Sheila's Picks

Brad Herzog, a balding, laid-back writer from California, packs up an RV to travel across country to his college home, Ithaca, NY.  He moves in a swath from remote corners to in the Northwest, across even remoter ones in the Upper Midwest, to northern NY.  Along the way he asks people for their stories:  What makes their lives interesting?  What are their trials and travails? Who are their heroes?

Herzog weaves and juxtaposes storylines from the Iliad and the Odyssey into his narrative.  He likens aspects of life today and our demagogues, rogues, bad guys, good guys, and sirens to those that appear in both books and in Greek myth in general.  Most of the comparisons are to Odysseus.  And while he doesn’t liken himself or his cross-country RV trek to Odysseus’ 19-year sojourn, he draws some analogies that apply to traveling in general, what home is, and how “otherness” makes us appreciate home (and those we left there) all the more.  And Herzog should very well appreciate home:  his tolerant wife is at home with two small children but has nonetheless allowed him his travels (which are, after all, research for a book).  He comes from a distinctly well-travelled family, and wherever he goes he gets to talk to some mighty interesting “average” folks about topics that at first seem like they aren’t anything special—one-room school houses, the oddity that is North Dakota.  He spends time with various people (some of whom we might term “characters”) and manages to pull an interesting note or two out of each.  He finds the special “life traveler” in all the people he meets.  He gets to talk about aspects of his own life:  summer camp, war stories, families, being a twin.  And while he doesn’t liken himself to Homer, he does give Homer his due by showing what a fantastic storyteller the guy was.  In many ways, Herzog gives us the Cliff’s notes to the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Greek myths have never seemed as interesting as when they are used to illustrate modern behavior. 

Herzog’s background is clearly well-grounded in the liberal arts tradition:  his understanding of geography-based psychology combined with his knowledge of the story line (and the lines behind the stories) of Greek myth and tragedy couple well with his ramblin’  man, down-to-earth personality.  It’s hard not to love a narrative from a guy who is so many things, but who is, most importantly, an astute storyteller of the everyday hero in all of us.

Known for her spiritual (if earthy) non-fiction, Lamott can also write fiction that disguises large questions of self-search and life meaning in a good story.  In Imperfect Birds, Lamott provides empathetic (if not maddeningly human) characters who are, as most of us are, defined by our moments of failure and weakness rather than our successes.  In Imperfect Birds, even the most promising characters have flaws that have the potential to derail the spiritual and physical lives of all those around them. 

Elizabeth’s new marriage following the death of her first husband and father to her daughter is a very good one, and she knows she’s lucky.  James is not only supportive and loving, but he is also a good father to her 17-year old daughter, Rosie.  James is not nearly as blinded by Rosie’s charms as is Elizabeth, who purposefully ignores and distorts the obvious about Rosie:  that she is, quite simply, an out-of-control, manipulative teenager, rather than the sensitive and overly moody soul that Elizabeth “hopes” constitutes Rosie’s only real problem.  Rosie may indeed be carrying hurt from her father’s death, but her actions are so difficult to comprehend and are so selfish that the reader is unlikely to be empathetic over the choices she’s made, particularly given the options she has been given for healing (family, community, church, sports, school).  The juxtaposition of Rosie’s words to her trusting and loving parents and her interactions with her friends is stark and frightening.  The reader is constantly taken aback that someone can be so manipulative and can lie with such facility—about everything, nearly all the time.  The deception is not focused solely around drug use, but seems to be second nature for Rosie, a teenager who is the poster child for every parent’s worst fears.   

Elizabeth initially engenders little sympathy from readers, as her own problems (including recovery from alcohol abuse) prevent her from seeing Rosie for what she really is, that she is in serious trouble, and that the collateral damage from Rosie’s pattern of destruction could include her marriage.  Just as you think Elizabeth will allow Rosie to destroy their lives, she and James send Rosie away to an outward-bound style program in a cold and challenging environment where only real deprivation makes Rosie and ultimately Elizabeth do what it takes to save their lives and their family.

