Literary fiction

Review: It’s A Battlefield

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Cover image of "It's a Battlefield" by Graham Greene

It’s A Battlefield

It’s A Battlefield, Graham Greene. Open Road Integrated Media (ISBN: 9781504053976) 2018, first published 1934.

Summary: The private “battles” of those connected with Jim Drover, a bus driver convicted of murder for killing a policeman.

Jim Drover was convicted of the knife murder of a policeman about to bludgeon his wife, Milly, during a demonstration. He was sentenced to die by hanging. The action in this story involves the people who know Drover and their efforts to secure a reprieve. As they do so, we see figures involved in private battles. The title refers to a battle in the Crimean War where a fog isolated soldiers from the larger battle, so they ended up fighting individually, without a sense of the whole but just trying to survive.

The Home Secretary has asked the nameless Assistant Commissioner to give him a report of what effect an execution will have on Communist demonstrations. Jim’s brother Conrad, the “brains” to Jim’s “braun” tries to find a way to secure his release. He solicits the efforts of the Communist party with only desultory results. Conrad urges Milly to persuade the policeman’s widow to sign a release, which she does under pressure. However, no one holds out much hope for the petition. Milly’s sister Kay goes to bed with Mr. Surrogate, a widower who is an influential Communist economist to solicit his support, but also to satisfy her own urges. Both Surrogate and the Assistant Commissioner try to persuade Caroline Bury, a society influencer to use her influence. All of this is to no avail.

The reports the Assistant Commissioner receives suggest that the response to Drover’s impending execution will be indifferent. There is the question of doing justice, since Drover was defending his wife. But he hides behind his duty to enforce the law, and that the determinations of justice lay with others.

Meanwhile, as Conrad Drover and Milly recognize the apparent futility of their efforts, they end up in bed, a release but unsatisfying. This was not the “look after Milly” he promised his brother…or was it? Struggling with guilt and ineffectuality, he buys a gun and begins stalking the Assistant Commissioner.

Greene portrays a group of people with no great purpose or vision, who are just trying to get through life, and survive the battle that is life. Conrad, in his desperate plan at least strives for something more–if nothing else to do “something” for his brother. Even the usually conscientious Assistant Commissioner sits on the report. In the end, Jim Drover, who defended his wife, looks the most heroic. But over all seems to hang the bleak curtain of a faithless and indifferent modernism.

Review: Shadow Ticket

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Cover image of "Shadow Ticket" by Thomas Pynchon

Shadow Ticket

Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Press (ISBN: 9781594206108) 2025.

Summary: Private detective Hop McTaggart hunts down a missing cheese heiress, from Milwaukee to Europe, in a series of madcap capers.

Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker, has tried to settle down into a more sedate life as a private detective, working for Unamalgamated Ops in Milwaukee. Instead of bashing heads, he gets the goods on wayward spouses. He has a colorful bunch of “associates”, from mobsters to Nazis. He frequents speakeasys and bowling alleys. Then, along comes the request to track down a missing cheese heiress, Daphne Airmont. Her father, Bruno, is the “Al Capone of cheese” but as the cheese wars heat up, he’s skipped town on a sub, taking him to Europe.

After avoiding a car-bombing and wanting to evade the local authorities investigating a murder he didn’t commit, Hicks decides to take the case. Daphne is following her lover Hap Wingdale, a clarinetist, to join his swing band. But Hicks is one step behind. He lands in Chicago to find she’s off to New York. He heads to New York to find she’s on a boat to Europe. After a night out, he wakes up to find himself on another ship.

Pynchon is just warming up. Hicks gets involved in a series of escapades with Interpol agents and spies, traveling from Belgrade to Budapest, hunting down Ace Lomax, Bruno Airmont’s right hand man, strikes up a relationship with Terike, a woman motorcyclist, and finally finds Daphne in a club in Budapest. I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.

All this is set with the 1930’s as backdrop–Communism appealing to workers and radicals, Europe trying to recover from the great war only to face and in some cases welcome) the rise of Hitler. Some reviewers try to draw parallels to the present day. I’m not so sure that Pynchon isn’t just playing with us. But I do see various figures trying to grab for money or love before it all goes to hell.

One of the challenges of the book is the dialogue, the “argot” as it were of this particular type of underworld. And scenes shift rapidly as various characters move in and out of the narrative.

