"The Storm" by Margriet de Moor

In “The Storm,” Margriet de Moor presents for our imaginations the howling, insensate destruction wrought by the freak hurricane that fell on The Netherlands in January and February 1953. Against this dark and furious backdrop she draws out the drama of two sisters who have switched places on a whim – one who drives to a relative’s birthday party in southern Holland, and one who stays behind in Amsterdam. The switch results in the “wrong” sister’s death in the epic storm.

Seldom will you find this much energy and attention to detail devoted to a single natural cataclysm – see Harris’s “Pompeii” for a possible parallel. The ill-fated sister’s (Lidy’s) odyssey to the estuaries at The Netherlands’ south end, and her trials and death there, take up half the book. Ms. de Moor impresses deeply with the depth and breadth of this part of the story. She draws it out so that it runs alongside the entire adult life of the surviving sister, Armanda. And this elegant device, the running of separate narratives for each sister: one a long protraction of horrific catastrophes that last but a few days, and the other a meditation on the surviving sister’s mixture of relief and guilt – deals with exceptional emotional clarity the journeys the sisters take. It gives the departed sister’s last days the depth and importance they deserve – we feel them the same way Armanda does.

Armanda feels like she takes on her sister’s life. She marries Lidy’s widowed husband and becomes the only mother her young niece ever knows. With a quiet grudge she suffers the slings and arrows of events she thinks of as her sister’s, especially the husband’s unfaithfulness and divorce. She does, however, become very close to her adoptive daughter. Her father becomes ill and has a brush with death, during which time Lidy goes unacknowledged. He survives, however, and becomes a near-stranger – a doctor who won’t listen to medical advice, a man-about-town who carries a sudden amount of extra girth. I think the author includes this brief episode to contrast with Armanda’s all-too-faithful adherence to Lidy’s purported life. There may be other purposes at work, but they escape me just now. The sisters achieve a fanciful rapprochement near the end of Armanda's life, and some readers may find it helpful to wrapping up the strands; for me it went in the direction of something too pat and tidy.

“The Storm” is a highly worthy piece of fiction. The unobtrusive translation from the Dutch by Carol Brown Janeway serves it in a highly effective way – it reads very naturally. A combination of harrowing, deadly detail and a fine portrait of guilt and ambivalence – all in all a heady and unique combination.

Read more »

"In the Company of Angels" by Thomas E. Kennedy

Place yourself confidently in Thomas E. Kennedy’s hands and allow yourself to be held in thrall by “In the Company of Angels.” Follow each character’s journey from his or her demons – be they torture, abuse, confusion, resentment or rage – to sweet redemption. The author knits these dramatis personae tightly together in their inner progress, and through a simple, character-driven plot, makes each journey interdependent. Mr. Kennedy’s treatment – oblique when it needs to be but otherwise quite straightforward – supports the many issues tastefully and beautifully. Oh, where to start in praising this work?

In the first of Mr. Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet (the second book, “Falling Sideways,” is due this year) we meet Bernardo (known as Nardo), a victim of a repressive South American regime who has immigrated to Denmark. Dr. Kristensen tries to walk him away from his horrific life and into the light of the world. Beautiful, full-hearted Michela battles the effects of her frightening past, as her current boorish boyfriend threatens to perpetuate them. Each narrative is gripping in its own right; get ready for a grand reward when they merge.

Mr. Kennedy piques my speculation by narrating the entire book in the third person, with the exception of those passages devoted to Dr. Kristensen. Those he renders in the first person, possibly casting the rest of the novel as events the doctor witnesses. He lets Nardo’s problems get to him a bit and begins to get burned out on life. He comes close to shunting Nardo off to a lower-level professional because he thinks they – doctor and patient – are wasting time and money. Are we to join Kristensen in these beliefs? Are we to accept them as the author’s viewpoint? Clear answers to these questions are by no means necessary to appreciating this book. This piece has an atmospheric quality to it: descriptions of the long days of sun and of the North’s tepid summer merge with our characters’ outlooks to create an emotional place where we buy in and hope. Outcomes are never assured or hinted at in this balanced narrative.

The tremendous degree to which these characters engage us testifies to Mr. Kennedy’s unsurpassed skill in rendering human thought and emotion. The reward of the denouement gives this excellent, touching novel its parting chord, the final concordant arpeggio, which you will take away and savor. I congratulate Mr. Kennedy, and anxiously await my chance at the next Copenhagen Quartet number.

