Literary fiction

Review: The Covenant of Water

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The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese. New York: The Grove Press, 2023.

Summary: The story of three generations of the family of Big Ammachi of Parambil, the ever present reality of “the Condition” resulting in a drowning in every generation, a story both of love and the hope in advances in medicine.

Twelve year old Mariamma has been engaged in a brokered marriage to a forty year old widow, the owner of a 500 acre estate near the town of Parambil. Her mother tells her, “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding….After that, God willing, it gets better.” I began reading with a sense of foreboding of what would happen to this girl in the house of this man. And I was surprised. At the wedding, he runs away, mortified that she is a mere child. But they wed. And he leaves her to her own room, and lets her learn the management of the household, lets her mature, lets her bond with his son, JoJo, and lets her realize that he has loved her by providing her time to come to love him. And so begins this incredible story spanning three generations within the Mar Thoma Christian community of South India.

When JoJo falls into what is little more than a puddle and drowns, she learns of “The Condition.” It explains the distance of the house from the river, the fact that her husband will not travel on the water. She is shown a genealogy. Every generation has a death from drowning. And JoJo’s name is added. Eventually Mariamma, who has become Big Ammachi, a capable manager of her household, bears another child, a girl with a developmental difficulty leaving her a perpetual child. Baby Mol brings perpetual love and an uncanny prescience about events. Fifteen years pass, and at a point of giving up hope, Big Ammachi has a son, named Philipose.

Philipose has the condition. Sent to college in Madras, he soon quits due to deafness that impedes his ability to follow the lectures. On the carriage home, he meets Elsie Chandy, an artist, and is smitten. They’d had a brief encounter when Philipose risked his life carrying a dying child on a river barge during floods to the nearest hospital, and was given a ride home by Elsie and her father. He strives to educate himself and becomes a writer, producing a column, “The Ordinary Man” widely followed throughout the country. Eventually, through a broker, Elsie’s family agrees to the marriage. It seems like a beautiful love affair, that sadly ends with the tragic death of their child Ninan. They blame each other and Philipose, injured trying to rescue Ninan, falls into opium addiction. Elsie leaves but returns when she learns Baby Mol is pining for her, and in failing health. Philipose and Elsie are intimate once and it is soon evident that Elsie is pregnant. As she approaches delivery, she has a seizure. Big Ammachi assists in a difficult breech birth, nearly costing the mother her life.

The baby is named Mariamma, after her grandmother. Soon after her recovery, Elsie disappears after going to the river to bathe, her body never found. Philipose sorts out his life, becomes an exemplary father, and continues his writing work, turning over his estate to Shamuel, and eventually, Shamuel’s son Joppan, to operate. Big Ammachi has dreamed of both a hospital in Parambil, and that her grand-daughter would become a doctor and find the cause of “The Condition” that plagues her family.

The book also involves a parallel plot line in which a young Scottish doctor, Digby Kilgour, goes to India to acquire surgical experience. Working for an incompetent superior, he has an affair with the superior’s wife, ending in a tragic fire that only he survives, with his right hand badly burned. A couple, grateful for an earlier medical intervention on his part, shelter him and connect him with a doctor working with lepers, who operates on his hand. He is helped by a young girl who helps him recover fine movements in the hand through drawing. Through much of the novel, we wonder what the what the connection of this plotline is with the main plotline of Big Ammachi and her family. Hang in there. There is one.

The story spans the period from 1900 to 1977. India goes through huge transformations through this time that serve as a backdrop for the novel, from a British colony par excellence to an independent country, seeking to modernize amid political ferment, with the electrification of the countryside and advances in medicine and modern technology. We get some sense in the novel of how this presses against traditional caste divisions, particularly in the relations between the family of Big Ammachi and Shamuel and his son Joppan.

I found the writing particularly engaging. It felt to me that Abraham Verghese writes with the same reverence for his characters that he has for his patients (he is a Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford). One senses a deep sympathy for his characters, even as they struggle with tragedy, estrangement, and the vicissitudes of life and death. He portrays a community shaped by faith, love, and purpose. And he conveys the noble possibilities of the medical profession, evident in Rune Orquist, the doctor of a leper mission who operates on Kilgour’s hand, and in Mariamma, and the professors who train her. To read Verghese is to read a consummate story weaver who has thought deeply about the human condition in its frailty and fallibility, in the powerful bonds upon which our lives and loves depend, and in the hopes and holy aspirations that represent the best in human striving.