www.billmckibben.com

In the 20 years since Bill McKibben wrote End of Nature , his clarion call about global climate change, McKibben has remained steadfast in his well-supported belief that global climate change will have far more serious and hastened effects than we can possibly conceive.  In Deep Economy, he argued that smaller is better—living smaller, having communities produce their own food and goods, consuming less—because smaller is ultimately good for us psychologically and physically.  In Eaarth, McKibben completes the trajectory of both books, arguing that 1) it’s too late to really undue the global climate change problem, although there are steps to prevent it from accelerating further; 2) we’ve reached peak oil; 3) life on Earth (or new Earth—Eaarth) is going to change, with the most significant change coming from extreme climatic conditions of which we see evidence now; so 4) we’ll need to re-think “growth” to consider it not such a good thing—and to channel our lives back into small communities.  McKibben envisions several small regions, cities, and areas functioning like a CSA Program (Community-Supported Agriculture) for energy, which makes sense and seems very doable if you live in Vermont, as McKibben does.  McKibben’s points about curbing growth so that globalizing markets do not continue to ramp up the ruin on the environment may be the stickiest point:  to most current global scholars, turning back in a “flat world” is not going to be possible.  Still, McKibben’s argument stems from the idea that while we may not want to curb growth in the flat, hot, crowded world—but that the environment will do it for us by way of massive upheavals and drastic (permanent) climate changes.  His arguments are compelling, and he certainly has data to support them.  He completely unpacks the notions of local energy co-ops (supplemented by wind, solar, and other forms that aren’t biofuels and nuclear) in the US and, one presumes, similarly set-up communities in other parts of the world.  And while it’s probably unlikely that a CSE (an energy equivalent of a CSA) will be the answer for everyone, it’s certainly a start for many of us, particularly if (as McKibben has asked us so many times before) we just consume less.   The call for reduced consumption of everything (except what it takes to power server farms for the Internet) is not a new one, as McKibben and others have shown us through several studies, books, and essays that less is more in so many ways.  While never strident, McKibben’s tone this time around is certainly more urgent, and the reader pretty clearly sees that McKibben does not think that we have the luxury to tarry.

Ann Tyler is well-known for her complex and richly-drawn characters, many of whom are unlikeable but all-too-human.  In Noah’s Compass Tyler is in top form:  she provides a story of a man whose life has been completely rudderless (floating along with no compass; hence the title) and whose discovery that his lack of purpose and attention has left him with no mark on the world, and few memories. 

Liam Pennywell, newly-retired (“downsized”) fifth grade teacher finds himself facing the rest of his life with nothing notable to show (never mind recall) from his first 60 years.  Only when he is attacked and suffers the sort of head bump that leads to temporary amnesia does he begin to be bothered by the idea that whole chunks of his life are simply….not there.  His memories don’t exist because of any particular physical reason; they are inaccessible because they weren’t noteworthy or even particularly meaningful.  For the first time Liam finds himself concerned about his life and future, and more disturbingly determined to remember exactly what happened during the attack.  His single-minded focus on those few moments of his life confound his estranged family:  sister, daughters, and former wife.  His daughters—an angry social worker, confused religious housewife, and self-absorbed teenage daughter—attend to Liam despite that he doesn’t know them at all.  Liam, after all, never gave much thought to life with them, seeming to wish that they would go away so that he could read, think, and just “be” in peace.  They are right:  to Liam, others are a bother; he can hardly remember a young wife and child, watching his young wife wither and die, marrying again, fathering yet more daughters with whom he established no connection, and letting that marriage fade away. 

Liam becomes convinced that a younger woman, Eunice, who serves as an aide for an elderly businessman, can help him remember.  He contrives to meet her and convince her to help him.  Eunice needs little convincing; being helpful is what she does, the only thing she can do well.  Eunice appears to have little else to show for her life:  she’s frumpy, socially-awkward, ill-at-ease in the world…but to Liam, she is magic.  While Liam’s plan to have Eunice help him remember very specific events never comes to fruition, he finds himself more and more entranced by her, and she with him, and much to the surprise of his intrusive estranged family, they become a couple.  Suddenly Liam remembers minor details of a day, tiny slices of life, and everything (even things he dislikes, such as a messy grandchild) takes on a new texture.

It can’t last, of course, but this time not because Liam let it all slip away.  Even his daughters (who start to connect with him despite his prickliness) are confounded by Liam and Eunice.  The idea that he would invest himself in a person at this stage, despite all of the chances he’s had to have some sort of purposeful life, seems somewhat too-little, too-late.  And perhaps it is.  His time with Eunice, and ultimately without her, makes Liam remember.  And while he never gains what he sought (memory of the night of his attack), he certainly starts to remember his children, his marriages, his career (non-) trajectory.  Liam realizes that he’s had no compass, like Noah.  He just built a life to weather until some end in the future, never with a clear direction or rudder, and that he had a sort of life-long amnesia.  Worse, he had never noticed what he lacked.

Does Liam get a compass?  That’s for the final pages of the novel to (perhaps) reveal and for the reader to decide.  Tyler never gives up on her characters, but she never changes their nature either.  You may have lots of sympathy for Liam or he may frustrate you, but he is at the start and at the end complicated—and stubbornly unchangeable—as Tyler intended.