Read more »

"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.

Read more »

"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.

Read more »

"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.

Read more »

"Henrietta Sees it Through" by Joyce Dennys

A series of charming, if a bit dotty, letters form “Henrietta Sees it Through,” by Joyce Dennys. Or, no: the letters are not dotty, it’s the Devonshire villagers who are dotty, the letters simply capture their whims and minor adventures and misadventures. This is the 1986 sequel to 1985’s “Henrietta’s War,” also a collection of letters to Henrietta’s “Childhood’s friend.” I’m having the Devil’s own time finding information on Joyce Dennys, except that hers was a military family, she was born in 1896 in India, and her family moved to Britain in the 1920s.

The language is light and so are the circumstances. In a Devonshire village during World War II, Henrietta comically frets about playing the triangle in the orchestra, but in the end gets is right. The villagers make sure Faith and the Conductor get married – they’d be awfully unhappy kept apart. The serious strain of the War affects the village, although they do reflect some odd psychologies: those whose homes have been damaged by the Germans feel superior to those whose haven’t. Each letter is addressed to Robert, a neighbor, and a British soldier somewhere in the Middle East. They deal exclusively with the domestic goings-on around the village.

I enjoyed the heck out of this collection. It has a distinctly British style to the humor and to the daily approach to the War Effort. We feel the ups and downs alongside these village worthies, and are euphoric come VE-Day. This is a lovely distraction: a close look at a close world full of vivid, wonderful characters dealing in their unique British way with the privations and victories of daily life in wartime. Line drawings interspersed.

Read more »

"Standing at the Crossroads" by Charles Davis

A surprisingly powerful and deceptively deep novel, “Standing at the Crossroads” packs into a bare 150 pages a thrilling adventure and a timeless morality play. This is a very serious fiction but it has a number of surprisingly tasty treats: a) several laugh-out-loud moments after jokes or insults; b) an ongoing appreciation (first-person, in an internal dialogue) of some of the greatest novelists in history – Melville, Stevenson, Cervantes, Trollope, Austen, Dickens – in a way that bears on the events of the story; c) a well-paced and tender love affair.

This novel also swings back and forth between extremes. The love our narrator finds counterbalances an old hatred that a fanatical soldier has for him; the principals stumble upon a hidden paradise of trees, streams, and colorful birds while running for their lives in the killing Sahara; the subtleties and moral shadings in the world’s best fiction battle the unrelenting zeal and hatred of the roving bands of rapists and murderers, who call themselves the Warriors of God.

It is a wonder that Charles Davis could fit all this into such a compact package. This story has such an unmistakable moral stance that one could call it a parable, but it’s a parable that has fully-developed characters with very true motivations. And layer on top of this confection, a truly suspenseful chase which lasts nearly the entire book, and you have a true marvel. You will not soon forget the hero, called the Story Man, or his erudition, or his carefully-considered philosophy, nor the love he shares with Miss Kate, the crusading but surprisingly naïve Westerner.

I had a very serious wrestling match with this review – I wanted to say everything at once, as in the book, but I wanted to make sure that all I say comes out as praise for this touching, shocking, heartbreaking, endlessly surprising book. Recommended – no, I exhort you to read this book. You will come away richer.

Read more »

"Solo" by Rana Dasgupta

Rana Dasgupta has divided “Solo” into halves: the “First Movement: Life” and “Second Movement: Daydreams.” The “Life” part recounts the mundane days of Ulrich, a man who has lived almost the entire 20th Century, and even some years into the 21st. The “Daydreams” section … one could argue that this part of the book, vivid as it is, is all in Ulrich’s mind.

The first section feels lengthy, and I leaned toward despair of finding any point to it. Ulrich, from Sofia, fails while a boy to pursue his passion for the violin. He marries but after a few years his wife takes their young son and moves to America. Ulrich helps run a Bulgarian chemical plant, but his audit of his own plant’s figures leads him to turn his boss in to the authorities. After retiring, he blinds himself in an accident with chemicals. He cranks along, on and on, and he approaches his last days, living across from a transit depot. Through all this, I waited for Mr. Dasgupta’s stance, his theme. I found it, much to my gratified and awed amazement, in the second part of the book.