Review: A Quiet Life

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A Quiet Life, Kenzaburo Oe (Translators: Kunioki Yanagishita, William Wetherall). New York: Grove Press, 1998.

Summary: Ma-chan, a quiet, college age woman is left to care for her older brother who has a neurological disorder and younger, college-bound brother while her father, a famous writer, sorts out his life and faith in California on a writer’s residency.

All Ma-Chan wants is to live a quiet life, writing her thesis on Celine, a French novelist, while caring for her brother, nicknamed Eeyore, who suffers from epileptic fits that have caused brain damage, yet left him with an unusual musical talent. She has been more or less marginalized, an orphan even before her parents left Japan for California. Her parents tended to focus on the afflictions of the older brother and the promise of the younger brother, O-Chan, preparing for his college entrance exams while his parents are in America, Her father, a famous writer, has left for a writer’s residency in California. In reality, he is suffering from a “pinch” of the spirit, having suffered a loss of faith that causes him to wonder “how is a faithless person to cope with life?”

Ma-Chan is left to cope at a more practical level. She has to help her older brother deal with his sexual urges in socially appropriate ways while seeing that he gets to his sheltered workshop each day. She has to help others understand her brother’s seizures and resist their mockery of him, often in internal cries of “Hell no! Hell no!” She also takes him to the Shigetos, who help Eeyore discover and develop his unique gift for musical composition. One of these is titled “Sutego” or orphan. Both brother and sister are orphans together.

Eventually, it is recommended that Eeyore take swim lessons to channel some of his physical energies. It is here that they meet Mr. Arai, a shady character who agrees to teach Eeyore to swim. And he is very good at it and a bond develops between them, even as everything in us screams “predator!” Mr Shigeto starts watching out for them until a confrontation with Arai in which Mr. Shigeto is severely beaten, opening the way for Mr. Arai to pursue his designs.

The “quiet life” Ma-Chan wants comes at the cost of submerging her own selfhood. She describes herself as “robotizing.” She sees herself as a skinny thing with stick legs, oblivious of her own sexuality and that others might notice her. Yet there are her “Hell Nos” and her “Diary of Life,” written that “her papa might remember he has a family.” One comes to the end of this novel wondering whether Ma-Chan will find her voice and her self in more than a diary and her internal monologue. Will she heed the self that says “Hell No!” or let her father treat her as an orphan while he pursues an esoteric spiritual search? Will she emerge as the scholar in her own right?

Many of us want a quiet life. Life doesn’t always permit this, and more than that, at what price do we secure such a life? Is it at the price of our selves? Must we robotize? It seems these are the questions Oe’s novel asks of us. Meanwhile, he seems to take a swipe at the pretensions of literary figures who think their existential “pinches” more important than the real pinches they make those around them endure.

Review: Bastille Day

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Bastille Day, Greg Garrett. Brewster, MA: Raven/Paraclete Press, 2023.

Summary: A brief love affair with a beautiful Muslim woman who he rescues from a suicide leads Cal Jones to come to terms with losses and traumatic memories and to discover that he is not alone.

Brave. And broken. Like James Bond. That is how Calvin Jones describes himself. Jones had been a war correspondent in Iraq where both his father and driver Khalid died in bomb attacks. He blamed himself for Khalid. He fled to the security of working at a local news station. For ten years. Life was good. He was in a serious relationship with Kelly McNair, an interior designer. They looked good together. Sex was pretty good. Then, before his eyes at a Black Lives Matter rally five police die including the officer he was riding with, who he watches bleed out before his eyes. The man had protected him with his life. And all the dreams, never distant, came back.

Rob, a fellow correspondent, sensing the troubled state of a former colleague invites him to join Rob’s news agency in Paris to cover terror attacks in Europe. He arrives the Monday before Bastille Day (July 14) in 2016. While waiting to meet Rob in Harry’s New York Bar he meets a beautiful Muslim woman, Nadia, highly educated but unhappy. In days she will be married to a Saudi millionaire, an arranged marriage that will greatly benefit her family. Except she doesn’t want this marriage and has contemplated suicide, jumping off a bridge into the Seine. As they part, he gives her his business card. Call, if she needs to talk. He doesn’t expect to hear from her. The marriage is in five days.

