Review of Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake

I don’t want to say I didn’t enjoy reading Tom Lake, but I didn’t. And it’s not that I hated the book. I just hated reading it. I think I understand Patchett’s plot-technique, her repetitive layering of memories, underscoring her homage to OUR TOWN and the idea that life is a cycle that repeats and repeats and repeats. 

Tom Lake is heavily indebted to Thornton Wilder’s classic, OUR TOWN, which I’m sure at the time—and for decades after—was a highly regarded, impactful play. And I did enjoy OT when I re-read it as I read Tom Lake. It’s a simple, classic, maybe Greek-like-play, detailing the story of the circle of life/death as depicted in one, small New Hampshire town—the beloved Grover’s Corners. At the outset, we meet the two main families—the Webbs and the Gibbs–and we learn about their pasts and presents and futures. We see their children grow up, marry, have children of their own, and eventually, like those who have preceded them, die. 

Central to the action of the play—on a meta level—is the stage manager, who appears every so often to update us on the time/events/etc. He is, according to Lara, a god-figure, who also happens to have been played by her future husband in the Michigan production of Tom Lake in which they met. Lara is the novel’s narrator, who  portrayed OUR TOWN’s Emily on three different occasions/locations—at her high school, then in a local, small-town New Hampshire production, and finally in the summer-stock Michigan production in Tom Lake. All of which is to say, Patchett is doing a slow and intricate job of layering one story upon another (Tom Lake’s events/play vis-à-vis Our Town), one production upon another (Lara’s high school production, then the New Hampshire community production, and finally the summer stock production in Michigan), and, lastly, multiple characters/ families/ occurrences upon one another. Key to the novel is a young, flamboyant actor named Duke (Peter Duke, lead actor in the Michigan production of Tom Lake and young Lara’s lover. Young Lara is, in fact, in love with Duke in a way she’s never been with her subsequent husband (Joe Nelson, stage manager in the Michigan production and father of her future daughters). 

All of which is to say Tom Lake is a complexly-plotted novel, much like those of Amor Towles, whom I believe Ann Patchett admires (as do I). But Towles’ novels are complicated in a succinct, purposeful way that Tom Lake is not. Tom Lake layers one story upon another, one time upon another (as does its inspiration, OUR TOWN). But it is not an ecstatic, revelatory, explosive melding of story, theme and plot as are Towles’ novels. Patchett’s plot gains impact by virtue of the accretion of one tale/character/time upon another. Even the title of the book, Tom Lake, exemplifies this type of accretion/homage to other places/times/tales. It’s the name of the town in Michigan where OUR TOWN takes place—named after the young boy whose family formerly owned the property on which the summer stock theatre resides. Really, the lake was called Tom’s Lake, but somehow, by a quirky, child’s linguistic shift, becomes Tom Lake. This slight shift in name not only exemplifies the way how idiosyncratic things become part of our shared history, but also nods to the title of Wilder’s play, OUR TOWN.  Not quite an anagram of Our Town, Tom Lake, is similar enough in cadence and appearance to underscore the parallels between the two places.

In closing, Tom Lake is a lovely book. It’s just that it’s tedious to read, going over the same material again and again with different characters in different times and places. While admirable, and interesting to parse, Tom Lake is far from the tour-de-forces Towles’ novels are. (Towles is a master architect of plot, especially in the way his plots reveal meaning—where plot and theme become one, as opposed to two different aspects of the novel.) One thing I truly admire about Patchett’s novel, though, is the narrator’s final understanding of true love—enduring love as opposed to romantic, passionate infatuation.

NB – I wish I’d written a review of Towles’ The Lincoln Highway when it was fresh in my mind. Truly a masterpiece of plot, theme, and character, The Lincoln Highway abounds in insights and ironies, not the least of which is the main characters’ trek to upstate New York from the midwest, when their original (and real) intent is to follow the Lincoln Highway westward in search of their long-lost mother.

NBB – One thing important to mention is the present-day setting of the novel–a rural area in Michigan, where the Nelson’s farm is located. This becomes the family home of Lara and Joe and their children, partly inherited and rescued by Joe, who was the nephew of the original owners (OUR TOWN M.O again). Not only do the children grow up on the same farm as Joe and his relatives (the new Grovers Corners), the farm is an apple orchard which gives way to cherries and pears and other fruit throughout the year, much as spring gives way to summer and winter and fall. Again, the endless and beautiful cycle of life that both Wilder and Patchett celebrate.