I’ve not read Pynchon before, so I had no idea of what to expect. Vineland sits on my “to read” pile. We’ll see if I keep reading Pynchon after that. I’ll leave it to others to recommend what’s best to read of Pynchon’s. But I suspect that, despite the achievement of publishing this at 88, this is not his best. But at least he’s alive and writing!

Review: Emma

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Cover image of "Emma" by Jane Austen

Emma

Emma, Jane Austen. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780141439587) 2003 (first published in 1815).

Summary: A beautiful, rich young women with no interest in marriage makes a series of disastrous assumptions in matchmaking for her friend.

I went through most of this work viewing Emma Woodhouse as a most unlikable character–rich, class-conscious, and with an exaggerated estimate of her ability to understand others. As it turns out, that was Austen’s intent. Before beginning to write, she wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” On that count alone, Austen succeeds.

Emma Woodhouse is the younger daughter of Henry Woodhouse, a wealthy but frail (or at least he believed himself to be) and fussy old man. Emma’s mother died when she was young. Her older sister Isabella is married to John Knightly and they live in London with their five children. Emma is the lady of Hartfield, wealthy and lacking for nothing and attentive to her father. She insists she is content to remain single.

She also thinks she played an important role as matchmaker with her former governess, Ann Taylor, who marries a widower, Mr. Weston. As a married couple, they live nearby and visit regularly. Mr. Weston has a son by his first marriage, Frank Churchill, raised by his uncle and aunt at Enscombe. The latter plays a controlling role in his life, keeping him close by through her ill health. However, when he finally visits, he manages to stir up trouble.

But Emma does well enough on her own account. She becomes a mentor to Harriet Smith, who supervises younger girls at Mrs. Goddard’s boarding school. The daughter of a successful tradesman, she is attractive, winsome, but untrained in the ways of society. While boarding, she stayed for a summer at Abbey Mill Farm, at the invitation of Elizabeth Martin, one of the students. During this time, she became acquainted with Elizabeth’s brother Robert, who took a liking to her.

Robert Martin was a young, hardworking farmer, well-esteemed by those who knew him. For someone like Harriet, it would have been a good match and he proposed. Enter Emma, who has befriended Harriet. Before Emma tries to make a match for Harriet, she helps break one, influencing Harriet to believe she could do better. That is, she could marry a higher class of person. So, she turns down the match.

George Knightly thinks Emma has misguided her friend. George, who is called Mr. Knightly throughout, is a leading figure in Highbury and owns Donwell Abbey, a large estate. Abbey Mill Farm is part of the estate and so he knows and thinks highly of Robert Martin. He believes Robert would have been a good husband to Harriet. Throughout the novel, Knightly is a friend to Emma, the kind who sees more wisely than she, though it will take some time for her to accept that.

Much of the novel unfolds the successive misguided schemes of Emma to make a match for Harriet. First there is Reverend Elton, who Knightly correctly realizes wants to marry into money, which Harriet doesn’t have. Then there is Frank Churchill, who instead seems to flirt with Emma. Finally, because he acted kindly toward her, Harriet thinks Mr. Knightly might care for her, which Emma supports until she discovers that Mr. Knightly loved another.

In addition to failing her friend, the appearance of two other women give Emma her comeuppance. One is Augusta Elton, who is even more unlikable, arrogantly so, than Emma, who is gracious and pleasant if misguided. Emma gets a brutal lesson in class pretensions when she sees Harriet heartlessly “cut” by the Eltons. The other is Jane Fairfax, who arrives on the scene at the same time as Frank Churchill. She is distinctively attractive, intelligent, and a far more talented musician than Emma.

Emma is young and the novel turns on whether she will go the way of Augusta Elton or become a humbler, better person. And her insistence that she will remain single? Here as well, she will face the chance to know herself better.

The issue of class pretension runs throughout the novel, particularly in the tension between Emma and Mr. Knightly. It’s also subtle, but there is nothing spiritual about the minister, who even “comes on to” Emma during a carriage ride. He only seems concerned with status. Is Jane Austen conveying her low opinion in general of clergy?

In sum, Austen’s title character, unlikable as she comes off, keeps us wondering, and reading, to find out if she will “get a clue” that will enable her to see others, and herself, in a truer light.

Review: Vigil

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Cover image of "Vigil" by George Saunders

Vigil

Vigil, George Saunders. Random House (ISBN: 9780525509622) 2026.

Summary: Jill Blaine is a spirit who consoles the dying but her current charge needs no consoling, leading her to reexamine her short life.