Out on a run, he receives a text. She is at the bridge, ready to jump. By providence, he is near, and when she jumps, he goes after her, rescues her, and takes her back to his apartment to dry off. And so begins an improbable love affair. He realizes that he never loved Kelly and that he does love this woman and doesn’t want her to marry the millionaire, even as she grapples with the implications for her family, herself, and even other Saudi women, if she refuses to take the burqah.

Amid all this, the Nice truck attack occurs, in which a Muslim, shouting Allahu-akbar (“God is greater”), drove a truck for a mile down a boulevard crowded with Bastille Day celebrants, killing or injuring 500. Cal is sent along with cameraman Ahmed, to cover the attack. It surfaces all the memories, the trauma, the anger. And he takes it out on Nadia, forgetting all he has learned of her and other honorable Muslim friends. Too late, he realizes how he has wronged the woman he loved and desperately tries to communicate. Silence.

He is a wreck. Drinking too much. Barely holding it together. Yet loved. By his Uncle Jack in Texas who would hop on a plane in a moment, talks straight sense. He and his wife pray like crazy. By Rob and his wife, going through a rough patch in their own marriage. By a former military chaplain and by Clarice, the dean of the American cathedral. And by Allison, an attractive lesbian and good friend. They have faith when Cal has lost his. No cliches. Presence. Honesty. Love.

Cal will need it. To face the complicated relationship with his deceased father. His guilt over Khalid. Over the police officer. Over Kelly who he does not love. He is broken and needs to find “brave” within it. Especially with Nadia who he can’t bear to lose despite the obligations she faces.

This is an adult novel from a Christian publisher. There is sex outside of marriage, though not graphically portrayed. There is violence that is graphically described. There is also a quietly compelling Episcopal community (as well as Uncle Jack) who make space to include Cal in their journey as far as he will go. He is both skittish from a fundamentalist youth, and broken from the horrors he has seen, including the horror he sees in himself. We wait to see how brave will he be.

Greg Garrett offers a finely drawn story occuring in the space of a week, peopled with characters we come to love, including Frederick the bartender at Harry’s New York Bar. We consider Christian-Muslim relations, in ways integral to, but never overshadowing, the plot. The dialogue is never trite, but reflects people who care about their lives and those of others, wrestling with fraught choice, life’s ambiguities, and the unanswered questions of suffering and loss. I will be thinking about Cal, Nadia and their friends for awhile…

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

Review: The Last Chairlift

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The Last Chairlift, John Irving. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Summary: The son of a former slalom skier tries to make sense of the ghosts he sees, the father he never knew, and the different ways people love, and fail to love.

John Irving has written a number of novels, at least several of which might be judged among the great American novels: Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The World According to Garp. All of these were written in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Where does this, which Irving describes as his “last long novel” rank among these others? I’ll get to this by the end of this review.

This is definitely a long novel, 889 pages in my edition. It spans the lifetime of the narrator, Adam Brewster, from his conception in 1941 until 2021–eighty years. His mother, Rachel “Little Ray” Brewster was an off-the-podium slalom skier in the 1941 Olympics in Aspen. She comes away, not with a medal, but a pregnancy, after a brief affair with an attractive young boy hanging around the Jerome Hotel who she never contacts again. She describes Adam as her “one and only,” which has more than one meaning for her.

He’s raised mostly by his grandmother and increasingly demented grandfather, the “Diaper Man.” Little Ray is gone in the winter months, working as a ski instructor and living with Molly, a trail groomer. But she and Adam are close–in fact so close she sleeps with him into adolescence–including one instance with unconsummated sexual overtones.

An English teacher in town eventually becomes a mentor. Elliot Barlow coaches wrestling as well as Adam’s writing aspirations. He’s small, but strong not only physically but in other ways. Adam, who hates skiing, despite his mother, takes to snowshoeing with Elliot. Little Ray meets him and they fall for each other.

