"The Beach at Galle Road" by Joanna Luloff

Happy families, with bright, live-wire teenage daughters and cricket-mad sons, suffer and become obliterated in Sri Lanka’s endless civil war. The usual family aspirations of university educations and good marriages evaporate as war’s mayhem sweeps the island.  

Joanna Luloff’s The Beach at Galle Road is a series of linked short pieces that one can read as a unified novel. That is certainly the effect Ms. Luloff achieves as the last few stories conclude what is a harrowing story of loss.

The eponymous road, which runs parallel to a beach, becomes a metaphor for risk and change as we read of the sister of a central character driven to madness by her husband’s bizarre need to shame and abandon her. Shame arises from strict societal mores throughout this collection, but these concerns begin to fade as the stories shift to the Tamil population, which bears the brunt of depredation on all sides: war from the government side, and purges from the rebellious Tamil side. The issues escalate to life and death as boys are whisked off to the fighting and their mothers turn up dead and floating in the river.

One theme deals with Westerners who have come to Sri Lanka, volunteering to teach or tend to the sick. The local customs and strictures baffle them, just as their behavior shocks the locals. This idea dominates the earlier stories, but the shift to the Tamil side of the conflict leads to loss, starvation, child combatants, and suicide in a smooth and well-executed swing in the stories.

This collection touches us because we know all too well of the loss and madness of war. These truths are brought home to us in this memorable and very honest collection.

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"Hawk Quest" by Robert Lyndon

In Hawk Quest we follow the epic journey of a small and shifting group of questers literally around the ends of the earth: from England to the west coast of Greenland, over the northern cape of Norway and into Russia by way of the White Sea. The year is 1072 AD, the Conqueror’s Normans remain busy subjugating Britain (through the time-honored means of rape, murder, and arson); the Seljuks have routed the Christians at Manzikert (in present-day Turkey); and Vallon, the intrepid leader of a motley, undermanned party, must try to stay one step ahead of the law.

Historian and enthusiastic falconer Robert Lyndon never lets you rest. One death-defying adventure follows hard on the heels of its predecessor. The small group must escape the British Isles with the law after them, get out of a feud in Iceland, battle North Atlantic tempests just to return east after capturing birds of prey in Greenland, and race the season’s onslaught in the Arctic Ocean. Then the real fun starts.

Through it all, the narrative energy never flags. Mr. Lyndon manages to fill a book three times the normal length and leave the reader ready for more. Because of its incessant tides of trouble and the party’s sometimes miraculous escapes therefrom, you will keep turning page after thrilling page.

What sold me on this book was the promise that Bernard Cornwell fans will like it. It does remind one of Mr. Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles: it has the same bright verisimilitude; the characters are just as real, and just as highly skilled and heroic.

This is outstanding escapist fare. It will transport you, if I may be allowed to say that about a book portraying an epic journey. And will leave you hoping to see the characters reunited, however improbable its conclusion makes that.

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"Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde" by Rebecca Dana

There are two people the title of Rebecca Dana’s memoir Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, which is appropriate in this book, for it spins around an axis pulled taut between opposite poles. Rebecca Dana, a reporter for the Daily Beast and Newseek, and formerly with the Wall Street Journal, has assembled not only an unstintingly honest exposé of her searching self, but also an étude on such subjects as life lived “in deferment” and the significance of something called “communities of meaning.” This book surprised me; it swept me up with its soulful exploration of faith and virtue.

Ms. Dana begins by laying out in honest terms her ambition to emulate Carrie Bradshaw, the heroine of TV’s wildly successful Sex and the City. Her dream of capturing and living the glamorous life grows out of a middle-class upbringing long on scholastic achievement but short on familial love. When her ideal urban romance falls apart she finds, against all her instincts, an apartment in a Brooklyn neighborhood dominated by an arch-conservative Jewish sect, the Lubavitchers. Hesitantly she moves in with a larger-than-life young rabbi from Russia, called Cosmo. Cosmo is very dramatic about his sex life (it’s a struggle), his grooming (subject to change), and his faith (quickly evaporating). This character and his milieu allow the author to slow down and understand other facets of life, like home and faith.  

And here we find the axis on which this energetic narrative spins. Ms. Dana’s attraction to Manhattan’s glitz and glamor must suddenly compete with the appeal of the hearthside joys of family, which are a revelation to her. She shows a very discerning eye when it comes to her new acquaintances; she recognizes the degree to which Lubavitcher women are restricted in their lives, but she can also cull wisdom from scholarly men in the community. From one she picks up the concept of communities of meaning, in which groups hold common values and goals, and use common spectra to measure worth. She also posits that her current need to scrimp and work extra hard for a promised payoff has a direct parallel in the Jewish faith, in which believers defer joy in this life for rewards in the hereafter.