She’s descending to earth, her body and clothing reconstituted as she falls. “She” is Jill “Doll” Blaine, an “elevated” spirit whose task is to console the dying in their last hours, helping them to come to terms with their regrets, fears, the unfinished. She’s done this 343 times.

But K. J. Boone is different. Lying in his bed in his stately Texas mansion, he doesn’t think he needs consolation. As she searches his thoughts she found “a formidable stubbornness. A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to do, see, cause, and create, especially given his humble origins.” And she found no doubts, even as he lay dying of cancer.

Boone was an oil tycoon who rose from working on rigs to leading one of the largest oil companies. At the height of his powers, he gave a speech “debunking” the science of global warming that became a standard reference for deniers. He was a fierce defender of his industry, and all that it had made possible.

But she was not to be left alone with him. Other “spirits” attempt to show him the error of his ways. The Frenchman who invented the internal combustion engine. People who suffered the effects of climate change. And many more from his past. None shake his self-justifications. But many try to make him accountable.

But this shakes her. She recalls how she died as a newlywed. She was blown up by a car bomb meant for her husband. So, she leaves her charge to revisit her Indiana hometown. She enters the mind of the man who planted the bomb. Like Boone, he had no regrets. He considered it an inevitability.

Accountability versus inevitability. Jill wrestles with what that meant in her short life, and what that means for dealing with her charge and the parade of spirits besieging him as his life wanes away. In other words, was it right to assist the spirits trying to wrangle a deathbed turn-of-heart out of him? Conversely, was there a kind of inevitability to the trajectory of his life, one that justified his self-satisfaction? That is to say, did he simply fulfill a predestined course?

These are unsettling questions–the kind that leave you thinking when you’ve put the book aside for other things. Some want Boone to be responsible for the terrible things he unleashed, although Boone pokes at the pretensions of those fueling their environmental activism with his oil. However we think of these things, we think choices matter and want people to be responsible. Yet are not people a part of things larger than themselves that shape them?

It’s a question Christian theologians have wrestled with for two millenia. Are human beings responsible? Yes. Is God sovereign and does God predestine? Yes. I have not met anyone who has satisfactorily explained how both can be so. Yet both things somehow have a ring of truth, explaining something of the way the world is, kind of like light as both a particle and a wave.

And that is what Saunders would have us wrestle with. Is life complicated enough that we must live with the tension? But it seems that all Saunders would afford the dying is comfort for lives they cannot change. However, what if there were the possibility of grace?

Review: Jazz Trash

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Cover image of "Jazz Trash" by Michael S. Moore.

Jazz Trash

Jazz Trash, Michael S. Moore. Crumpled-paper.com (ISBN: 9798985928945) 2025.

Summary: Andrew, who cannot play the guitar, is chosen to play guitar for a group that explores the boundaries between jazz and noise.

Perhaps you were (or are) like me–a music fan who dreamed of playing in a rock band. Maybe lead guitar. But the only guitar you can play is an air guitar, and even that not very well. That’s Andrew as he walks to meet band members. He’d seen a poster like this one:

Postcard: “Wanted Guitarist who does not play guitar” from “Jazz Trash” © Michael S. Moore (part of book promo materials)

It turns out he is exactly who Dave and Phil are looking for. They are jazz musicians wanting to create a new kind of music. The fact that Andrew doesn’t even have a guitar and doesn’t know how to play makes him a prime candidate. At his audition in the pictured warehouse, they give him an old guitar and plug him into an amp. And then, on cue, he is to play, which really means making loud noise. Then Dave on bass and Phil on drums improvise behind him.

Andrew has no clue how he is doing. But Dave is ecstatic. This is just what Dave and Phil wanted. So, they make an audition tape to send to the Kit-Kat Club, the premiere jazz club in town. But the owner just doesn’t hear the magic, just the noise. But they get by with a little help from their friends.

Some are friends I’d met before in Moore’s first novel, Crumpled Paper, which I reviewed in 2023, calling it my “sleeper” of the year. Richard is the artist whose breakthrough with a series of “crumpled paper” works. His studio is upstairs in the warehouse from the group, which, after this disastrous mixtape, names themselves “Jazz Trash.” Richard not only sympathizes with the group. He takes them under his wing and arranges a gig at the Kit-Kat under their new name. But the owner pulls the plug as soon as Andrew hits his guitar. A chance to play at a private reception goes slightly longer before the police shut them down on a noise complaint.