Their wedding is a series of bizarre incidents including everyone overhearing niece Nora and her companion, the mute Em as Em climaxes. The wedding is accompanied by a zithermeister. A storm hits and the Diaper Man is electrocuted. And Adam stumbles upon his mother and Molly in bed together. It turns out that the marriage of Little Ray and Elliot is cover for both, even though they really do love each other, but not as man and wife. Elliot wants to be a woman, and eventually transitions and becomes “she.”

Adam learns that there are many ways for people to love each other. And the book depicts many ways people have sex with each other, including Adam in his attic, along with the ghosts, which literally scare the crap out of one girlfriend. In fact, the book seems to describe the varieties of sexual relationship other than a reasonably healthy marital one (Adam’s son is conceived before his marriage). And we hear about it in several chapters set at the Gallows, a New York comedy club where Nora and Em have an act, Two Dykes, One Who Talks. Nora does the talking and Em mimes, off stage as well as on. It is an odd set of relationships and yet they all care deeply for each other, and especially for Adam.

I mentioned ghosts. Adam not only sees the ghost of the Diaper Man, who hangs about the house, but a group that hangs around the Jerome Hotel–miners, Mr. Jerome, a maid, and others including a small, young, early adolescent boy wearing an oversized sweater and girlish ski hat. Unlikely as it seems, he begins to wonder if this might be his father. Then he sees the work of screenwriter and actor Paul Goode, whose resemblance to both the boy and to Adam himself is striking. Adam wonders if his own growing talent as a writer and his screenwriting aspirations come from his father.

There are two climactic scenes at the Jerome, both marked with tragedy. Both are written as screenplays rather than regular text and in them Adam encounters Goode, all too briefly. More significantly, they mark a transition of Adam from a serial lover to a father, even as his own marriage is breaking up and he is transitioning to the most enduring, albeit, unusual relationship that lasts to the end of the book.

The last chairlift. Chairlifts are a place of death throughout this novel, one tragic and others where the last chairlift marks a fitting coda on the lives of those brought down the mountain for the last time. One wonders if Irving sees this story as a coda, a last chairlift in his life. He explores in unconventional ways the themes of love and death so basic to literature, the sexual politics of his (and my) generation including the neglect of the Reagan administration toward AIDs, as well as the search for a missing parent that haunts so many young.

So what do I make of this work? Overall, I felt it undisciplined and overlong. I wonder if it tries to do too much. It seemed at times like a series of short stories (or screenplays) written by the narrator stitched into a book relatively unedited. Yet Irving gives us memorable characters, humorous moments, and a complicated yet coherent plot arc. I don’t consider it among his greatest works yet it bears the marks of his skill and his sensibilities. And for many readers, that is reason enough to engage “this last long novel.”

Review: The Captain and the Enemy

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The Captain and the Enemy, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (orginally published in 1988).

Summary: A boarding school boy is taken to live with a poor woman in a London flat by a confidence man called “The Captain,” who sporadically visits, provides money and seems to care for the woman, Liza, who become’s “Jim’s” mother. Only years later does he understand more about this mysterious figure, and the various relations in his life.

There is much in the setup to this story that stretches plausibility. Victor Baxter, a boarding school student whose distant father is known as “The Devil” is taken out of school one day by a distinguished figure of military bearing, only known as the Captain. That things are not on the up and up becomes clear when, first The Captain asks the boy to lend him what little money he has, and then takes him for an extravagant meal at a hotel, charges it to his room, and then leaves without paying for anything. They are driven to a poorer part of London, to a basement flat, where a poor young woman, Liza lives. The Captain instructs Victor that he is to call her mother and that he will be Jim, and will not be going back to school. He tells Victor/Jim and Liza that he won the boy in a game of backgammon from his father.

The Captain shows up sporadically, always giving Liza assistance, though the source of the money is obscure. Newspaper reports of jewelry thefts mention a figure like The Captain in description, and there are times when he must make himself scarce and times they are not to answer the door to anything but his signal. When he is present, The Captain gives history and geography lessons that suggest wartime escapes and flights. It’s evident that he cares for Liza, that there is some deep bond. “Jim’s” role as he becomes older is to look out for Liza in The Captain’s absence–more prolonged now that he is in Panama. His letters promise wealth around the corner, but again, don’t mention where this will come from.

