Literary fiction

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.

Review: The New Men

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Cover image of "The New Men" by C.P. Snow

The New Men (Strangers and Brothers, 6) C. P. Snow. Open Road Integrated Media (ISBN: 9781504097000) 2024 (First published in 1954).

Summary: The tension between two brothers involved in nuclear weapons research during and after World War 2 in England.

Between 1940 and 1970, C. P. Snow wrote eleven “Strangers and Brothers” novels narrated by Lewis Eliot, who rises from an attorney to a Cambridge don, and finally a senior civil servant in government. The novels explore power in the political context and the challenge of maintaining personal integrity. Recently, Open Road has reissued the series in e-book format. In this case, their efforts brought to my attention a book as old as I am. Yet the questions it explores have been those many of us have wrestle with through all our lives. Can nuclear weapons and the arms race be morally justified?

Lewis assists his brother Martin, a physicist, in obtaining a position in a highly secret research program at Barford, the fictional site of England’s atomic research program during World War 2. He will work under Walter Luke in building an atomic pile. This is the first step in creating fissionable material for a bomb.

The novel works at several levels. One is a fictional narrative that captures the rivalry as well as cooperation of the British and Americans to build a bomb before Germany did. Snow narrates setbacks such as failures in activating the nuclear pile, and later, a near fatal accident involving Luke and Sawbridge. In part, because of these failures, the Americans build and use the bomb. But, in an effort to preserve Britain’s place in the world, they win continued support to build Britain’s own nuclear arsenal.

The second level is an exploration of the moral issues. Like some of the scientists at Los Alamos, the scientific challenge to build the bomb was separate from the idea that it might actually be used. The effects of radiation exposure on Luke and Sawbridge underscore the particular horror of radioactive fallout. Snow portrays ineffectual efforts to prevent the American use of the bomb. Also, the advantage of the West grates on Sawbridge and others, who provide information to the Soviets. In fact, it did not make an appreciable difference.

Finally the novel develops a tension between the two brothers. Lewis wants his brother’s success, which becomes a burden to Martin, who must struggle with his own ambitions and his brother’s expectations, whether in marriage or career. Then moral issues arise between the more pragmatic Lewis and idealistic Martin. First, they arise over going public in opposition to the bomb. Later, Lewis disagrees with Martin’s aggressive role in the prosecution of Sawbridge.

All this occurs against a backdrop of relational networks of Cambridge dons and Whitehall officials. These offer a glimpse of the alliance between academy and government, like the pipeline from Harvard into Washington during the “Best and the Brightest” years. Yet despite power and influence we see human flaws that undermine ambitions and aspirations, even between brothers.

Review: Loser Takes All

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Cover image of "loser Takes All" by Graham Greene.

Loser Takes All, Graham Greene. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780140185423) 1993 (first published in 1955).

Summary: On a honeymoon in Monte Carlo, Bertram’s gambling successes force a choice between love and money.

Mr. Bertram is getting married. Neither he nor Cary are affluent. He’s a low level accountant in a business firm, with few aspirations for advancement. But they are excited to share a frugal life with each other, beginning with a modest honeymoon in Bournemouth.

All that changes one day when he is called on to resolve some accounting problems for the firm’s director, Mr. Dreuther. He does so in short order. Bertram mentions his wedding plans and Dreuther insists on what is an enticing alternative. He invites him to go to Monte Carlo to get married, and then join him on his yacht for a sailing honeymoon. How can he and Cary say no to that!

They arrive in Monte Carlo. But there is no Mr. Dreuther. Bertram and Cary marry and enjoy their honeymoon suite. But they had not planned to stay. Bertram visits the casino in hopes of winning enough to afford it. They are living on snacks. At one point, the hotel even fronts him a loan as a member of Dreuther’s firm. He keeps losing until his “system” starts working and he wins enough to pay back the loan. He keeps winning, and at one point gains the balance of controlling shares in his firm from another firm director who has been losing at the tables.

But as he spends all his waking hours gambling or thinking about it, he loses something else. He loses Cary, who loved the hungry and poor Bertram, not this rich stranger. It all comes to a head when Bertram discovers Cary has moved out of their suite to be with a hungry young man she has met during all those days Bertram left her alone.