Review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Rarely do I finish a book with more questions than I started, but I did with Klara and the Sun. My early questions—what is this book about? what is an AF? is Ishiguro going to explore the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI)? Will AI turn out to be evil, like Kubrick’s HAL? What’s up with Josie and her family—where do they live, how does Josie really feel about her mother (and vice versa), where is Josie’s father? And, last but not least, what the heck is a COOTINGS machine?

The one touchpoint I found between this book and Ishiguro’s celebrated The Remains of the Day is his allusion to fascism, which figures prominently in RD, set during WWII. But Klara and the Sun is futuristic. It posits a world with a huge AI presence in the form of intelligent robots. And it fills this world with current conflicts about education, financial inequality between populations, the threat of increasing pollution, and the achievement of one’s life-goals.

The main thing we learn about Klara, Josie’s AF (artificial friend) is that she’s a wonderful, kind, sincere individual/robot. She puts Josie’s needs before her own, always trying to improve her interactions with humans. Which begs the question—is Ishiguro suggesting ever-evolving AI presents a threat to the human race? By the novel’s end, it’s clear he is not. On the contrary, Klara is the most compassionate character in the book, and Josie a typical, maturing teenager (though her off-handed way of phrasing often seems out-of-place: Klara and the Sun is set in Britain, yet Josie sounds as if she’s from a small midwestern town in the US).

Ultimately, we realize Klara and the Sun is about is the danger of placing too much stock in parents striving for their children to excel. Josie and her sister have been genetically modified, or ‘lifted,’ as Klara explains, to give them an educational advantage over ‘regular’ kids. The downside of this lifting, however, is illness and potential death. SPOILER Alert: Josie’s sister is a case in point. Josie, on the other hand, manages to survive thanks to the healing power of the sun, her only loss being the future she plans with her best friend, Rick. And that is tragic. Their dream of running away together is sacrificed to the parochial goal of educational and financial success. Josie will have a good life, Rick *may* have a good life (because he’s naturally smart and talented despite being ‘un-lifted’), and Klara, sadly, will simply devolve into recycling detritus, because she’s sacrificed her ‘secret sauce’ to stave off the pollution created by the dreaded COOTINGS machine.

All in all, I admired this book, though the questions it raised remained largely unanswered until the very end. jgk.

Thoughts on Niall Williams’ This is Happiness

Niall Williams’ This is Happiness is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Rich in Irish wit, humor and irony (as well as the occasional paragraph-long-or-so sentence), the novel presents both challenges and delights.

Recounting his experiences as a 17-year-old, the warm and reflective septuagenarian narrator, Noe, recalls the exceptional, rainless mid-twentieth-century year in which electricity came to the remote hamlet of Faha, Ireland. Not accustomed to modern conveniences (and quite content to maintain their pastoral way of life), the citizens of Faha are a colorful bunch, most notably Noe’s beloved grandparents, Doady and Ganga, and Christy, Noe’s new-found 70-year-old friend. 

Now, while the coming of electricity informs the novel, it’s not the sum total, because, first and foremost, This is Happiness is a highly-affecting love story told in stunningly beautiful prose. Born and raised a Catholic, Noe’s weaves his fall from-the-traditional church around the many iterations of requited and unrequited love he observes and experiences. Starting with Doady and Ganga’s often-humorous-but-deeply-felt love story, we quickly learn it is love, not the idea of happiness, which informs the novel—because happiness, as Christy explains, is just this—the moment, any moment—under the stars, in the city, by the sea—in which we presently find ourselves. It’s an appreciation for the joy of existence, for the beauty of nature and our momentary apprehension of it. All of which is to say, This is Happiness is an ode to love—filial, familial, fraternal, communal and romantic—in all its glory and pathos as we experience it in our tiny moment in time. 

Along with Doady and Ganga, Williams aptly renders Christy, Noe’s unlikely anti-hero friend-and-mentor, as well as the unexpectedly impactful character of Annie Mooney, Christie’s erstwhile love. There’s much to consider in the parallels between Christy’s love for Annie and Noe’s love—of his deceased mother, grandparents, and along the way, his first adolescent crush—and as well as those between Ganga’s Kierkegaardian knight-of-faith and Christy’s Knight of Infinite Resignation. And, finally, there’s much to admire about the tiny, raggedy town of Faha.