The “Life” section, dealing with Ulrich’s own narrative, has a random-seeming episode in which Ulrich, at university in Berlin, picks up and returns a sheaf of papers Dr. Einstein inadvertently dropped, and the great physicist jests, “I am nothing without you.”

Let’s rush forward to the second movement, “Daydreams,” the more vividly-told of the two, which is set in the present day, and revolves around the vortex that is Boris. Boris, an eccentric musical genius – a violin player, naturally – attracts other characters which give the author a chance to make moral statements about the state of former Soviet bloc countries. The specific countries are Bulgaria and Georgia, both of which have been plunged into varying depths of economic chaos and lawlessness. But Boris is the focus. Ulrich, the narrative states, makes a trek to New York and approaches Boris to tell him of his theory of the one and the many.

Ever since his chance encounter with Einstein, Ulrich, never a very effective or up-to-date scientist, imagines that it must take many, many lesser scientists to make up one Einstein. And, he tells Boris, it must take many, many run-of-the-mill violin players to make up one genius like Boris. The author, then, crowns and unifies his terrific novel with this conceit. Mr. Dasgupta posits in “Solo” a relationship: it requires a vast number of lesser players to form a pool big enough (or to generate enough ideas and energy, maybe?) for a single shining genius. Ulrich knows he is one of the rank and file, and his second-half adventures, the “Daydreams” are essentially impossible. He cannot see, but yet he gazes at the lights in Times Square, and visits the iconic Woolworth Building. He sees his collegiate sweetheart there, though she’s been dead many years.

In this powerful, vivid, thought-provoking, and challenging novel, the author gives us a set of ineffable tools with which to reach an understanding about art and science, genius and plodding rote. And to add to the genius of this novel, he places it all in the imagination of an ordinary man of no particular ability or distinction. Superbly done! Get yourself through the flightless first half of this book, because your efforts will be rewarded many times over in the second.

Read more »

"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.

Read more »

"The Devil's Footprints" by John Burnside

Author John Burnside leads us, the intrigued readers, on an intimate tour of the unaccepting and brutish heart of smalltown coastal Scotland in “The Devil’s Fooprints.” But that exploration serves as just the appetizer for the first-person narrator’s – Michael’s – descent into his own low-key, “elective” madness. The devil does indeed leave his footprints all over this story, and in some way, Michael, by turns willfully and unwittingly, follows them. Rather closely.

As Michael grows up his parents are reviled as outsiders. His parents die within a few months of each other during his university years, his mother in negligent homicide, his father in weighted solitude. Michael’s own history includes his victimization by a bully for several months when a grade-schooler, an episode in which Michael finds courage and turns aggressor. However, these just set the stage for Michael's reaction to the horrific suicide by a townswoman, years later, who kills two of her sons along with herself. This precipitates a downward spiral in Michael, mainly because he thinks he may be the father of the victim’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

All this sounds dreary indeed, and I regret that, because Mr. Burnside handles all this with such straightforward earnestness, and the exactly appropriate level of somberness, that Michael’s character generates our sympathies. We’re sympathetic when a prank against an old oppressor turns freakishly fatal, but perhaps less so later when he perpetrates a felonious flight with a minor girl. You’ll not find the stunning, hurtling violence of the internal dialog that so distinguishes Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” not here. Here we find the contemplative, self-aware, well-meaning man, aware of his ever-loosening grip, yet unable to do anything about it.

The title refers to the town legend that one morning, many years ago, after a night of snow, the early townspeople found footsteps in the snow, deep and burning, sulfuric and discoloring, clear trough the snow to the ground. They are clearly not human, and no known animal could have made them. They hop fences and go right up the side of the church, across the roof, and down the other side. Michael’s misadventure with his purported daughter ultimately results in an impossible trek on foot that nearly kills him, and the ruminations during this walk are worth the price of admission by themselves. Suffice it to say that what possesses people who act like demons becomes far more familiar to us, and is not at all what you think. Pick this piece up and  reflect with the author on the durable fear that priests and landowners feel about the demons that threaten to take them over.

I recommend this book very, very highly. Here’s why: the language will stun you with its simple effectiveness and the rightness of its diction. The characters will strike you as real, as will their symptoms. And the thematic issues of motivation, secrecy, and near-demonic possession will challenge you and bring you new understanding. You will understand more about human nature, and there is no higher compliment I can give to a piece of fiction. Congratulations to Mr. Burnside for this quiet, shaded triumph.

Read more »