Meanwhile, their circle of friends that gather at an artsy cafe, stick with them, Lulu, one of the servers, and Andrew have a budding friendship. Glenn, Richard’s volunteer manager, works his magic. Martha is taken up photographing another artist, Reginald, and his literally haunted house, which reminds her of a series of Nancy Drew mysteries. Yet, she helps with band pictures as Dave creates a music ‘zine to hype the group.

While all this is going on, everyone is working hard getting ready for the annual Art Walk. Reginald will debut new works and try to get free of his ghosts. Meanwhile, Richard will try to follow up on his previous successes, and the band will get what could be their last shot at his reception.

Like Crumpled Paper, Moore explores the world of artists in various media who try to break out of the boundaries of their art. So much is about getting that chance to find an appreciative public. But part of what makes this book so enjoyable is the ensemble of characters living in this artsy community, enjoying tea and good food and conversation in the cafe as they support each others’ efforts. It’s a pleasure to recommend this book by an Ohio author living in my home town! (And I can’t help but wonder if our Short North arts district and its monthly Gallery Hops served as his inspiration.)

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the author.

Review: Mansfield Park

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Cover image of "Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen.

Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780141439808) 2003 (first published in 1814).

Summary: Fanny Price moves from poverty to live with rich cousins in Mansfield Park, maturing amid their whirl of social relationships.

This is my second Jane Austen novel in my year-long Jane Austen reading goal. It struck me as a version of the ugly duckling who becomes the beautiful swan–that ugly duckling being Fanny Price. Fanny grew up in Portsmouth in a large and impoverished family. At ten her mother arranged for her to go to live with her sister’s family at Mansfield Park. She’s escorted by Aunt Norris, the imperious wife of a clergyman, who makes it a point to emphasize how indebted Fanny is to her and the family for their good offices.

And so begins an uncomfortable and socially awkward existence at Mansfield Park. Her uncle, Sir Bertram is distant. Lady Bertram is a pampered and self-absorbed woman who, seemingly can do nothing for herself. Fanny becomes her sewing companion, and an extra maid. Tom, her oldest cousin, is a spendthrift who barely notices. Maria and Julia, the two daughters, are caught up in their own social life. Only Edmund, the second son, destined for the clergy even notices her and becomes her confidante, and eventually she, his.

Marrying well, to financial advantage is everything. Aunt Norris, now bereaved and removed from her husband’s living, arranges a match between Maria and James Rushworth. While he has an extensive estate, he’s personally unimpressive. Then enter Henry and Mary Crawford. They are related to the new incumbents to the living, the Grants, and come for a visit. Henry has wealth and is a ladies man. On a visit to the Rushworth’s estate, he flirts with both Maria and Julie, favoring the elder. Fanny quietly looks on.

Then, while Sir Thomas is away attending to business in Antiqua, Mansfield Park brings all these remaining young people together in a play at the behest of an actor friend of Henry’s. Edmund, despite his opposition, ends up playing opposite Mary. While Rushworth struggles to learn lines, Henry pursues a dalliance with Maria. Julie, jealous of Maria, eventually elopes with the actor. And Fanny? She quietly supports the effort behind the scenes, her thoughtful demeanor and growing beauty gaining notice. Yet it all comes to naught when Sir Thomas returns. But this futile effort sows the seeds of so much of what unfolds.

Despite the dalliance with Henry, Maria marries Rushworth. Edmund and Mary are drawn to each other but Edmund’s calling poses a problem. He actually takes it seriously rather than as just a source of income–not the life Mary envisioned. And Henry finally notices Fanny and sets out to win her affections. He arranges the promotion of her brother William. But all his good offices and attentions, and the pressures of others, refuse to convince Fanny. She’s seen his flirtatious character and cannot bring herself to trust him. Again, she and Edmund confide in each other.

As it turns out, character matters as both Edmund and Fanny learn. The more puzzling thing is why it took two such perceptive young people so long to realize that they were the ones they were seeking? Perhaps it was the first cousin relationship. Marriage between first cousins, while not common, was permitted. All I can figure is that it made for good story, though Austen spends precious little of it telling us how they awakened to their love for each other. But I suspect most readers saw this coming from early on in the story.