A final note—when a book group friend quietly noted that Christy is a Christ figure in this very Catholic book—I responded, he most certainly is not, years of Catholicism having fully sensitized to me the slightest whiff of a Christian allegory (eg, The Life of Pi).  This is Happiness, I insisted, is not one of them. However, I later decided Williams did obviously mean to infer a connection to Christ.by naming his major characters, Christ(y), and Noe (whose name, we learn, is short for Noel, a Christian reference to the birth of Christ). But Christy is NOT a Christ-figure-per-se (or a second-coming-of-Christ-figure, etc.). He is, rather, one iteration of a modern-day secular Christ. That is, he is what all of us can/should/hopefully aspire to become: good, kind, loving, fully-realized human beings. In other words, Christy is a ‘Christian’ free of the trappings of the Catholic Church. And that, in the end, is Noe’s awakening—that a person need not ascribe to any particular religion to be his best, most authentic self.

Review of John Banville’s The Sea

If ever a book didn’t need another review, I suppose it’s this one. Winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2005, how can I have anything to add to what others have already said? Well, here’s my attempt….

This was a difficult book to read. Far more challenging than SNOW, Banville’s 2020 mystery involving the death of a clergyman (Not a spoiler. Happens on page 1.). The sentences are long, highly wrought, replete with beautiful, original imagery, and oftentimes arcane vocabulary. I managed to get through it though, and was surprised, in the end, to find a twist or two. It’s really a book about memory, and family, and those we love, as well as those we fear and trust and mistrust. It’s about a young boy growing up in coastal Ireland, his early acquaintances and experiences. It’s a coming-of-age novel of sorts. It’s also a book about an older man—by fifty years, the 60-ish year-old man the young boy has become, along with the baggage he’s acquired over the years. It’s about his ambivalent feelings towards himself and those he loves, and, especially, towards the veracity of his own memory. It’s about how one thing leads to another, and how small—or not so small—things lead to horrific eventualities. It’s definitely a book worth reading. It’s sad, contemplative and important. It prompts us to look at our own lives and question their meanings, their values, their functions, their points. It asks us, in the end, whether the beauty we experience in this world is worth its concomitant pain. I’d like to read this book again sometime, to see if I react to it differently. It definitely moved me and made me question many things about myself. 

I realize what I’ve written above is vague, and want to add a couple of footnotes. So, to that end, if you haven’t read the book already, this is a SPOILER alert. Max, the main character, is grappling with his wife, Anna’s, recent illness and death. At the same time, he’s trying to manage his relationship with his daughter and with related consequences of his wife’s death, the main one being whether or not to sell the summer home he inherited from his parents and where he spent much of his time as a child as well as an adult. Mixed in with all this are reflections about his parents, about how he felt about them and how they felt towards each other. And, more importantly, reflection about childhood friends he made while vacationing there, Miles and Chloe Grace, their parents and support staff. It’s quite convoluted, really, and a miasma of sorts because Banville’s main character (the narrator) freely roams from what he (I think) calls the absolute present time (his stay at the Cedars) and the recent past (Anna’s death) and the remote past–his childhood, his adolescence, during which he spend time with Chloe and Miles Grace, and, significantly their parents. It’s a sad, tragic tale very much worth reading.

Thank you, John Banville, for writing such a brave, interesting, beautiful and important work.

Review of Haruki Mukami’s Killing Commendatore

I loved this book, though I have to say it’s one of the most mystifying novels I’ve ever read. Not to say it’s the most esoteric or difficult to read. The writing is clear and simple and fluid. Statements are clear, paragraphs coherent, plot simple. But the story… not so much.

The first thought I had was despite it being a Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami (my first exposure to him), it did not read like a translation, that’s how good the translation was. (Though I have to note my mother’s observation that some of the expressions/phrases the narrator uses throughout the novel seem less Japanese than American.) Second thought—this book would make a great movie. Maybe along the lines of something Hitchcock might have done. Third thought, though written by a Japanese writer, it harkens back to novels by South American magical realists like Isabelle Allende.

Okay, now, as for meaning. Well, it’s mostly about a middle-something-aged portrait artist who is in the process of getting a divorce. This is his wife’s choice, for no particularly clear reason. We learn shortly thereafter she has been having an affair with a colleague of Masahiko Amada, a family friend, and she is, in fact, pregnant with his child. The narrator, the main character, mulls this over from time to time, noting Yuzu and he had had no children during their 6-year marriage.