John Irving’s newest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, ultimately asks one key question none of us want to answer:  what will you do to keep your child safe and well?  For Irving’s main character, Cookie (one of the cook’s many, many names), the answer is “anything and everything.” And so Cookie and his son Danny (eventually known as Danny Angel) move from place to place in order to avoid the blowback from one accident that occurred a long time ago.  They move at the behest of their best friend, Ketchum, the logger who stays behind in Twisted River, NH, and who provides both coutnerpoint to Cookie and Danny (they flee to avoid problems, he stays and embraces them) and acts as their chief long-distance friend and provider of social and personal commentary.  Ketchum may have stayed in the rough, logging industry in Northern New England, but his words (by letter, visit, and ultimately any odd electronic means) follow our boys to Boston, New Hampshire, Iowa, Vermont, Colorado, and Toronto.  Danny and Cookie (and, eventually, a grandson) can flee the specter of the past in order to make the world safe for their sons, but they can never outrun Ketchum’s opinions about how they should live, nor the past to which he anchors them.  Ketchum knows that the quest for revenge will never go away, and so he monitors Cookie and Danny’s lives as well as that of their shadowy pursuer, the slow-witted but violent constable whose desire to avenge his honor for what (or, rather, who) Cookie and Danny took will never die until he does. 

Missing (as is often the case in Irving’s novels) is a strong, central woman—or even a mom for all those boys.  Women populate the novel, but none are without the greatest of flaws.  If they are young, they are fickle; if wonderful cooks, then they eat too much.  They are fat, rapacious, talkative, in the way, nothing more than a ghost, to be placated…but none of them are truly there in this world of men. In Irving’s world of families made up of men, those essential members are missing, and the lack of real, living, good women is as a glaring ommission as large as a front tooth from a smile in these mens’ lives. 

Violent?  Definitely, starting with the depictions of life in the logging camps and the drives down twisted river.  And no Irving novel would be complete without unpredictable and unplanned gory deaths.  These serve to bolster Irving’s theme that there may be nothing you can do to keep yourself and yours away from the fates of the world, but also from the inhabitants of the world.  As Danny (writing as the author Danny Angel) makes clear note in one of his novels, “The villain—if there was one—was more often human nature.” 

Irving’s strength as a writer remains the prose that carries both dialogue and a strong description of place and time.  He does manage to revisit all or many of his previous novel themes, from bears to abortion novelists, from ex-pats to cheating wives, from motherless boys to wrestling.  And to missing hands, always.  And, in the end, the book is really just a long tale of one family, three generations, and how they’ve been marked by what their lives lack.  Do the twists and disconnected places (cities, woods, countries), people (Italians, Asians, hippies, cooks) in and out of the lives of Cookie and Danny hang together to make a good story?  Somehow, they manage to.

How far do—or should—parents go to protect their adult children from what they know is bad for them?  In A Friend of the Family, two families headed by respected physicians and their supportive wives face in their own ways the need to protect a child from something; unfortunately, the protection on Pete Dizinoff’s end becomes protection for his only son from his best friend’s daughter.  Laura Stern is a woman he barely knows, as she was sent away as a teenager after she murdered a baby no one knew she was going to have (Or did she allow the infant to die?  It’s so unclear to Pete, and the Sterns went to great lengths to protect Laura from a full trial…) But now Laura has returned, after a sojourn including various institutions and other self-finding pursuits (goat farming, South America exploring…)  Her family fully embraces her; Pete does not.  Worse, Pete’s son Alec, his only child, is enamored of Laura.  Alec is already difficult—he’s dropped out of school, he may have skirted the fringes of the law some—but his parents love him much, the only child they were able to have, and not easily.  No one but Pete seems to see that Alec and Laura are a problem; not his wife Elaine, and not the Sterns, people who managed to do what Pete and Elaine had been unable to do:  reproduce easily and often.  As Pete tells the story of Laura and Alec he recounts the development of the good relationship between the Dizinoff and Stern family and how each made a choice for a child that made that relationship impossible.  You will have to read to find out how Pete managed to ultimately protect a son who didn’t want, and certainly didn’t appreciate, the attention.  And while he was focused on saving Alec from his whims, his ability to be a good physician and good friend deteriorate.  And being a good father, friend, and physician are what defines Pete.  Grodstein carefully allows pieces of the plot to unfold (no, you don’t guess what happened, it’s not that simple) from the inside of Pete’s mind and from his perspective, but that doesn’t mean that you are always sympathetic to Pete or his choices.

Attention, Red Sox Nation! 