The story is a fascinating commentary on the conventions of love and the considerations of wealth. Edmund upsets the convention of the convenient living in which a clergyman did little. Maria’s loveless, and ultimately failed marriage to Rushworth portrays the folly of marrying only for money. (I wonder if the relationship of the Bertrams is another version of this). By contrast, Fanny rises in stature through her character, which also becomes a measure of the character of others. One thing is for sure, Austen creates in her a figure for which we all root and wish the best.

Review: The Overstory

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Cover image of "The Overstory" by Richard Powers

The Overstory

The Overstory, Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Co. (ISBN: 9780393356687) 2018.

Summary: Eight stories of nine people who lives intersect with trees and forests, whose lives, deaths, and survival are the real story.

I missed this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel when it was first published. But it kept surfacing in friends’ recommendations until I finally picked up a copy. While the story revolves around nine people, it is really the story of trees in North America, the wonder of their existence, and their plight. The novel’s organization into four parts reflects this focus: Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds.

In “Roots” we meet nine people in eight stories (one is a couple). In each story, their lives intersect in some ways. They range from a hearing-impaired botanist ahead of her time in discovering how trees communicate, dismissed for many years by the scientific community to a Vietnam vet whose life is saved in a plane crash by a tree. We meet a couple planted a tree in their backyard each anniversary until they began to drift apart. They are on the point of a divorce when he has a stroke. She stays and they bond over studying the forest in their backyard, including the scientist’s book. Another is an Indian boy, paralyzed when he fell from a tree, who invents a hugely successful online game while another engineer is radicalized when the tree outside her office is cut down.

In “Trunk” their stories begin to connect, like the roots of trees in a forest. Five become environmental activists, part of a movement engaged in increasingly risky actions to stop logging companies, including a couple living an amazing existence on a high platform in an old redwood marked for harvesting. Meanwhile, other researchers vindicate the botanist’s research. As an expert, she testifies in attempts to block logging. In the end, money wins over truth.

“Crown” follows a climactic event that resulted in the death of one of the activists and the dispersal of the others, and the subsequent lives of others, and in some cases, their deaths. “Seeds” describes the ways the survivors find meaning as the destruction of forests and our eco-system continues.

Woven through the account are trees. There is the chestnut on an Iowa farm that survived the blight killing all the trees in the east. A farm family chronicles in images its growth over several generations. The scientist travels the world, harvesting seeds, to create a kind of “ark”. A psych researcher is transformed into a radical after a night high up in a redwood. Especially through the scientist, we learn of the wondrous life of trees and the community they form in a forest.

It is this aspect that makes the book so compelling. The novel makes me look at the trees in my own yard differently, including the roots I encounter when I dig in most parts of the yard. It also raises an existential question. How does one live, when we seem hell-bent on destroying the very things on which our lives depend?

Review: Marce Catlett

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Cover image of "Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story" by Wendell Berry

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, Wendell Berry. Counterpoint Press (ISBN: 9781640097759) 2025.

Summary; A story spanning three generations beginning Marce’s disastrous experience of selling his tobacco at a loss in 1906.

The story begins on an evening in 1906 when Marce Catlett and a neighbor rode horseback part of the way, and train the rest, to Louisville to witness the sale of their tobacco. Tobacco that had been carefully tended, sorted, and packed for shipping. Burley tobacco of the highest quality. Marce had hopes of paying off expenses, and paying down the mortgage on the farm. There was one problem. James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company held a monopoly on the market and the price they paid out barely covered the cost of shipping to Louisville.

It was a terrible blow. There were few words to be said on the journey. “Long day” about summed it up. But that long day became a story with force to shape a family over three generations. It became a story for Marce of a way of farming by which a family sustained its life upon its land. It marked the beginning of Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association. Then Marce’s son Wheeler, who had risen to a position as a Washington lawyer in the Roosevelt administration, walked away from it all to lead the Association in negotiating fair prices for the growers. His efforts bought a space for several decades for growers to make a decent living off their efforts.

But the times were changing. Mechanized agriculture came in after the war. However, many of the children went off to college and it changed them. Children like Wheeler’s son Andy, for a time. Yet his work after college on an ag publication made him long for the old ways. And so he returned to a hillside farm in Port William. That meant returning to a community where each helped the other when they needed help at harvest. That meant hours telling stories as they stripped and sorted the tobacco..

Then times changed more. Tobacco farming ended as the cancer risks of smoking came out. Then farms were turned over to tenants instead of being passed to children. Andy, living the story, carried on as long as he could. But Port William had changed. Increasingly, those who lived in Port William didn’t work there. Not only did many yield to a changing way of life. They also forfeited a way of living on the land that had been the Catlett story. And they forfeited membership in a community that made life there so rich.