When the novel opens, the narrator (does he have a name?) is staying at Masahiko’s aging-artist-father’s (Tomohiko Amada’s, who is currently suffering from dementia and living in a nursing home) abandoned house. Upon moving in, the narrator discovers one of the father’s paintings under wraps in the attic. Importantly, throughout its course, the content of this mysterious painting informs the novel: Tomohiko painted it in the Japanese style after returning from a harrowing experience in WWII Austria during the Anschluss. It depicts a scene inspired by Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, in which a commendatore (commander?) is being murdered by an unknown hand, Donna Anna is nearby, and a strange figure is seen emerging from a hole in the ground. All of this echoes events that have happened to Tomohiko during this time: he tried to murder a Nazi official, his lover was brutally killed. As the novel progresses, more echoes of the painting recur: we learn the narrator‘s sister, Komi, died at 12 years of age. Similarly, the mother of the 13-year-old girl who lives next door was killed many years ago by a hornet sting. The narrator, a portrait artist, meets the mysterious Mr. Menshiki and agrees to paint his portrait even though he is on a sabbatical of sorts. He also paints the young girl’s, Mariye’s, portrait at Menshiki’s—who turns out to be the girl’s biological father—request. Finally, there are a handful of other characters, not the least of which is the commendatore himself, a 2-foot-tall white-clad figure from the painting who describes himself as an ‘Idea.’ [It’s also interesting to note all of the significant men’s last names (as well as Mariye’s and Muro’s first names) in Killing Commendatore begin with ‘M,’ the first letter of author’s own last name.]

So … are you confused enough? The ironic thing is the story is not hard to follow, mainly because of Haruki Marukami’s meticulous world-building. Detail by detail, layer by layer, the narrator tells the story, making it seem very, very realistic (even though it is full of fantastical stuff). What holds it all together, though, and makes us keep reading, is the promise by the commendatore that all of these disparate elements (people, places, times) are related to one another in some way, that all of the things depicted in Tomohiko’s painting are, perhaps, metaphors for important things in the main characters’ lives.

And that’s where I’ll leave you. I don’t want to spoil the novel (and, I’m not quite finished it yet myself). I’ll add a postscript explaining what I think it all means in a little bit. Only read that if you’ve finished the novel (or, alternatively) decided to abandon it. Overall, though, I give the novel 5 stars, because although it’s extremely long (800 pp?—it’s hard to tell on the kindle) it held my attention and made me want to keep reading it, in fact, to find out what it all means.

PS – SPOILER ALERT:

Okay. I haven’t finished it yet, but here are some pieces of the puzzle: Mariye is a metaphor/doppelganger/parallel of the narrator’s dead 12-year-old sister, toward whom he has unresolved feeling of great sadness. Her dead mother is a metaphor for two women—Yuzu, the narrator’s ex-wife, who’s currently pregnant with another man’s child. She is also the woman Menshiki, the mysterious white-haired millionaire from across the mountain, had an affair with and impregnated on their final night together (by Mariye’s mother’s design). Do all these women refer back to Donna Anna? I’m not sure, because I’m not familiar with the opera, Don Giovanni. Is Menshiki connected to the mysterious white-haired man emerging from a hole in the ground in Tomohiko’s painting? If so, what does this mean? And the man in the white Subaru forester who keeps popping up—is he another metaphor for Menshiki and the white-haired man in the painting? Watch this space for some more thoughts about all this after I’ve finished the novel!

Finished—finally. Thank heavens Haruki Murakami is such a good writer, otherwise a book this length, full of this much repetitive detail, would have been tedious, to say the least. But I liked it, and, in the end, it worked for me. Here’s my take on it: the painting depicting the killing of the commandatore is a metaphor for all sorts of transformation/journeys/realizations in the book. And the pit it depicts is a metaphor for the real pit in the narrator’s backyard as well as the personal deep, dark hole each of the main characters—the narrator, Menshiki and Mariye—needs to go through to grow. Menshiki in the real pit, the narrator in his journey underground from the nursing home, and Mariye in Menshiki’s basement. And all of them grow—Menshiki meets his daughter and finds a mate, Mariye’s aunt, Shoko; the narrator reunites with Yuzu and has a daughter with her, Muro; and Mariye connects with her long-dead mother via her evocative clothes, filling an emotional gap in her life. She also literally grows up a bit, eventually sprouting the breast she constantly worries about. So it’s a happy ending all round. Despite it being a long and winding route, all of the main characters have gone through their own, personal dark journeys to get where they needed to be. And the commendatore, both literal and figurative (the one the narrator and Mariye meet as well as the one in Atsuko’s painting), has served his purpose—as a metaphor, a facilitator, for all of his various ‘my friends’ inner journeys.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: a Review

In the end, I loved this book. But for the first 200+ pages I had no idea where it was going. Unlike traditional 19th and 20th Century novels, there was no clear through-line from page 1, no ‘meet our hero who wants this but can’t have it because….’ Instead, we encounter a cast of quirky characters, chief of whom is Count Alexander Rostov, a ‘former person’ (according to the post-Revolutionary Bolshevik regime) sentenced to permanent house arrest in the Metropol, a posh Moscow hotel and icon of a bygone age.