“The Devil” also shows up and doesn’t challenge the arrangement. It turns out that Liza had been a mistress of his, became pregnant, and a botched abortion resulted in her inability to have children. Through The Captain, one child of the Devil replaces another one lost. The Captain comes off as the noble trickster or confidence man, using deceit to accomplish his idea of the good.

As Jim grows up, he starts working for a newspaper, eventually moving out but staying in touch with Liza. The Captain, now going by Smith, sends money for them to come to Panama. Before she is able, Liza is struck by a car, on an errand Jim once ran. Jim decides to come to Panama, but conceals the truth of Liza’s death. He is met by Quigley, an acquaintance, but not a trusted friend of Smith, who seems very interested in knowing from Jim what the Captain is doing. Jim learns that it has to do with Smith’s plane, which he uses to haul “cargo” for various customers. Remember, this is in the late 1970’s. Jimmy Carter has signed a treaty to turn over the canal to Panama. There are various revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. Arms are needed, drugs are sold to pay for them. The latter part of the book have to do with the Captain’s efforts, supported by the Panamania government who set a guard on his lodgings, and Mr. Quigley’s real work behind the mask of a financial journalist.

The culmination of the story reveals more of this shadowy figure’s true character, his love for Liza, and Jim’s own relationship with The Captain/Smith. Personally, while I wanted to see how the story would resolve, I felt Greene stretched plausibility and the story didn’t work for me. How schools, family, and social structures let this happen, even after an aunt found out what was going on stretched credulity. I felt this was not up to the level of his great novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s although having the whiff of espionage, of characters who live in the shadows, and yet who love and long for purposeful lives. This one, written toward the end of his life in 1988 (he died in 1991), is for fans who want to read all of his works. I would not base my opinion of Greene on this work but rather ones like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana, all written before 1960.

Review: Demon Copperhead

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Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. New York: Harper Collins, 2022.

Summary: An adaptation of the David Copperfield story set in rural western Virginia, centering on a child, Demon Copperfield, raised by a single mom until she dies, the abuses of foster care he suffers, and after a football injury, the black hole of opioid addiction.

I’ll give you my opinion of this book up front. For me, this is one of the best, perhaps the best novel I’ve read this decade. It seems well-warranted that Kingsolver received a Pulitzer Prize for this book as well as its being an Oprah’s Book Club choice in 2022. Kingsolver worked off of good material, adapting Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to a story about a child in rural western Virginia, raised in the foster system, then succumbing to opioid addiction after a high school football injury.

Demon Copperhead got his name from his father, Damon Copperhead, who died before he was born in a swimming hole accident at the Devil’s Bathtub, a place that will haunt Demon throughout this story. His mother, an alcoholic and drug addict attempts to raise him, complicated by an abusive step-father. During an overdose, Demon gets his first exposure to the foster system, with social workers either blind or indifferent to the abuses of foster care givers in rural Lee County. At his first placement, Creeky’s Farm, he is basically seasonal farm labor, poorly fed and housed–a theme running throughout. Survival involves the other boys with whom he shares this placement. One, who becomes a long-term friend, Tommy, is comforted by comics Demon draws for him that makes him into a super-hero. The other, the oldest, who dominates this group by charisma and force is Fast Forward, high school star quarterback. Others do his bidding, and sometimes bear the brunt of his mistakes. It’s here that Demon is introduced to “pharm parties” and the prevalence of drugs circulating throughout Lee County, drugs that would soon take his mother’s life.

After that the foster world is his life, with no hope of escape. Another placement results in underage work sifting garbage for a storeowner fronting a meth lab. He literally escapes this by running away in search of a grandmother he’s never met in Tennessee, who helps wayward girls and who determines to make an exception and help him both financially and by using connections to find him a placement with Coach Winfield, a high school football coach, back in Lee County.