At 91, one wonders whether this is Wendell Berry’s valedictory statement (though I hope it is not the last of the works we will see from his pen). One has the sense of Berry saying this of his own life as Andy reflects:

“He gives thanks for life continuing on the earth, and for the earth continuing alive. He gives thanks for the continuing so far of his own life, the story of which is longer than his life.”

Andy speaks of “the breakages of broken times.” But he ends not in despair but in hope that somehow the story that carried him and the generations before him will outlive him.

Berry moves me to reflect on the stories of my family and the community we also called home through three generations. Although urban, rather than rural, similar changes to those of Port William ravaged my community. For that community, I can’t help but think that remembering and building on their communal story has been, and will be key to their survival and flourishing anew. Likewise for our nation, community by community, family story by family story.

Review: What We Can Know

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Cover image of "What We Can Know" by Ian McEwan

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan. Albert A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593804728) 2025.

Summary: A researcher in 2119 seeks a lost poem read at a famous dinner in 2014, reconstructing the circumstances of the dinner.

In 2014, famous poet Francis Blundy hosted a dinner in honor of his wife’s birthday. During the dinner, he read a poem written for Vivien in the form of a corona. A corona is a “crown of sonnets” consisting of fifteen sonnets, often addressed to one person. The last line of each sonnet is repeated in the first line of the next. Finally, the fifteenth sonnet consists of the last lines of the first fourteen, and makes sense! Blundy wrote it out on vellum and, after the reading, presented it to Vivian, After the dinner, its whereabouts became unknown. The dinner became known as the Second Immortals Dinner. The first was in 1817, with Wordsworth, Keats, and Charles Lamb among the guests of painter Ben Haydon.

In the 2030’s, cataclysmic events occurred. Climate change resulted in wars over resources, including the limited use of nuclear weapons. One of these, intended for the United States landed in the mid-Atlantic, creating a giant tsunami inundating the low lying areas of the Americas and Europe and western Africa. Paradoxically, these bombs resulted in a cooling of the planet. The period was called the Derangement and by the following century, the Earth’s population was down to four billion.

McEwan envisions a world in 2119 that suffered both the loss of much and retained the vestiges of advanced civilization. Regions of the United States are at war. Nigeria controls the internet. But there are still universities in what is left of the United Kingdom. Among the researchers, Thomas Metcalfe studies the years prior to the Derangement. His interest has focused in on the dinner and the lost poem. Instead of the coup of discovery, all he can know are the circumstances surrounding the dinner. Particularly, this included the lives and loves of the guests.

He knows of the tragic first marriage of Vivien Blundy to Percy. This big bear of a man built beautiful musical instruments, including working on a replica of a Guarnieri violin. That is, until early onset Alzheimer’s struck. He knows of the dalliances with Blundy’s brother-in-law Harry, and the meeting pf Francis and Vivien. All this took place prior to Percy’s death from a fall. Vivien subsequently married Francis, setting up in her own studio near the main building called the Barn.

But Metcalfe’s career and life seem stalled. He’s in an off again/on again relationship with Rose, a fellow lecturer on the period. They even teach classes together. Research trips to the Blundy archives turn up lots of trivia about the Blundy’s but nothing on the poem. That is, until an archivist passes along a slip of paper. On it are scratched numbers that Thomas figures out are map coordinates.

When students, no longer interested in how writers dealt with or avoided the impending Derangement, walk out of Thomas and Rose’s class, they conclude it’s time to seek out the coordinates. It turns out they are on the site of the home where Vivien lived after Francis’ death. Could this be the poem’s hiding place? Thomas and Rose embark on a boat trip to an isolated island, hike through overgrowth, find the site and dig up a sealed container.

This is all in the first part of the novel. The second part tells us what they found, and will answer the question of what happened to the poem. It reveals how much they did not know. McEwan leaves the impact of discovery to our imagination.

McEwan foregrounds the quest for a lost poem and what a scholar can know of its past, and that of its author. But part of the work he and Rose do is study the literature leading up to the Derangement. The unspoken question is why so many knew and did so much yet failed to do what was needed. McEwan also creates a situation in which civilization doesn’t end in a cataclysm but withers by degree. It is telling that Rose and Thomas’s students take no interest in what they can know of the past but think they can create a future on a blank slate. They take no interest in knowing the folly of forebears who refused to face and act on what they knew.