Ok, let me see if I can summarize things a bit (I’ll give a spoiler alert if I reveal anything you might not want to know until you finish the novel). We meet the Count on the day of his sentencing, whereupon he is removed from his longstanding hotel room (#317), a spacious, elegant apartment overlooking central Moscow. Much to his surprise, he returns from court to find his belongings (those few he can keep) on their way to the sixth floor, a venue formerly used to house servants of wealthy hotel clients. The only things he can fit in his new room are his grandmother’s coffee table, his desk, and a bed. Oh, my. But he’s not deflated. Instead, he gradually adapts to his change in circumstance, slowly morphing from a privileged member of the Russian aristocracy to a hotel employee, specifically maître d’ of the Boyarsky, the hotel’s upscale restaurant. Here the former Count puts his innate ability to seat dinner guests in the most advantageous way–a skill discovered at his grandmother’s lavish dinner parties–to good use. The effete count, in other words, becomes a laborer. But he’s fine with that. Likewise, his former service providers—Emile, the chef, as well as other hotel managers and clerks (including the hotel seamstress), become his colleagues. And he makes all of these changes with aplomb, showing no difference in his treatment of or affection for said persons from his former days. Which marks Alexander–Sasha–as a wonderful main character, immune, in a way, from the class issues that precipitated the Russian Revolution. One thing he retains from his aristocratic past, though—besides his impeccable manners and refined sensibility—is a large stash of gold coins engraved with Catherine the Great’s image. Worth a fortune, they are hidden in the legs of his antique desk, and surface at key points in the novel. They are, if you will, one of the novel’s recurring symbols, and play an important role in the novel’s conclusion.

Aside from Alexander’s friends-cum-colleagues, he interacts with a few others, the first of which is Nina, a young, free-spirited girl dressed in idiosyncratic yellow (which sets her apart from everyone else, and is therefore indicative of the old order) who runs around the hotel eavesdropping on clientele, including Soviet officials. She also has a master key to all of the hotel’s rooms, which plays a significant role in future events. Although we have no idea what this future entails, we enjoy Alexander and Nina’s frivolous adventures, along with their camaraderie, dinner dates, etc.

So… so far we have a charming novel about an eccentric group of characters who live and work in a prestigious hotel, reminiscent of books and movies like The Bridge Over San Luis Rey, The Grand Hotel, Murder on the Orient Express, etc., wherein a seemingly unrelated group of people wind up having something crucial in common. And that is all that kept me going with the novel until page 200 or so when I started to put 2 + 2 together and realized I was witnessing the gradual transformation of Russian society from pre-Revolutionary privilege to post-Revolutionary communism–and back again. Because, sadly, the new regime fails to fulfill its idealistic Marxist promise and becomes more and more like its predecessor, reverting to the same kind of hierarchical structures inherent in old-world Russian politics.

What I’ve decided, then, is this book is about is the failure of communism, the irony of an ostensibly egalitarian system becoming as stratified as the czarist system it was meant to replace. A light-hearted meditation on the human condition (on human frailty as well as true humanitarianism, because Alexander Rostov is nothing if not an exceptional human being), A Gentleman in Moscow is harder to decode than Rules of Civility, but is a masterwork of irony nonetheless that succeeds in delivering serious content while at the same time entertaining us.

In sum, A Gentleman in Moscow is one of those books less about story than about plot. Luckily, its characters don’t suffer for it, because, typically, in clever books–ie, books more about ideas than emotions–the characters suffer because they are first and foremost pieces of a puzzle, emblematic more than idiosyncratic. And A Gentleman in Moscow is a puzzle of old new vs. old, of the new order seeming to supplant the old, but, in the end, just replacing it, becoming it.

In a word, what goes around comes around in this novel.  Thus (SPOILER ALERT) in contrast to the devolution of the communist ideal, Count Alexander, his paramour, Anna, a haughty Russian actress who finds herself on a progressively lower social stratum–and Nina gradually become their better selves as the novel progresses. Nina becomes her purposeful and talented daughter, Sophia; the Count becomes a commoner; his longtime friend, Mikail Fyoderonch—aka Mishka—former idealist, revolutionary and poet (it is he, after all, who writes the poem favored by the new regime calling for a new order, a new world—a poem that ironically saves Alexander’s life, because the Party thinks he wrote it and therefore is an early Communist sympathizer) ends up defeated, disillusioned, dead; and Anna becomes the new Helena, Alexander’s beloved sister.