Read this book.  It’s hard to believe that 370 + pages are needed to tell the story of Game Six, player by player, team by team, pitch by pitch….but they are.  You’ll relive every moment of that October, 1975, Tuesday night (and Wednesday morning).  You’ll feel real exhilaration, real despair, and real, if fleeting, joy.  The one thing you won’t feel is the dead-eye sleep-walk stare at work the next day, unless you stay up late reading this book (as I did, making the following day somewhat grim; but, then again, I was pretty useless at school on that October Wednesday in 1975.  We all were.)  It won’t matter, because Game Six was transcendent.  For those of you who weren’t alive in ’75, you need to know what came before the swoon of ’78 and Bucky (--) Dent, before Bill Buckner’s splayed legs, and certainly before the Red Sox became the team that they are in the 2000s.  Game Six represents the real struggles of athletes and sports fans, from heartbreak to redemption. 

Several pages are devoted to the story of how these players—regular people, all—came to be together on their teams and how they played with a dignity, love of the game, and work ethic that are no longer seen in American sports. While each Red’s player was a powerful individual and complex cog in the Red Machine, each of Boston’s players is a gritty, working-class hero.  El Tiante, Pudge Fisk, Rico, Yaz, Dewey et al. are shown not only on the field but on their trek to the majors.  All players on both sides (except Pete Rose, perhaps) are portrayed with both sympathy and admiration.  The most poignant stories belong to Tom Yawkey and Sparky Anderson, the two men for whom this game—indeed, “the game”—represented everything they loved in life.   

But Frost won’t let us forget Bernie Carbo’s three-run homer after his sickly swats, Dewey’s unbelievable catch, the hack umpiring throughout the game and the series, the Faithful hollering Loo-ee, Fleet Freddy hitting the wall in center field--dead silence at Fenway.  Frost brings back Denny Doyle’s streak, Burleson’s errors, Coop’s disappearance at the plate, and what happened to those Reds whose names are still household legends.  He spends a brief chapter reminding us of the end, Game 7: the managerial errors, Bill Lee’s eephus, and Yaz popping up to end it for the Sox. 

Interspersed among the innings is a brief history of baseball and the strife between owners and players, and how team ownership was at one point “player ownership,” providing for us some (albeit tiny) justification for today’s superstar salaries.  He also contrasts baseball as a team sport in the 70s with baseball as a showcase for individual talent today.  From the one game, any and all sports fans or students of Americana learn how baseball was once a dying pastime, but was resurrected by the superstars we profess to loathe.  It’s a message that applies to all professional sports today.  But Frost also makes all of us remember that for one moment all was right with the game, everyone could believe—no matter who you pulled for.  And it was due to Game Six, those twelve innings played into the wee hours of a chill Boston night, and to a grown man, jumping, hands waving, while the announcer intoned “there it goes, a long drive, if it stays fair….” 

Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs is a beautifully-written and complex story that focuses at its essence on the inevitable fate of attachment to others:  loneliness and loss.  Tessie Keltjin is a caretaker of the newly-adopted daughter for a couple that seems the antithesis of her own family, from which she has moved to attend college.  She becomes part of Sarah and Edward’s life, seeing in them everything her family is not:  they are wealthy but down to earth, professional yet warm, and wholly devoted to the idea of fostering and then adopting a child.  Tessie is immediately a part of their family, even meeting the two mothers from whom Sarah and Edward may adopt babies.  Even these characters are sad and striking women who allow plenty in their short time in the novel to understand fully why one might—or might not—have a baby that is not wanted and then give it up.   

Strange to herself, Tessie does not miss her family particularly.  They are organic potato farmers whose casual approach to life and each other mystifies Tessie, who fails to understand their distance.  The family has a lot of stock in Tessie, however, as she has the desire to move forward in life and who, unlike her happy-go-lucky (but going nowhere brother) actually moves away from their predictable comfort to live.  Eventually, too, Tessie’s brother moves on into the post-9/11 military, which is for Tessie just another sort of loss.   

Tessie’s own story parallels Sarah and Edward’s:  she finds love, falls deeply and is changed and charged by it, and then loses it and is seemingly forever marked by grief.  From Sarah and Edward, eventually, Tessie learns that lost love is not the end of the world, unless, perhaps, it’s love of a child that is lost.  And so each character—Tessie, her college roommate, her family, her brother—endures some type of loss, and how each is changed and whether each moves forward becomes the focus.  Whether 20-year old Tessie will realize that loss is a part of life, or whether she will be permanently marked, is the question that Tessie grapples with when she realizes that all who love eventually lose, observing that “…love and virtue—their self-conviction was an astonishing thing:  a sham pantomime of wishes, a dream made actual…as real as rock.”

Tropper adds another novel to his collection about guys having a crisis, figuring it all out, and emerging as new guys.  In each, someone faces some test of love or (perhaps and) loss.   