Then Dreuther shows up, pleading a breakdown to excuse his delay. He finds Bertram alone and hears the sad tale. Instead of counselling him to accept a failed marriage, Dreuther suggests a plan to win Cary back, a plan suggested by the book’s title.

The story is a kind of parable on the saying, “One cannot serve two masters.” In this case, Bertram must choose between love and money, and he chose poorly. Fortunately, we do not have to wait long in this short novel to discover whether Dreuther’s plan will allow him to redeem his poor choice.

___________

Thanks for visiting Bob on Books.  I appreciate that you spent time here. Feel to “look around” – see the tabs at the top of the website, and the right hand column. And use the buttons below to share this post. Blessings! [Adapted from Enough Light, a blog I follow.]

Review: Cutting for Stone

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Cover image of "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese.

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese. Vintage Books (ISBN: 9780375714368) 2010.

Summary: Twins Marion and Shiva were born amidst tragedy involving their mother’s death and father’s flight.

Marion Stone, the narrative voice of this work, and his twin brother Shiva were born amidst a tragedy. Their mother was Sister Mary Joseph Praise. Gifted surgeon Thomas Stone is their father. Both the Sister and Stone had arrived in Ethiopia seven years earlier, meeting on a boat from India. They worked together at “Missing” (actually Mission) Hospital in Addis Ababa. They were as one in the surgery theatre. She helped illustrate a textbook on surgery. And, mysteriously, they had become lovers (we only learn the circumstances at the close of the novel).

When the time of delivery was at hand, the babies can’t make it through the birth canal. The obstetrics doctor, Hema was away. Stone first attempts a botched abortion procedure. He freezes and can’t perform the needed Caesarian. Hema arrives in time to deliver the babies, who were attached at the head. Miraculously, they both live. But the mother dies and the father flees. Marion does not hear from him until he is an adult in America. However, Hema decides to raise the boys. And the one remaining staff doctor. Ghosh, takes over surgery in addition to general care. He also marries Hema and joins her in raising the boys. Clearly, they are better off than they would have been with Stone.

Ghosh mentors Marion in surgery. And Hema mentors Shiva in obstetrics and gynecology. He eventually develops an innovative procedure to treat women with fistulas. The boys are close, having been connected at birth. Yet their lives take unique courses. Eventually Shiva betrays Marion. Marion loved the daughter of the housekeeper and hoped to marry Genet. But Shiva slept with her. Betrayed by both, he is deeply depressed.

All this occurs against the backdrop of a turbulent period in Ethiopian history, first a failed coup attempt, and later, the Eritrean revolt, in which Genet plays a prominent role. Because of her tie with Marion, Marion flees Ethiopia to train as a trauma surgeon in a poor, New York hospital. It is here that he reconnects with Thomas Stone, a liver transplant specialist in Boston. Marion’s hospital is a source of many of those livers. The climax of the novel brings Marion together with the three people who had betrayed him. But will they find the reconciliation Ghosh, his step-father hoped for before he died?

Behind this theme lies another that I suspect is dear to Verghese–the calling of a doctor, and particularly a surgeon. The title, “cutting for stone” comes from the Hippocratic Oath as well as playing on Marion’s father’s name. Physicians swear not to operate for kidney stones, unless a specialist. Too many died at the hands of “lithologists” whose unsterile practices often killed their patients. In a scene during a conference, Thomas Stone asks,  “What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?” Marion, not yet known to him answers correctly, “Words of comfort.” Marion and Shiva’s step parents imparted this care for patients to the twins even as they emulated their father’s skill.

Last year, I read Verghese’s The Covenant of Water. His voice and storytelling capacity enthralled me. And so I sought out his earlier work. The same qualities are evident here. Verghese spins a compelling story. At the same time, he offers us layers of meaning and insight into the human experience. I look forward to his next work, which I suspect will be at least several years coming given the careful writing and length of his stories.

Review: Corridors of Power

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Cover image of "Corridors of Power" by C. P. Snow

Corridors of Power (Strangers and Brothers, 9), C. P. Snow. Open Road Media (ASIN: B0DCPBFBZT) 2024 (first published in 1964).