A redeeming novel in the end, A Gentleman in Moscow is a portrait of the human condition. Communism fails, but these several characters–who represent the core of humanity–survive, grow and, in the end, escape to a better world, just as do their confreres Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, which Towles so masterfully references and celebrates at the novel’s close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

H is for Hawk by Helen McDonald

Hello, Readers–

End of summer’s here at last, and I’ll miss it despite the fact I’ve done nothing but complain about heat and humidity the past few months. But change always scares me, and fall is a big change, perhaps the biggest seasonal change on the east coast. Why? Because it’s a step toward winter, the deadest of seasons (not the deadliest or ugliest or anything bad, by any means–I love winter, especially here in the South). Still, it’s a step toward death. Which leads me to the subject of this post–Helen Mc Donald’s disturbing yet amazing autobiography, H is for Hawk. What follows is my review.

This was a lovely book. Not a happy book, and not an easy book. But a thoughtful, interesting, beautifully-written one in which Helen McDonald weaves together three main threads–the loss of her father, TH White’s genius vis-a-vis his personal struggles, and her relationship with Mabel, a young female goshawk. How do these threads connect? I’m not sure I can explain it, because the tapestry is subtle, long and complex. The best I can say is the author is devastated by her father’s untimely death, cannot accept it or speak of it at first. She remembers loving hawks as a child, observing and training them with her father. This inspires her to purchase a young goshawk from Germany, I believe, the same place from which revered author TH White had gotten his beloved hawk, Gos. This also spurs McDonald’s memories of TH White’s autobiography, in which he describes training Gos, which McDonald argues has much to do with White’s own childhood. A gay man in merry old England at a time when it was not popular to be gay (especially in the eyes of his judgmental parents) made White feel like a misfit his entire life, despite his acclaimed teaching and writing career. Author of The Once and Future King, it’s ironic that the creator of this story of honor and nobility and equality should have so suffered at the hands of his own parents. But maybe that’s why he valued the beautiful Arthurian legend that inspired his work.

On to McDonald and her father. The pain of her father’s loss also inspires McDonald to raise a goshawk, easily one of the swiftest and deadliest killers on the planet. But McDonald does not judge her hawk, Mabel, for this. If anything, she respects her instinct and integrity. The hawk is an unabashed carnivore, honing in on her prey with laser precision. There’s no guilt, no remorse, and, from what I could tell, no subsequent bonding with her trainer. Still, Mc Donald loves this bird and somehow derives solace from its unrequited killing. It’s as if she identifies with this aspect of the bird (and I think she says so in the book), because raising the hawk helps her deal with her father’s death. He was brutally taken from McDonald, without warning or explanation. It was, in her view, a meaningless death. A sudden and terrible loss of the person she’d adored from childhood on. A gentle, kind man who studied the world through a photographer’s lens–from afar and with great respect, much like a tiny hare who lives his life unaware of the dangers that surround him–dangers like Mabel, who ruthlessly grabs the unwitting hare, crushes him to death with her claws, then devours him.

Similarly, TH White is able to deal with his homosexuality (and his father’s condemnation) through his relationship with his difficult goshawk, Gos. White’s attempt to control his very macho (though I believe Gos was female) hawk is in response to his own feelings of inadequacy for being gay.  I’m not quite sure how this works, either.  Both Mc Donald and White are in great pain and somehow externalizing that pain by raising remorseless killers helps them overcome it. Perhaps McDonald learns to accept death as  part of life–senseless, unexpected, and hurtful to those left behind–but a natural none-the-less.  This is what Mabel teaches her–that  in order to fulfill her destiny as a hawk, she must search and kill. There is no ulterior motive other than getting food. The hawk is guileless and driven by instinct. There’s no malice in her behavior.  It’s simply a matter of survival.  In this way, McDonald comes to admire, love and appreciate the hawk for who she is. So, too, she must continue to admire, love and honor her father, despite his swift and sudden death. He’s not killed out of malice either–he just dies because that is what we humans (and all living things) must do.  There is nothing more to it–just like the goshawk’s killing.  It’s the hand of fate, it’s guileless and remorseless.  It’s a ticking clock,  that’s all.  There’s on one to blame for her father’s death, because there’s no reason or intention behind it.  It just is.  If she can accept this about the hawk’s nature, she can learn to accept this fact about human life.  We live, we die, and we are mourned.  Thus, anger is displaced by sorrow, and McDonald can at least understand her father’s death.