In This is Where I Leave You the test comes to Judd Foxman with the death of his father…or more realistically, when he and his family are ordered to sit Shiva for seven days after his father is gone.  Seven days with a California sister, her go-get ‘em a**hole husband, and their two spoiled children.  Days on end with a wayward and loveable ne’er-do-well younger brother who functions as both a chick magnet and the main trouble hound.  Sit-time with a mother who seems to be youthening in front of him, with her increasingly shorter skirts and lower-cut blouses.  Visits from various friends and hangers-on, most with an agenda focusing on getting to someone in the family.  And interminable days with an older brother who stayed home to run the family business, a choice made due to some undescribed (until much later) and unforgiveable familial catastrophe involving Judd.  Brother’s wife—a former girlfriend of Judd’s—is the one to duck, as her prime goal is to get her cooking eggs fertilized, and she isn’t particular about which brother gets the job done.   

Not present is Judd’s wife, the amazing Jen, who left Judd after he discovered her infidelity with a decidedly not-nice kind of guy.  (If you are squeamish about anatomy, the scene where Judd catches Jen and her lothario is hysterical, but will definitely make you wince…let’s just say everyone involved was very surprised.)  Her absence keeps Judd keenly focused on every minor flaw in every relationship he has ever seen, and all the ones surrounding him during Shiva.  No one seems particularly happy; heck, no one seems even remotely functional.  As the story unfolds, however, Judd has more reason to examine why his life has become an emotional train wreck and to own up to his part.  By the end of the novel, everyone has had a chance to change their future to make it somehow less wretched.  For Judd,  too, the future could be unyoked from his past:  Jen is pregnant (oddly, by Judd), allowing a glimpse into a future where it is possible—just possible—that Judd will get something right this time. 

After one long, lonely summer spent in the company of his mother, a 13-year old boy, Henry, stumbles (literally) across a wounded man, bleeding in a public department store.  After befriending the man, Frank, and taking him home with the more-than-willing assistance of his mother (who is definitely not quite all there, and who rarely leaves the house), we learn that Frank is wanted for murder.  As Labor Day weekend approaches and the temperature in their small NH heats up, Frank surprisingly becomes an essential part of what is left of Henry’s family.  His dotty mother, Adele, a former dancer who lives in another world, and Henry himself come to depend on Frank for all the things for which one might need a husband or father.  While the story of Frank and his role in Henry and his mother’s life is important, this is really Henry’s story.  He’s bursting into adolescence, has a stepmother and step-sibs with whom he endures a weekly meal, doesn’t seem to possess any friends of note, and lives simply to help his mother function in this world, which doesn’t really exist.  Frank abets Adele’s fantasy world; they talk of travel, music, dancing…and Henry very quickly comes to enjoy Frank’s attention and the attention he pays to Adele, which serves to get Henry off the hook so that he can follow his own pursuits—including girls, and the new-found freedom from his mother.  His freedom, however, comes with a price as he wrongly trusts a girl with the secret of Frank, and the idyllic Labor Day weekend (extended version) comes to an end.  Adele—whose grip on reality is tenuous at best—is never the same, nor is Henry, whose beliefs that others cannot really be trusted and that love is a chimera are affirmed.  Of course, the reader never quite buys Frank’s story, and never really trusts Frank.  It is only at the close of the book, set many years later, that Henry and the reader learn that perhaps some people are true to their word, and that love may last.  The portions of the story detailing the day-to-day lives of Henry and his mother and Frank are the best; there is something very enjoyable in reading how one boy can be changed so profoundly by simple kindnesses and the presence of a loving father around him.

Welcome back to the 1980s, small town USA, Owl, North Dakota to be exact.  Klosterman disguises his social commentary as a novel set in a place and time that will seem familiar to us all—the town where nothing really ever changes.  Indeed, one character notes that people toss around the phrase “nothing changes” in a small town meaning it figuratively, but when it comes to Owl, the meaning is literal.  Nothing really changes.  So how does Klosterman make a novel out of this snapshot of life? 

The novel takes place over six months, during which the only thing that changes is the weather.  He provides different chapters focusing on the sameness of life from different points-of-view:  the retired farmer who has been in Downtown Owl forever, and seems to like and accept it all just fine, thank you very much, provided he makes he coffee-klatch with friends each day at 3 pm.  The backup to the backup high school quarterback, Mitch, is having an existential crises about life, sports, and Owl; he’s the one who gets to provide the wry observations from high school.  And apparently very little changes in high school, as Mitch’s thoughts wander from sports legends in Owl, to girls, to which of the two resident sociopaths is more likely to win a fight, to the near-religious attachment his friends have to 80s arena rock bands, and maddeningly on how the English teacher manages to seduce legions of 17 year olds and why no one will do anything about it.  (One of the most interesting interludes is Mitch’s off-hand observation that it was likely that none of the kids in his English class were thinking about class, so Klosterman provides a quick and pithy snap of what each is thinking.)   