Summary: An ambitious member of Parliament challenges Britain’s nuclear policy in the aftermath of the Suez crisis.

The phrase “corridors of power” has come into common political parlance. And it is C.P. Snow we have to thank for this. However, its use in the title of this novel was not its first. Rather, it occurs in an earlier novel Homecomings published in 1956. Both this and the earlier novel are part of Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, written between 1940 and 1970. The novels narrate the education and career of civil servant, Lewis Eliot. This mirrors C. P. Snows own career, first as a physical chemist, turned civil servant, and later as a director of several science and technology organizations.

Eliot is serving an elderly cabinet minister at the opening of the novel, who is displaced, ostensibly due to ill health, by rising star Roger Quaife. Eliot continues to serve under him and is drawn into his ambitious, yet coldly realistic policy goals for the U.K. During this time, the country has come through the Suez Crisis, an episode revealing their declining power. Rather than to attempt to keep up pretenses, Quaife wants the U.K. to end its participation in the nuclear arms race, leaving it to the two rival superpowers. Much of the novel develops the efforts to politically sell this policy. Eliot’s role is to chair a committee of scientists to make recommendations about the policy. Quaife wants their endorsement, and all but a dissenting scientist get the message.

Eliot has another role to play as well. Quaife has the perfect political marriage, with a glamorous and influential wife (who is a good friend of Eliot’s wife). We follow them in the rounds of parties with rich and influential friends. But Quaife also is involved in an affair on the side. Eliot becomes involved when Quaife’s lover begins receiving letters threatening to expose the affair if Quaife doesn’t end it.

The novel builds toward twin crises as Quaife faces a political vote of confidence amid growing dissent over his proposed policy and his wife’s ultimatum to Quaife to end the affair. He has dazzled with his consummate political skills. But will that be enough to carry him through these crises?

The novel serves as a commentary on the U.K.’s relative waning power, yet is far ahead of the times. As of 2025, the U.K. is still a nuclear power and significant NATO partner. Whether it was Snow’s intent, it also seemed a commentary on the vacuity of political power. Indeed, I wondered whether Quaife’s affair was the one thing of meaning, of real humanity in a life taken up with ambition and power.

I think I only knew of Snow through his book The Two Cultures describing the breakdown of communication between the sciences and humanities. I came across this work as a deal in e-book format, not realizing it was part of a series. Even though it was the ninth in the series, it reads well as a standalone. I just might try a few more!

Review: The Spectator Bird

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Cover image of "The Spectator Bird" by Wallace Stegner.

The Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner. Vintage (ISBN: 9780525431879) 2017 (first published in 1976).

Summary: A postcard from a Countess leads a retired literary agent and his wife to revisit the time they’d spent with her.

A postcard interrupts the routines of Joe Alston, a retired New York literary agent, living in California, near Stanford. Mostly, he spends his days caring for his home with his wife, Ruth, attending cultural events, and comparing maladies with other seniors his age. The postcard, from Astrid upsets all that. Astrid was an impoverished countess the two of them had stayed with in Denmark back in 1954.

In 1954, their son had recently drowned in the ocean, whether by accident or on purpose was unclear. Joe and he had constantly fought. The loss reminded Joe of other losses. His father, a railroader, died in his infancy. His mother had emigrated from Denmark, and he hoped understanding something of her background would help root his rootless life.

Joe had kept a collection of journals of that trip that he dug out. When Ruth finds him with them, she asks about why he has pulled these out, and asks if he would read them. So, in the evenings, he would read portions. And as the visit unfolded, the countess revealed the peculiar secret of her family and its own attempts to achieve a kind of genealogical purity. It is a story, that as it turns out, is connected with Joe’s mother’s emigration.

The account is broken up with present day events. A celebrity visits amid a storm and power outage, regaling Joe with his adventures and urging Joe to return to life. Then, clearing the aftermath of the storm, Joe feels his age, suffering several maladies, comforted by Ruth’s care. A neighbor delivers a woodchipper Joe has had occasion to borrow. It is a gift, with the unspoken message being that the neighbor, dying of cancer, will not need it.