In White’s case, McDonald demonstrates how control of the hawk is a substitute for control over his life.  His impulses, like the hawk’s, are natural, outside of his control, guileless and, therefore, innocent.  He is able to accept who he is by loving and understanding this creature with similarly uncontrollable passions.  There’s nothing wrong or right with those passions.  They just are.  Just as is McDonald’s hawk’s predatory nature.  Just as is her father’s sudden and unexplained death. Such is life, such is loss, so she must let it go, much as she and White release their hawks and watch them do the unthinkable. That is life and we must respect it.

I hope this review makes sense to readers.  It’s simply my attempt to explain this remarkable book to myself.  I look forward to reading critical reviews to see what others think.

Thank you for reading–jgk.  

Review of I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers

One of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, I Saw a Man is thematic, thoughtful and literary without being pretentious. A bit of a mystery with a soupcon of murder, the novel opens with an obscure poem by Hughes Mearns:

“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish, I wish he’d go away …”

A charming, but seemingly meaningless, ditty, it is a clue to the deeper, more perturbing issues in I Saw a Man—issues of guilt and responsibility, remorse and blame, sadness and forgiveness, accident and intention. In short, the novel with a deceptively simple title and epigraph is anything but simple.

In the opening pages of I Saw a Man aspiring novelist, Michael Turner, finds his true love in an international journalist named Caroline. Settling in a remote corner of Wales to escape their frenetic pre-marital lifestyles, their idyllic married life is tragically cut short when Caroline takes a risky assignment in Afghanistan. The inciting incident of the novel, it leads Michael on a path through anger and grief before finally resolving in a sort of clouded empathy as he returns to his birth city and establishes a new life. But what happens between points A &B is a series of highly unanticipated events, all of which contribute to the novel’s main theme.

Beautifully written with an economy of backstory and description, the novel is a classic peeling-an-onion style narrative, wherein widower Michael Turner reveals the details of his past in bits and pieces that accrue more and more meaning as the novel progresses. The setting of the story, a luxurious heath in south London, plays a prominent role in the novel, too, informing its mood and events.  A second literary technique Sheers uses to great advantage in the novel is mirroring, whereby seemingly disparate and unrelated events parallel one another, drawing readers back time and again to the novel’s central issue of culpability.

If this review seems obscure, it is because I Saw a Man is the sort of novel that invites (and deserves) scrutiny. It is opaque in a good way, rich in depth and dimension. What I admire most, however, is how Sheers subtly highlights the larger issues of the novel without bludgeoning us with them. Beyond the culpability of the main characters, for example, is the larger question of authenticity. Unlike them, we may not have caused another’s misfortune, but surely we, too, have indirectly fostered hurts and pain—small but significant partial deaths—in our lifetimes. It is part of being human. No matter how much we aspire to truth, beauty and goodness, we inevitably face situations in which we are less than honest, irresponsible if not entirely guilty, hurtful by default, if you will.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is Michael’s description of himself as an aspiring fiction-writer. Here again we experience the reflexive nature of Sheers’ novel—he is writing a novel about a character who wants to do just that—write a novel. Again, think of peeling-an-onion or a Chinese box. As a failed novelist, Michael finds his niche in writing non-fictional, intimate portrayals of people he meets. Here Sheers blurs the line between fiction and reality—an inherent flaw of biography—because of the categorical impossibility of ever truly knowing another human being. The irony is that even as Michael acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the exact content of his subject’s each and every conversation, his subject may have had, he still believes there is a measure of truth the writer is able to convey by virtue of his proximity to his subject, a proximity he seeks to actualize by removing himself, the observing party, from the final product, the biography. Thus Sheers’ protagonist inserts himself into other people’s lives in order to discover their truths, then promptly “disappears himself” from the finished work in order to more fully realize his subject’s unadulterated reality.

Michael exercises this technique in early in the novel in his summary of “Neighborhoods,” a study of two brothers whose contrasting lives continue to diverge from one another even after the book is finished. A second book he’s written is about a scientist who seeks to identify the exact nature of empathy by theorizing there are certain cells in the brain that actually “mirror” other people’s experiences, thus allowing them to understand and empathize with each other. Sheers’ novel exhibits this same type of mirroring or repetition as Michael seeks his own truth and struggles to become as authentic a human being as possible.