The oddest Owl observer is the new teacher, a startlingly clueless college grad teaching history in Owl; why she’s teaching, what she’s teaching, and what she’s doing in Owl is a mystery to her, and certainly to the reader.  She becomes the town’s newest and most darling barfly (how does she get to work?) but her outsider status allows her to tell the reader why it is that everyone has such a funny name, or two funny names.  Turns out everyone has a nickname, and as is common in small towns, knowing the story of how you got the name marks you as an insider.  She also gets to be the one person who offers the slightest of possibilities of something different to one local Owl legend.  Her replay of conversation, complete with what he said (but what he meant) and what she said (but what she thought) in achingly and painfully accurate.   

The novel reaches a quick and rather unhappy conclusion after the initial narratives, and the abruptness with which the story of same-old, same-old ends would make no sense were it not for the last words from one of the Owl observers—words that symbolize completely the lives of Owlets and, probably, most of us.  He notes that “…we are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure.  We are what we cannot do.”  Such is the way in Owl, and Klosterman nails it perfectly.

It’s rare to read a book so beautifully written that you get cold when the characters are looking at snow, but Goolrick’s writing brings alive the characters, story, and place—in this case, the wilderness of Wisconsin at the turn of the century.  He sets his story carefully, attending to not only the physical features of the countryside, harsh particularly in winter, but also to  the thoughts and psychological states of its inhabitants, many of whom simply snap and lose hope during the long winters, doing harm to themselves and others.  It is against this backdrop—a beautiful setting which cannot obviate the evil in men’s hearts—that Goolrick sets his tale.   

A wealthy and emotionally-closed man advertises for a reliable wife; he simply does not want to be alone for the remainder of his life.  He had a wife, as it turns out, but she was untrustworthy and venal; he wants something fresh, simple, reliable, and unattractive.  But that isn’t what he gets.  Instead, his reliable wife (a con from the start, you can sense that from the opening scenes) has come to fleece him, not to pry open his cold heart or help him locate a lost child (not his, probably) from his first marriage.  But in doing so the new wife thaws somewhat, although not to him per se; she continues with her plans (unveiled early on) to do harm to her new husband.  Why she wishes to do that, how she came to be first the unreliable wife (and then the reliable one), and why he appears to let her even though he clearly knows what she is doing are three threads that together become the main part of the narrative.  Only by attending carefully to the characters’ words and actions can you come to see that each is attempting to correct something unfixable, to atone for something that cannot be changed, to be persons they are not.  As the novel progresses, we learn more and more (asking, always, how can this get worse?), making it impossible to predict the depth and complexity of the difficulties faced by Ralph and Catherine.  At the same time, the prose is hypnotic and you truly move in the rhythms of their lives, making the story even more realistic.

“You buy your ticket, you take your chance,” notes Benjamin Ford, protagonist of Dear American Airlines.  While Benjamin’s observation is ostensibly about a 24-hour layover (delay?), caused by no discernible reason, Bennie’s time in the airport gives him an opportunity to reflect on his life, focusing on his mistakes, wrong turns, and bad luck.  We learn of his deranged mother (of whom Bennie is jealous because she lives without the responsibility of actually getting anything accomplished in life), the vodka-soaked 20s that caused him to lose pretty much anything that might have been good, and his long-lost ability to write poetry.  He drove away the poetry muse about the time his Stellas (girlfriend and daughter) left him awash in vodka and childishness because he wouldn’t get it together.  At this point in his life, he’s living in NY and working as a translator of Polish novels.   

Humor?  Sure.  And irony aplenty.  The whole book is a letter to American Airlines, explaining Bennie’s current situation, none of which makes sense (to Bennie, anyhow) without knowing the whole story of how he ended up in O’Hare airport after a bus ride from Peoria during his NY to LA flight.  Bennie was on the way to see his daughter, whom he has not seen since she was an infant after she was whisked away by her mom, Bennie’s first love and the one person who always had Bennie’s number and never failed to call him on it.  He’s never really met his daughter, yet he’s supposed to be escorting her down the aisle at her wedding—er, commitment ceremony.  It’s a drag missing the chunk of your kid’s life.  Bennie’s narrative descriptions of the cranky children, cell-phone pecking strandees in O’Hare, sadistic plastic molded terminal chairs, and TSA’s constant wanding of his shoes and person as he makes continuous trips outside to smoke are spot-on descriptions of the misery of flight in America these days.  Juxtaposed with the descriptions of the ridiculous situation Bennie is stuck in is his desultory intermittent work on a translation during the down times when he isn’t writing his screed to the airline.  His translation focuses on real hell:  war, loss of limbs, watching loved ones die, and realizing that there might not be a home to go home to after a war.  Makes you feel like a missed wedding and 24 hours in O’Hare (where you are stuck eating Chipotle burritos) might not exactly be called a tragedy.  

