbehavior behind his back, and sends Bernard away. I find myself considering Bernard more and more; he’s a fine construct – he balances Roman’s baser side, and proves in the end to be a weak force (his lungs are ruined from second-hand smoke) that Roman will miss keenly after he’s gone.

How fitting that a story about brilliant writing should come to us in such brilliant language! Ms. Chang’s tightly- harnessed prose never gets in the way, and yet answers our need to see inside these characters. Graceful, rhythmic, restrained, instructive – Ms. Chang’s prose is all these. And the depth! I caught echoes of Henry James in passages describing the relationships between and among these striving, stricken souls. But, fear not, there are none of the fussy, nested phrases of the late James here. All is in wonderful, flowing order. Our author renders psychological insights and memorable stories in classy, disciplined prose, with characters portrayed truly and unblinkingly – this is a fine achievement.

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"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard

In this exceptional story, Shirley Hazzard gives us the eternal story of Aldred and Helen, thrown together in the chaotic and threatening aftermath of the Second World War. He's a major in the British Army who re-upped at war's end to study the effects of war on old cultures. She is the daughter of horrid and ambitious parents and has a terminally ill brother to whom she is devoted. She's loyal, erudite, fifteen years Aldred's junior, and falls unalterably in love with him. War's fortunes and the designs of empires unfortunately separate them and put an entire world between them - he is sent back the the U.K., and Helen goes with her family to her father's new posting in New Zealand.

There are several Great Fires here. One is World War II itself, and one is specifically the bombing of Hiroshima. Another is Aldred and Helen's love. Ms. Hazzard's prose comes across as reserved and cautionary, but is deeply touched by what we witness. The intellect and the heart are both deep, and deeply affected. Our author inspires awe at our renewed understanding of the power of language.

Our hero Aldred is a very virtuous man. He hides his severe wounds,which are physical as well as emotional. He is aghast in the wake of war and weary in the role of occupier (his superiors assign him to a study of Hiroshima after The Bomb). His friends and colleagues see it, too: one potential rival for Helen's heart gives up the field when he comes to know Aldred better.

Besides a very memorable love story, this is also the story of civilization and hope surviving cataclysm. (Not to spoil anything, but the force of Helen's and Aldred's love will at length not be denied.) Helen's beloved brother dies, and the cataclysm becomes close and personal. Aldred helps people in the U.K. - our author never flinches in her willingness to protray sympathetic characters - minor heroes - of either sex or any age. (The secondary characters would make a very fertile area of study.)

I honor Ms. Hazzard. I recommend this piece in the highest terms possible. Would that she produced fiction more often - I will definitely be taking up her other novels. Wow.

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"Paint it Black" by Janet Fitch

"Paint it Black" is Janet Fitch's powerful and compassionate novel of two women trying to get on with their lives in the wake of young Michael Faraday's suicide. Their shared lives and the ultimate divergence of their approaches to Michael's end make up the story.

Josie, the innocent from Bakersfield, is the lover Michael leaves behind, and our main protaganist. Her mix of internal dialog, recollection, and drug-addled guilt and grief make up much of the story. Ms. Fitch's handling of all this shows her great strength. She lets Josie's lament play itself fully out, believably, slowly, doggedly. In someone else's hands, this would not even have been published, but it's sustained and evolving, and true to life in Ms. Fitch's balanced and inevitable-seeming prose.

We also meet Meredith, Michael's aggrieved mother, a world-class classical pianist, who is outraged at Michael's leaving Harvard and falling in with Josie in L.A. After all, she's a runaway punk from Bakersfield. Meredith is at first quite hostile toward Josie, but she comes to depend on her and to cling to her as a last remnant of her departed son. She opens her home to Josie when she needs it most, and eventually invites Josie to come to Europe with her on her concert tour. Before she consents to first-class travel and five-star accommodation, though, Josie feels the need to travel to the motel on the edge of nowhere where Michael killed himself. She finds answers there, at the motel ironically called "Paradise," and another young woman who knew Michael only long enough to fall in love with him, and who is also deeply afflicted by Michael's death.