The author even manages to structure her memoir like a novel. Late in the story, her boss Tina Brown organizes a high-profile conference of highly celebrated and influential women, focusing on violence against women. Amid talks given by African women recounting rape and mutilation, seminars conducted by Melanne Verveer, United States Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, and Barbara Walters, Ms. Dana is taken up by how noble and uplifting the gathering is. While imagining what it would be like to go to a picturesque, out-of-the-way corner of the globe to end conflict and free women from oppression, she finds herself seated next to Candace Bushnell, the beautiful and classy creator of Sex and the City. Ms. Bushnell’s attendance at the conference, and her patient suffering of the author’s fawning, unite the book’s two thrusts, and provide Ms. Dana with an understanding and appreciation of her own way forward. The author handles the moment in a very assured and honest way. It’s really gutsy, and it works really well.  

Ms. Dana yolks her superior intellect and her no-holds-barred honesty into a powerful team, and the result is a gratifying ride indeed.

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"A Glass of Blessings" by Barbara Pym

Blaise Pascal said the world is divided into two types of people: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous. Clearly into the first group do we designate Wilmet Forsythe, the first-person narrator of Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings.  A faithful churchgoer to High Anglican services in London in the 1950s, she constantly hopes she’s doing something of value for other people, and doubts sometimes do creep in.

And here lies the genius of Barbara Pym: she can establish a character and give her a touching innocence but keep her musings so real and so honest, that she always compels our sympathy. Our love, even.  She tells her story with a sly and subtle humor with the joke being at the heroine’s expense most of the time. If this reminds you of Jane Austen, you’re on the right track, but in Pym the internal dialog is more constant and vivid. In Blessings, we become captivated by Wilmet, a pretty, fashionable housewife on the verge of turning 30. She brings a certain charisma or vivacity to her friends and acquaintances with the simple act of visiting. Her good will and well wishes are really just a bonus. She acknowledges her vanity – which she can hardly help, really – is in conflict with her charitable impulse, and tries always to favor her virtue. Thus we the glamorized readers are towed along the book’s character-driven plot with its gratifying outcomes. That’s the point with Pym: tag along behind the engine of the main character’s internal dialog and see where it takes us.

Open Road Media are re-releasing Ms. Pym’s oeuvre for e-readers this year, and I hope their effort spreads the word about Barbara Pym to the world again. Ms. Pym definitely deserves her reputation for gentility and wit, as well has her burgeoning standing in the pantheon of 20^th Century novelists. This book contains not even a hint of a false note, nor a flagging moment, and even though the plot is straightforward, it does contain surprises.

If you haven’t experienced this artist, pick up (or download) A Glass of Blessings and introduce yourself to the bewitching and delightful company of Barbara Pym. You will be richer for it.

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"Steer Toward Rock" by Fae Myenne Ng

At a horrific, life-changing moment, a Chinese immigrant in the United States under a false name and false pretenses thinks of some wisdom his mother had given him. He is about to be separated from his hand as two thugs drag him to a table saw, he remembers his mother’s aphorism: “Trust rock, she told him. Break fear upon rock. … Go toward fear. Trust fear. Steer toward rock.” She told him this as she was preparing to sell him to an illegal immigration ring in the U.S.

So the young man, who must make payments to his mob boss for the right to live, sustains himself at this ghastly moment. And Steer Toward Rock becomes the aphorism by which this novel’s characters must live if they want to find meaning, family, and happiness. Impressive for its sustained obliquity, Fae Myenne Ng’s book brought me into the Chinese culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown like no other book ever did. She stretches this culture taut across a frame of trans-Pacific exploitation and racketeering. We learn of the purchased boy from China whose name becomes Jack Moon Szeto, a multiple falsity rooted in a scheme to allow illegal entry to Chinese immigrants. Before confessing his status to the American authorities, he becomes another link in the illegal and oppressive chain. He must take a bogus bride purchased for him from China, but here he finds companionship and eventually fathers a fiery, headstrong daughter.

 

This entire history leads to the daughter. This is really her story – how she hasn’t steered toward the rock of honesty in her love life, but does free her father from the tangled, fear-ridden narrative of his past by shepherding him through the naturalization process.