But Bennie’s life has been a tragedy, albeit a self-engineered one.  But it doesn’t matter; playing the cards you dealt yourself and playing the hand the world gave you are not so terribly different.  In the end it comes down to making sense of where you are, where you’ve been, and moving forward.  “Which is the better fate?” Bennie asks.  “Maybe the answer is that there are no better fates.  You can’t escape what you are, be it possum or poet.”

Anita Shreve never shies from difficult subjects, and her latest is no different in that regard. Testimony brings us head-on into a Vermont prep-school where one mistake (error in judgment? youthful indiscretion? life-changing transgression?) alters the course of the lives of a host of students, their parents, and school administrators. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different person (students, spouse, girlfriend, roommate), and so the story of how three boys—the rich prep, the spoiled athlete, the local-boy-makes-good—and one very troubled girl end up in a dorm room after a night of drinking is pieced together in such a way that more questions about the incident are uncovered even as many are being answered. Shreve adds layers to the story through each character, adds to the difficulty of making ethical judgments of each person’s responses by slowly providing small nuggets of mitigating information, and adds layers of characters until you get a full and satisfying conclusion. If you can get past the opening chapter (a somewhat explicit description of dorm-room sex) you will quickly become enmeshed in the story and you will also decide (perhaps in error) the proper price for very-human mistakes.

Berg fans will be happy with her latest, Home Safe, as this novel (like her others) presents a rich tapestry of complex characters, many of whom seem familiar because they may very well be your neighbors, your friends, or yourself.  Berg has never shied away from writing from the perspective of persons of varying ages, and this time she gives us an enjoyable protagonist in Helen Ames, a recently-widowed (and definitely at loose ends) older woman who can’t figure out her next step, as her husband was always the one to lead the way while she was content to stay at home and become a successful (albeit not critically-acclaimed) novelist and mother.  As the story opens, Helen has come to rely on her twenty-something daughter Tessa for nearly everything great and small, and she has stopped writing.  Helen deals with her life like a thread at the bottom of a sweater:  she gives it a tug, and it all comes unraveled.  You’ll alternately cringe and cheer each time she takes a new step.  Her first foray into teaching a basic writer’s course is a disaster, her attempts to determine what her husband was hiding from her (and which cost them nearly the entire nest egg) lead to little more than confusion and then great consternation, and her interactions with Tessa become so difficult that her daughter stops answering the phone.  What finally helps Helen move forward is the realization that even in her new life—the one without the husband but with the dream house, the one without her daughter and also without the incessant desire to be there for Tessa—she is still needed.  Like A Good House before it, Berg conjures up several remarkable friends in need for Helen, and each adds a dimension of interest to Helen’s life.  Each counts on her to find for them or lead them to what they need or want, as only Helen can.  Eventually Helen, too, finds her way in her new life, but not without several starts and stops.

It's not a book about the storm, not really--even though it starts with Betsy and with Katrina it ends-- because the spirit of New Orleans never really ends, does it?  Maybe not, but maybe so.  Nine Lives is nonfiction, but it reads like a novel with short chapters told from various perspectives.  Nine people--the Parish coroner, a cop, a transexual, a thug, a rich krewe captain, a hs band director, a Mardi Gras Indian--tell the story of their lives in short pieces, starting in 1965, and skipping along over months and years as they move forward (and back, and around).  Their lives are all defined by New Orleans and its customs, feel, food, people, speech, and ethos.  All are remarkable in their own right for the complexity of their stories and the events of their lives.  You have to wonder whether New Orleans affects everyone the same way, because everyone seems to have had such eventful times.  The summer of 2005 arrives about 2/3 of the way through the book, bringing both a time for change as well as Katrina.  Some left, some stayed; all narrate the post-Katrina city in its horror (it really was worse than I thought) and with a clear sense of outrage, sadness, and disbelief.  You will come to love all of these people (even the street thug) as you see how they tried (and still try) to prevent the storm from defining their lives.  Read this one with a map of the city at hand, and be prepared to stay up late because you won't want to put it down.

 Three stories, three people, three lives–one cut short when one overlap among them occurs.  A wealthy woman finds her husband has been cheating, and in her blinded fury and hurt drives over a lovely woman, Ruth Mitchell, whose husband adores her.  The woman becomes further unhinged; the widower, Arthur, slides further and faster into his own world (writing to Ruth), and in the mean time he finds portions of a manuscript Ruth left behind.  The story of Eva in the manuscript provides a touching counterpart to Ruth and Arthur’s marriage, and the doomed marriage of the wealthy doctor’s wife.  After a time, Arthur believes Ruth has returned to him, as the doctor’s wife has tried to atone by constantly checking on the diminished Arthur.  Her atonement–and the impossibility of it–means that Arthur must confront (over and over) life without Ruth–the impossibility of it.  This book is not light, but the narrative is well-written and these characters will stay with you long after you finish reading.