This difference between Meredith and Josie shows in high relief: Meredith wants to run to Europe, with its adoring crowds and flattering men, while Josie wants to follow Michael's path as far is it goes - she owes him that. And there she finds this other girl, with less Michael-history than Josie has, and opens up her home and the the opportunities of Los Angeles to her. Meredith runs, wanting to get away; Josie runs too, but toward the calamity, and eventually finds the answers to urgent questions.

This is compelling, life-affirming stuff. I admire Ms. Fitch's skill with a tricky subject. I'm very glad I picked this up, and I'm sure you will be, too.

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"The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" by Peter Orner

"The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo" is told in snippets, tiny chapters, some as short as a paragraph, that observe the lives, lusts, and shenanigans of teachers at a Catholic boys' school in the veld of Namibia.

Some of the snippets provide forward momentum, as we learn of the volunteer teacher from Cincinnati, a youngish Jewish man who, along with the other male teachers, lusts after the eponymous Mavala. Young Larry Kaplanski, our Buckeye protaganist, engages in a long series of assignations with the heroine, and works less than diligently at his teaching job.

These brief chapters make this book a quick read, but don't get in the way of our knowing the characters. They (the chapters) are often extremely funny, but there is some informed, charged talk about the newly independent Namibia, about how isolated everyone is, about the struggle between the parish priest and the principal. There are other weighty issues to grapple with, too, as when a young boy dies en route back to school after a holiday. While this is an enjoyable book and effective in its way, its characters don't do quite enough to win our sympathy, and the point of the exercise remains, frankly, murky.

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"Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser

Buddha teaches that the suffering we experience in life comes from desire. "Sister Carrie" expresses and reinforces this truth with such singleness of purpose that it becomes ponderous, a drag. This book holds its place in the American canon because it broke shocking new ground of realism in portraying the callous disregard with which some men treat impressionable young women. The book also casts its unblinking eye on our material culture and its concomitant status-seeking.

But principally and without question, Dreiser gives us the emptiness of our daily urges, the self-defeating nature of vanity, and pages and pages of glittering emptiness. The long, slow decay of Hurstwood, the man who forces Carrie to join him when he leaves Chicago on the lam, takes up the lion's share of the book's second half and grinds the reader under its ever-burgeoning weight. There is something unrealistic and difficult to accept about Hurstwood's undoing.

Dreiser is unblinking and pioneering, but also plodding and didactic. It reveals a great deal about the time it represents and the audience it addresses, but it seems clear to me that there are more pleasant and efficient ways of learning about these things.

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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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"Triangle" by Katharine Weber

Katharine Weber has taken a deadly fire in 1911 New York and spun a tale of family heritage, survival, avant garde music, and a possible love triangle. Rebecca is the granddaughter of Esther, and Esther, aged 106 at the time of her death, lived for 90 years after surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911. Unbeknownst to Rebecca, Esther has been interviewed on several occasions by Ruth, who values Esther as a primary source of knowledge about the fire.

After Esther dies, Ruth interviews Rebecca in turn, and we learn that Ruth suspects Esther of having been suborned and bribed in the trial of the Triangle company after the fire. Ms. Weber portrays Ruth as a comically stilted and blinkered scholar, absorbed in her work and without a life, and intolerant of any who do not value her crusade as much as she does. The interaction between her and Rebecca, and Rebecca's lover George, is sharp, comical, charged, and in some ways is the climax of the story. George is George Botkin, a mucial genius, a world-reknowned composer and synesthetic who sees the world, particularly the microorganisms that populate it, in musical terms. He writes an oratorio commemorating Esther and the Shirtwaist fire, which clearly comes across as a work of genius and the only fitting tribute to Esther and to the people who lost their lives in the fire.

"Triangle" weaves several tightly interconnecting themes and plot elements into a satisfying whole. I believe Ms. Weber's main point focuses on the rapacity of business owners in the early 20th century. She treats with scorn the arch silliness of starry-eyed and tendentious scholarship, and reveres the magical power of art and love.

I recommend "Triangle" quite highly. Its sometimes oblique and sometimes plainly transparent treatment of its subject will leave you impressed, satisfied, thoughtful.