I love the conversations between the Chinese men in San Francisco. They holler at each other, tease each other, voices seemingly raised at all times; they want to get each other’s goats. Through it all, though, there is honesty, good will, humor, and bemusement at life.(Jack himself exhibits wisdom unusual in one his age;  his almost every statement, every piece of advice for friends and family drips with ancient Chinese wisdom.) This banter, with its glimpse into Chinese culture, is a major delight here, and worth the price of admission all by itself. I could have wished for a more-closely-described San Francisco, but this may have been absent by authorial intent. She tells her story obliquely, until roughly the last quarter of the book, when the daughter’s character takes center stage and the narrative takes on greater concreteness. Until then, though, the story is told as though through a mist, becoming visible like Victorian homes on a foggy day in San Francisco.

It would be hard to top this book’s intent look at the San Francisco Chinese culture, or its treatment of the Hon Pak confession program, pursued in the 1950s by U.S. Immigration authorities as a sort of bait-and-switch tactic to get better records on Chinese and other immigrants. The family histories feel all too true, and the saga of exploitation all too consistent with the world’s ever-present greed.

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"Arcadia" by Lauren Groff

How does a well-meaning man, living the principles of an idyllic and idealistic upbringing, cope with the wrenching changes in his life? How does a visionary leader engender his ideals in his followers? Lauren Groff provides memorable answers to these questions in her knowing and compassionate second novel, Arcadia.  

A cult has grown up around Handy, a folk/rock singer reminiscent of Jerry Garcia. He and his followers realize their utopian dream when they come into 600 acres in Upstate New York, and in the late 1960s they found the commune Arcadia. Built on full egalitarian principles, Arcadia achieves self-sufficiency for a time, with acceptance for misfits, common-law marriages, and a hands-off policy toward drug use. Into this idyll is born Ridley Stone, a premature baby and diminutive child and adult, known universally as “Bit.” Through Bit’s eyes we witness the unique and inexorable events of this story: a community starts under the highest ideals, but human nature rears its head and jealousy, lust, covetousness, and anger creep in to spoil things. Bit suffers particularly on account of the women in his life: his mother Hannah suffers from seasonal affective disorder and barely stirs from bed for months at a stretch. Helle, the childhood chum who grows brightly beautiful by age thirteen turns out quite troubled – a heavy drug user and apparent thief. Eventually she becomes the mother to Bit’s daughter Grete, and at least in his daughter's case, Bit’s influence proves sufficient to inculcate responsibility and a sense of family.

We suffer as along with Bit. He’s a sympathetic character: caring, gentle, and wise, if a little timid. In this way he embodies the commune and its spirit. At the end of the story, his mother’s mortality grinds down Bit’s last nerve and physical reserves, but also provides a release from some overwhelming responsibilities, and an opportunity for love. Arcadia is the history of a noble experiment, an experiment that has hopeful beginnings, a golden age, and a tragic end. We hope Bit’s end will not be tragic, because he’s a highly sympathetic being who was schooled in principles by parents with high ideals.

And truly that is the story: Ms. Groff questions whether a commune like the one she describes can withstand the vagaries of human nature. The Arcadia of her story certainly can’t. Bit, however, is the community’s central figure, true to its ideals to the end. We wish his luck with the love of his life could have been better. This novel enjoys a much tighter focus than The Monsters of Templeton, and the result shows off the author’s great skill with the language and the depth of her treatment of the moral issues. The prose throughout makes this novel fairly glow – there’s almost no other way to describe it. This is a highly memorable read with fully-drawn characters, and a unified theme and concept carried forward very precisely by the characters. Ms. Groff’s skill is really very impressive, and I’ll frankly say it’s more than I hoped for after Monsters. She hits it out of the park! Take it up!

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“The Informers” by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Juan Gabriel Vásquez makes his title plural, because the informers are everywhere in this interesting and self-reflective novel. The author plays himself, so to speak, in writing this book, and the narrative taking up the first three quarters poses as a book which has been published. However, there is very nearly nothing we can consider meta-fictional here; Sr. Vásquez plays this very straight. The result is entertaining, thought-provoking, and full of cautionary lessons.

Sr. Vásquez uses the voice of a Colombian journalist who has written a book about the life of Sara, his immigrant friend. Sara moved to Bogotá in 1938 from Germany with her prosperous Jewish family, and has lived there ever since. She became friends with Gabriel Santoro, prominent attorney and language professor. Santoro’s son, also called Gabriel, is our narrator-journalist. Santoro senior reads his son’s book and writes a prompt and excoriating review. We very gradually learn the reasons for the hostility, and they stem from the elder man’s guilt about something he apparently said about an acquaintance, an immigrant man from Germany, during World War II. He informed. The result is a blacklisting of the acquaintance-victim, Konrad Deresser, who is detained, imprisoned, loses his family and his business, and at war’s end, commits suicide.

This bit of character assassination starts the dominoes falling, and it takes more than fifty years for all the effects to be felt. 