When Willie Upton returns to her upstate NY home after a romance-turned-bad with her Stanford graduate school advisor, she sees her town of Templeton with new eyes.  It turns out that the town history she knew (or thought she knew) like the back of her hand is a mere sanitized version, like the life stories of nearly everyone else she has ever known.  Willie is the daughter of a former hippie, Vi, once the free-spirited gal in town  but now eating non-organic sugar-filled foods and embracing religion.  When Vi drops the bomb that Willie’s dad isn’t some guy from a commune out West but is in fact a man from town, Willie channels the energy she should be using to get her academic life back on track to finding him.  Along the way, she discovers much, quite a bit of which was always there for her to see. 

Given that Willie is related to nearly everyone in town (and she’s got the genealogy charts to prove it), it shouldn’t be too hard to find her dad, right?  She is the descendant of several town bigwigs, all of whom came (legally and illicitly) from one Marmaduke Temple.  Duke’s relations with his family, his sons from different women, his wife, his town, and even (to Willie’s utter surprise) a slave result in various lines, most of which are tangled with arson, poison, questionable habits, adultery, illegitimacy, and lunacy.  As she digs deeper through letters between people dead over a hundred years, Willie becomes closer to the current residents of town, many of whom, like she, came about somewhere through the convolutions of Templeton lineage.  The mystery is unraveled in documents, letters, and stories from people about whom Willie has never given much thought.  What they think of Willie, and her mom, comes out during her summer crusade to find the truth, and Willie starts to see the town and even old high school friends with new and more sympathetic eyes.  With Vi pushing her to return to Stanford, an ill friend who could stand some company, and a married lover trying to convince Willie to come back for one final semester sling, Willie works faster and harder, speed-reading in the town library genealogy stacks.  Dry as much research like this is typically, it isn’t when Willie’s doing it.  The entire history of Templeton is a parallel to the real deal of Cooperstown, NY.  The town was saved when JF Temple (think James Fennimore Cooper) landed the Baseball Hall of Fame for the town (for love, not money). Natty Bummpo and Hawkeye make cameos, and tales of Indian settlement and abuse are interwoven, meshing the present day with the past, and Groff’s fiction with Cooper’s.  And, strangely, underneath the lake a monster may actually exist or have existed, watching the town.  Of course, as Willie uncovers the past she finds that there have been many monsters in Templeton, not just the one of unknown reptilian nature in the lake. 

The Monsters of Templeton is irreverent and creative (some chapters are letters, some two pages long, some with dialogue from hundreds of years previous, some current, some with portraits), and it reminds the reader that what seems simple—people, genealogy, history—is actually multi-layered, richly textured, and more than straightforward…much like Groff’s ambitious novel.

Anything positive you’ve heard about Three Cups of Tea is probably understated: this is an inspiring story that will leave you in awe of the tenacity of one man to accomplish good for the world, and which will also have the collateral effect of helping you to understand the hows and whys of the modern-day geo-politics and culture in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Greg Mortenson’s failure to complete his climb of K2 led him to a needed recovery in the remotest portion of Afghanistan, where it became clear to him that the best use of his considerable energy would not be attempting to scale a mountain out of existential boredom, but would instead be directed to the needs of the villagers in mountainous and desolate Karakoram. Mortenson repaid his host village’s hospitality by returning to build a school for its girls...and then moved through the mountains, across villages, around crooked politicians, and through militants and the Taliban to build over 50 more. Mortenson doesn’t take no for an answer–unless there are guns pointed at him (and that certainly happened a few times), and he remains oh-so-human in his quest to bring books and education to the wildest portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The book is highly readable considering the difficulty of recounting a story with so many difficult names and places, and in some spots it’s quite literary. Every sentence, however, is inspiring.

Two sisters—Clem and Louisa Jardine—could not be more unalike, and their differences have always served as the main force in their relationship. Louisa is jealous of Clem’s life, vitality, and relationship with their mother…and, yet, she would be lost without the ability to live through Clem, and Clem would be lost without Louisa’s stability. The book provides two strong and very interesting women characters, and sails through their life (past and present) in such a way that you can’t be quite sure whether ultimately the sisters adore each other or despise each other, because they spend half of their time adoring (and the other half despising) one another. Like other Glass novels, this one is well-written, employing alternating narrators, and shows careful attention to narrative that spans time and lifetimes. You can easily become lost in Clem and Louisa’s lives.