If this discussion has taken a metaphysical turn, it’s because I Saw a Man is ‘meta’ in nature. Like many great works, its form equals content, the meaning of the novel and its telling feeding one another in an endless loop. I’ve purposely avoided specificity to allow the reader to discover the novel’s meaning for himself.

Overall, I Saw a Man is a modern masterpiece, much like The Goldfinch or All the Light We Cannot See. Like Donna Tart and Anthony Doerr, Own Sheers is one of those writers whose work resonates far beyond the confines of its covers. I honestly can’t imagine—and can’t wait to see—what Sheers writes next.

Review of The Girl on the Train

Review of The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train has much to recommend it, not least of which is its best- seller status. But I wonder about the recent flurry of “Girl” books, starting with Gillian Flynn’s truly admirable Gone Girl.

I loved GG. It was slick, interesting, surprising. Good plot (excellent plot, actually. I remember thinking you’d have to be a mastermind to plot something as complicated as this.), well-drawn characters, plausible motivations (the minor exception being Nick Dunne’s final dubitable decision).

But then along came Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on a Train, followed shortly by Renne Knight’s Disclaimer, another in kind (though one lacking the eponymous “Girl” title).

Let’s take GT. Similar in style to Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train is told from multiple points of view—four, in fact: three women and one man, all of whom, sounded alike. This was my first problem with the book, which, in the end, had a decent plot. But when all of a novel’s characters sound the same, it’s difficult to distinguish one from another, a cardinal rule in novel-writing being that each character have its own “voice.” So I had trouble navigating GT because I could never be quite sure who was speaking (unless I went back to the chapter heads to double-check), which greatly disrupted the flow of the narrative.

A second confusing issue was the time frame. Like GG and so many other contemporary novels (reaching back as far as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours—which was excellent and warranted the shifts in time—as well as Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife and Sara Gruen’s Like Water for Elephants, for example) GT moves forward and back in time, a technique which has become less ‘novel’ than de rigueur. So de rigueur, in fact, it’s become tiresome, mainly because it’s difficult to follow.

A lifelong reader, I propose a return to the days of straightforward narrative—unless different time periods are truly warranted by the story. Let the story stand on its own merit. Let the characters absorb us. Let their voices seduce us. Let go of the gimmickry of multiple points of view and shifts in time—or at least use them judiciously. Currently they’re so over-used as to become parodies of themselves, serving no other purpose than to confuse the reader—which, sadly, seems to be the sole point of many of the Gone Girl clones.

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, it’s no surprise Anthony Doerr’s latest tome is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. A masterpiece rich in story, structure and theme, All the Light We Cannot See centers on Marie-Laure, a sightless young French girl, and Werner, a young German orphan whose expertise in radio technology makes him a valuable asset to the Third Reich. Set during WWII in Paris, St. Malo and various points along the German front, we first meet Marie-Laure and Werner as young children in their respective homes of Paris and Zollverein, a small but vital coal-mining town in western Germany. Written in the present tense, unusual for a story set in the distant past, Doerr’s appealingly short chapters alternate between Marie-Laure and Werner’s points of view. Beginning in 1944 Paris, motherless Marie-Laure accompanies her father to work each day, meticulously learning to navigate the streets between their rooftop apartment in the 5^th arrondissement and the Jardin des Plantes, where he is a master locksmith.

As readers quickly learn, however, All the Light We Cannot See is more than the interweaving of Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s wartime lives. It is also a novel rich in imagery and musings about light, sight and the irony of the brain existing in absolute darkness while at the same time allowing us to perceive ‘all the light’ of the objective world. Marie’s blindness and reliance upon other senses—smell, touch, hearing, etc.—are deftly rendered as is Werner and Marie-Laure’s inevitable intersection by way of her grandfather’s radio broadcasts–broadcasts remembers listening to as a young boy. Eventually used to help Allied troops, the radio is a good example of how every image, every plot point, every detail in the novel carries weight.

There’s also the story of the Sea of Flame, a rare diamond that bears an onerous warning–that it will protect its owner from misfortune and death, but is a virtual a death- sentence to those surrounding him. Another irony in a story rich in irony, this plot device serves as both a metaphor for much that happens in the novel as well as a further point of intersection between Marie- Lauren Werner. A beautifully-crafted novel with an interesting, important theme, Doerr’s attention to detail—significant, pervasive detail—is one of the things that makes this piece of historical fiction not only a compelling read but also a work of art.