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"Carpenter's Gothic" by William Gaddis

This is a book which moves forward almost entirely in a fugue-like conversation. It's so short, you almost don't get used to the style. A woman, who we learn has somewhat diminished capacity, has rented a carpenter's gothic house overlooking the Hudson some distance north of New York City. She has a hard time remembering things, doesn't express herself well, and has a constant series of doctors' appointments. Also, she wears the evidence of the abuse her husband has inflicted on her.

The story poses more questions than it intends to answer, it would appear. What's really wrong with our renter, Mrs. Booth? Does her husband, whose visit threatens more violence, intend to pull the same sort of trick with Mrs. Booth's friend, Edie? Is McCandless, the owner of the house, an espionage worker and mineral-rights tycoon, or a pathological liar?

We end in terrible menace. Mrs. Booth is dead, and Mr. Booth, now heir to a tidy fortune, climbs into a limousine with Edie. Mrs. Booth's brother dies, too, in a plane crash with a Senator. It was probably just me, but I remain confused about a lot of it to this day.

Confusing, fascinating, effective, eerie, unpredictable. Spend some time with this book and cut yourself adrift from certainty. In this case, it's fun!

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"The Whole World Over" by Julia Glass

The title refers to bird migration patterns found on a map in a small rest room in a small book store in New York. In the larger sense, it refers to the travels of this book's main characters, who drag their weak, or noble, or ambitious, or out-of-luck selves around the country from Maine to New York to New Mexico, and back home.

This story revolves around Saga (given name Emily), who has been injured and is not quite all the way back. We also have Alan and Greenie and Greenie's lover Chuck, and their son George. George commits the crime of releasing a herd of horses into the wild and Alan and Greenie have to deal with that; this episode brings up the environmental and animal-rights themes which so prevail in this book. (It's almost Kingsolver-esque.) Our friend Fenno (from Glass's prior "Three Junes") finds happiness at the end of this book. I apologize; my notes on the plot are inadequate. Trust me, however, when I say that when you read Julia Glass, you will get graceful prose in the service of touching stories, told with wisdom. Glass is a polished, satisfying, wonderful author, and I recommend anything by her.

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"Indiana, Indiana" by Laird Hunt

An odd little book, "Indiana, Indiana" is the obliquely-told story of Noah, a very simple man who had a relationship with Opal, and has visions as a psychic. Opal is unstable herself - she set fire to her house, and then refused to leave it. Folks try to take advantage of Noah because of his simple nature and his unique abilities. All Noah wants is to see Opal again, but she's been committed to the care of the state. This is ultimately the story of an unusual man at odds with authority. That authority might be in the person of his father Virgil, or the sheriff, who wants insights about missing people or a crime scene, or the mental health authorities.

This narrative is told in an inexact tone, a dreamlike tone ... conversation is never in quotation mark, and the chronology jumps around startlingly. We finally discern that we have met Noah in old age, but then we jump back again to childhood, to courting years, then back to Noah's dotage. It's very effective in rendering the dreamlike consciousness of Noah - this is the book's greatest achievement, along with the clear implication of society's clumsiness and (perhaps) injustice when dealing with those with special needs.

This is an unusual and challenging book. It shows its author to be a highly skilled and wise practitioner. If you want to charge into an odd, quirky story, which nevertheless has clear lessons, pick this one up.

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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 Feast of Love" by Charles Baxter

Three interweaved narratives populate Charles Baxter's "The Feast of Love." One involves Bradley Smith, something of a putz whose two unfortunate marriages (so far) ended badly: one wife leaves him for a woman, and the second leaves him for her long-time sex partner. That relationship ends badly for the self-absorbed cheating wife.

My favorite plot has to do with Chloe (pronounced clo-WAY). Chloe has outrageous sex with, and then marries, Oscar. A couple of months later the poor thing is widowed. Chloe has visions; she's quite young but has wisdom in worldly matters; she sees mystical things while high, but understands their import in the cold light of day. She undergoes the worst heartache in the book, but she emerges from it. She's a goddess - she even says so. You can't read this book and not fall in love with her. She's Venus with 21st century techno-patter.

"The Feast of Love" is replete with lessons: don't pick someone based solely on looks; don't blame the other person exclusively when he or she cuts and runs; don't settle; don't invest too much emotion in your partner; trust your local psychic.

This highly readable book will engage you with its characters. You will come away wiser and with an appreciative smile for the author. By all means, read "The Feast of Love."

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