The author takes up the immorality of calumny very effectively: the perpetrator destroys his victim, and lives with his guilt for decades. Even as he becomes a prominent professor and rhetorician, his words and his acquaintances betray him. Eventually we aren’t sure whether he’s killed himself or not. The moral territory is crystal clear and the language engaging and seamlessly translated. This book abounds in subtleties: the snitch becomes a jurist-rhetorician; the son becomes a truth-seeking journalist who inadvertently brings ruin to the father. Well-written and throught-provoking.

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"By the Lake" by John McGahern

Now I want to move to Ireland. After listening to the lilting, fluid conversational rhythms in John McGahern’s By the Lake, I can’t wait to pull up stakes and move to the Sacred Sod. It doesn’t hurt that the late Mr. McGahern set all these charming spoken words in the mortar of his own graceful narrative. The whole is more than agreeable, it’s enchanting. I’m sorry I finished, and that doesn’t happen for me that often.

And I do admire By the Lake, make no mistake. We witness the cycle of the agricultural year in a vaguely-identified region of the Republic of Ireland. It might be County Donegal, but it doesn’t matter. Joe Ruttledge and his wife Kate live next to a lake, raise sheep along with a few cattle, and are much admired and loved in the community, particularly by their lakeside neighbors, Jamesie and Mary Murphy. This is a quiet community, encompassing a small market town, and Jamesie is well known for his nosy nature and his innocent, innocuous ways. Other characters aren’t quite so sympathetic, but their discourse and their manners always adhere to a carefully respectful, even sunny, code. Events flow like a stream that never overruns its banks. The egotist remarries later in life, only to find a bride – and her entire family – reject him. Crops are brought in with neighbors’ help, livestock taken to market, construction projects proceed, folks pass away, and atheists and priests are on friendly terms. The conflicts all play out in confidential conversations, it seems. No one does anything rude or aggressive in By the Lake, but the strife of conflicting interests unwinds its tense energy below the surface nonetheless.

So what commends this book to our attention? Here’s what: the unceasing and beautiful description of nature in rural Ireland, and how it dictates these farmers’ agendas; the awe-inspiring and delightful diction of Irish conversation, here faithfully tendered; the glowing significance inhering to everyday objects and statements, given them by this lovely soup of emotion and honor. There is a lot of folk wisdom contained herein, and we can all take a lesson – or any number of lessons – from this novel’s poetically-spoken characters.

I recommend this joy of a novel to anyone interested in an ennobling narrative, set in the hearts and minds of some earthy – not simple – Irish country folk. Take and enjoy!

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"Bloodroot" by Amy Greene

Events in Amy Greene’s captivating, soulful Bloodroot swirl around Myra Lamb, a pretty girl from the hills of Appalachia. This is yet another stunning debut piece from an author with superior gifts. You will get a full, rich read here, as each of a selected handful of characters narrates a first-person segment of this saga. And “saga” captures the tone perfectly – the harrowing detail of these hard-luck stories of abuse, neglect, and dissipation, and the depth of emotion call the word “epic” to mind.

Myra, very much a free-spirited girl, loses her parents when but a tot, and Byrdie, her Granny, rears her.   Byrdie in her turn was also raised by her grandmother and great aunts, all of whom were blessed with some version of “the sight,” an occult ability to perceive, predict, or influence forces beyond the natural. Byrdie pursues a fairly relaxed regimen with Myra’s upbringing, having hated restrictions when she was young. She also believes Myra has the gift, but frets over the girl’s wild and willful ways.

Myra’s strong will does indeed get her into trouble. She meets the physically beautiful John Odom and must have him for herself. She even casts a spell to ensnare him, patterned after one her great-great grandmother used decades before.  John turns out abusive, oppressive, and shockingly violent, the same as the rest of his creepy family. Myra and John say they are bad for each other, but it’s hard to see what Myra might have done to deserve such suffering at the hands of her husband.

The author uses a very elegant structure to capture all of this story’s threads. I’ve seen it said that writers make their readers want to go to a certain place, but shouldn’t take them there. Ms. Greene does one better. She takes her entire novel to lead her readers to a certain conclusion, only to place a very oblique, almost wistful, version of it in the very last voice we expect. The diction and speech patterns come from Appalachian hill country, and strike the perfect note, with subtle differences from character to character.

Bloodroot is such exceptional storytelling – it’s organic, it flows as the blood-red sap of the plant of the title. Its force derives not only from the harrowing and inexcusable weaknesses of its characters, but also from the subtle and inexorable pull of family and kin, for better or for worse. Be prepared to accompany and suffer with Myra, a very memorable fiction in herself, and honor and acclaim the amazing arrival of a terrific new author.

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