Several themes come together in this finely crafted story. Firstly, it is a story about aging. It is not only about the physical indignities of age but also the assessing of what one’s life has meant. Secondly, it is about revisiting the unexamined ambiguities of one’s past. The journal revealed Joe’s fascination with the countess, one both he and Ruth had been aware of. Although he had not acted upon it, it was one of the ambiguities of the couple’s life together.

Finally, we come to Joe’s whole approach to life, that of the “spectator bird,” the observer rather than the participant. He was the literary agent, working for the success of his clients. His journal in Denmark is another exercise in observation. Did he feel an observer with his son, unable to prevent his self-destruction? He describes himself as “just killing time until time gets around to killing me.”

I found myself identifying with Joe. We are the same age and at similar stages in life. There are the indignities of a body that doesn’t always do what you want and imposes its own limits. Then, having laid down one’s career, one wonders what it has meant. And there is the complex companionship of a long marriage, both the deep and comforting bond and the awareness of what an imperfect work of art it has been and one’s own part in those imperfections. One is aware of being loved far beyond what one deserves.

As Joe and Ruth read and process the journals and revisit the past, we await to see whether this will help them make sense of their lives. Will they find the sense and meaning that will enable them to navigate their remaining years with some quality of equanimity? Will we?

Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

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Cover image of "The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry" by Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin. Algonquin Books (ISBN: 9781616204518) 2014.

Summary: A widowed bookseller’s life changes when a rare book disappears and an orphaned child is left in his care.

Amelia Loman didn’t deserve this. She’s on her first sales calls, representing Knightly Press. She’s taken the ferry to Alice Island, where she has an appointment to meet the owner of Island Books, A. J. Fikry. He’s terribly rude and doesn’t appear to be interested in anything in her winter catalog. She even manages to knock over a pile of Advanced Reader Copies stacked in the hallway to his office. But all she can do is leave a book she has really liked in his office along with the winter catalog.

A. J. Fikry is not yet forty and a widower. His wife, Nic, with whom he started the bookstore on a resort island, had been killed in an auto accident. Since then, he’s been drinking and the store’s sales are slumping. His sister-in-law Ismay, married to a fading, once best-selling author, tries to help. She even took him to an estate sale where he found a rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane. He buys it for $5 but figures it is worth $400,000. It’s kind of an insurance policy.

The night of Amelia’s visit, he pulls out Tamerlane as he drinks himself into oblivion. When he wakes the next morning, the book has disappeared. But, in a strange turn, the officer, Lambiase, who takes the police report, becomes a regular visitor to the bookstore. Then he starts a popular book group for those who read detective fiction. Meanwhile, A.J. helps him broaden his reading interests.

While Lambiase was taking the police report, A. J. had a seizure, something that had occurred throughout his life. When a trip to the hospital reveals nothing wrong, except for his depression, the only recommendation is that he get exercise. One day, on returning from a run, he finds the door to his store, which he leaves unlocked, ajar. On investigating, he discovers a baby in the children’s section. With her, he finds a note introducing the baby as Maya and that the mother, who can’t care for her wants her to grow up in a place with books. With Ismay’s help, he figures out how to care for her, The next day, Maya’s mother’s body washes ashore.

Lambiase explains the realities of the foster system, and against all his instinct’s A.J. decides to fulfill the mother’s last wish. The town is abuzz. Then he adopts her, and gives her the middle name Tamerlane. She has become the most valuable thing in his life, an unexpected replacement for the missing book. And A.J.’s heart begins to open up as Maya blossoms into an amazing daughter.

Remember Amelia? She keeps calling and A. J. discovers he likes discussing books with her. He looks forward to her visits. And the wonder of it is that Amelia, who has had her own disappointments with men, finds herself drawn to this one. And she finds herself marrying the guy who had treated her so rudely on her first sales call.

Gabrielle Zevin writes a story of how tenderness, friendship, and love arise out of tragedy. And for booklovers, it all happens in a bookstore! Another bookish device are the “shelftalkers” that open each chapter, written as we later learn, for his daughter Maya, who loves books and writing beyond her mother’s hopes. This is the second Zevin novel I have read this year, and she is one of my “author finds” of the year.