It leaves one wondering what historians a century from now, if such still exist, will write about our time. And I can’t help wondering if they will write about what we knew and failed to act upon. Will they wonder about our grand projects and petty squabbles while our own Derangement loomed? I wonder.

Review: Buckeye

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Cover image of "Buckeye" by Patrick Ryan

Buckeye, Patrick Ryan. Random House (ISBN: 9780593595039) 2025.

Summary: Two couples in a small, post-war Ohio town have secrets between them that will shake their lives and the son who connects them.

Why was everyone in small town Bonhomie, Ohio celebrating? That’s what Margaret Salt wanted to know when she went into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins worked as a clerk. They go down to the basement and turn on the radio to learn the Allies had defeated Germany in World War II. Spontaneously, she kisses Cal–passionately, on the lips–igniting a passion that would change forever two families.

Margaret, a woman of striking looks and red hair, had been raised in an orphanage in eastern Ohio, abandoned by her mother. When she comes of age, she moves to Columbus, where her sexuality is awakened. She meets Felix, a dashing executive for a manufacturing company. They marry after a short courtship but he seems to have little sexual drive, though he treats her wonderfully. He is promoted and assigned to a plant in Bonhomie, a fictional town located near Findlay, Ohio

Meanwhile, Cal Jenkins grew up in Bonhomie, raised by Everett, a father with PTSD from World War I (though no one called it that). One of his legs was shorter than the other. Yet he learned to work hard, and in the course of things, met Becky, whose father owned the hardware store and several other small businesses in the area. Becky had a special gift of being able to connect with spirits of the departed. They married and Cal went to work for her father. Soon, a son, Cal, Jr. but Skip to everyone came along.

Then something else came along. World War II. Eventually, Felix enlisted in the Navy, assigned to a ship in the Pacific. Cal was turned down for service because of his leg. Becky developed a practice, especially for those who’d lost sons or husbands. She came to the attention of a promoter by the name of LaGrange. who would have used her gift for a money-making scheme (she never charged for sittings). Instead of letting her handle it, Cal threatens the man and drives him off, creating a rift in the marriage. It is while this was going on that Margaret encountered Cal. Soon they struck up an affair. Meanwhile, Felix has an affair of his own, with another man, Augie, who dies when their ship is sunk. Felix survives and after recovering from injuries receives his discharge.

When Felix’s ship was sunk, his fate was unclear for a time, and Margaret cut off contact with Cal. Until the night before Felix was due home. They got together one last time–without their usual precautions. Then, the next night, Felix wanted to be with her. You guessed it. Shortly after, Margaret was pregnant. They raised Tom as if Felix was his father. He had Margaret’s red hair. But there were other signs that he was Cal’s son. Those in the know kept the secret.

And it seemed to work for a time. Cal and Becky got back together, aided by timely counsel to Cal from Becky’s father. Felix and Margaret gave themselves to raising Tom, even though Felix struggled with his own PTSD and kept the secret of Augie. Felix’s career nosedives as Cal takes over the management of the hardware store, expanding it. Becky continues to offer sittings. And in an awkward turn, Skip and Tom become friends, with Tom nicknamed “Buckeye.”

But secrets have a way of coming out. Much of this story centers on the unraveling of secrets, and what they meant for everyone involved. Each person made different decisions, to lean into or turn away from relationships.

Parentage is a big theme of this story. Margaret struggled with abandonment. Cal coped with a difficult father. Felix wrestled with being a good father to Tom. Cal lived wondering about whether he had a second son. And for so many of Becky’s clients, the fate of a lost child or relative was their great concern. Patrick Ryan reminds us of the ways parentage inescapably weaves through our lives.

Ryan also is pitch-perfect in capturing post World War II America. The boom of growth. The hiddenness of gay life. The brewing tensions of race…and a far off conflict in Asia. Likewise, Ryan captures the ethos of Ohio during this time. While not an Ohio native, he did graduate work in Bowling Green, Ohio, not far from the location of his fictional town. His place names and descriptions in Toledo, Columbus, and small town Ohio are spot on, even though Bonhomie is a fictional place.

As much as I enjoyed all this, I most appreciated the intergenerational story Ryan wove. Against the Ohio canvas, he invites us to remember our own loves, families, and secrets. While these shape us, he also reminds us of the choices each of us may make–to love, to be vulnerable, to accept, to forgive–or not.