The grandmother is not the first to notice a resilience in Demon, that he is more than the “trailer trash” he thinks of himself as being. He grew up with the Peggott family including “Aunt June” Peggott, a nurse practitioner with a drop-dead beautiful daughter Emmy. They eventually returns from Nashville to Lee County, where June works as a nurse practitioner, on the front line of a rising opioid epidemic. Coach Winfield offers him the first decent home he has lived in, decent clothes, food, and more. Coach has a daughter, Angus (a play on Agnes, her actual name), who pretends to be a boy when first encountering Demon. She certainly is a maverick among all the girls he’s met, the closest thing to a sister that he has had who can talk with about his life, an utter straight shooter, and a non-conformist in the local culture. He also meets an art teacher, Miss Annie, who encourages his talent, trying to convince Demon that he has something special.

Coach recognizes that Demon has the talent to be a stellar tight end, big and fast with good hands. Eventually he plays on the high school team, becomes a chick magnet, until a knee injury puts an end to all that. Pain-killing drugs prescribed by the team doctor who also runs the town’s “pill mill” turns a boy already introduced to drugs into an opioid addict, sending him into a deep spiral along with his addict girlfriend Dori. June Peggott, who has been crusading against the companies flooding her community with these drugs tries and fails to help. In fact, her own daughter Emmy is swept up in drug trafficking by Fast Forward.

Kingsolver traces the heart-breaking descent of Dori and Demon, dropouts living together on love and drugs, going through a series of jobs lost, and the desperate quest for the next fix. Demon has been a resilient survivor with a gift, but will it be enough? Will those who see what Demon could become be able to help?

Kingsolver offers a compelling commentary on the failings of the foster care system and the tragedy of drug companies who targeted rural communities to make a “killing” by persuading doctors to prescribe their product to all those suffering pain from age, work injuries, or sports, or just the pain of life. From Demon’s mother to friends, Demon sees death all around him. Will this be his end?

But the other side of this story is the fabric of community, the “people capital” of these rural communities, who do the best that people can do. Loyalties–to family, to one’s buddies, like Tommy or the Peggott’s son Maggot, and in Demon’s case, to Dori even as she descends into addiction hell is another part of this story. We meet characters from Aunt June to Angusj to Annie and her husband, who show tough love without becoming co-dependent or enabling.

Finally, in the character and voice of Demon, Kingsolver has given us a narrator whose story is as compelling in a rural American setting as David Copperfield was in the urban poverty of Dickensian England. We hear the combination of self-doubt from all the destructive messages and personal failures, and the determination that burns within, and we keep reading to find out which will win out in the end.

Review: Ordinary Grace

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Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger. New York: Atria Books, 2013.

Summary: Two boys in a rural Minnesota town encounter a series of deaths, including one within their family, and discover something of the “awful grace of God.”

The writing of William Kent Krueger has been my discovery of this summer. How grateful I am for the person who recommended his work to me! Ordinary Grace is a standalone novel set in a rural Minnesota town in 1961. The story centers around Frank Drum, the narrator, and his younger brother, Jake. Jake stutters, and is often silent, but also always seeing and often insightful. Their father is a pastor, responsible for a three church charge. Their mother is a musician, once in love with the town’s music professor, Emil Brandt, who had returned from war blinded, physically and emotionally damaged, who lives with his sister Lise, a deaf spinster attached to Emil and to her garden. Instead, Ruth Drum ended up marrying Nathan Drum when he was ambitious to become a lawyer. War changed all that, a survivor of too many battles, having lost too many men, hearing a call from God amid the loss. Ruth tried to make the best of what she had not expected, living the life of a pastor’s life instead of being the spouse of an up and coming lawyer. Nathan came back with one of those he did not lose, Gus, who loves drink too much, gets into fights, lives in the church basement, getting by on odd jobs about the town. Surprisingly, Gus is a confidant of Nathan who he calls “Captain” and often advisor to the boys.

The other person in this circle is Ariel, the Drum’s daughter, just graduated from high school, a gifted singer and composer, headed to Juilliard, representing the unfulfilled dreams of her mother. She is dating Karl Brandt, nephew to Emil and son of the wealthy brewing family who live in a mansion at the top of the hill and drives a sporty convertible. At one point, Frank spots her slipping out in the middle of the night, returning before morning. Shortly after, she begins to reconsider her Juilliard plans.

The story spans a single summer, filled with a mixture of normal adventures, a scrap with Morris Engdahl, the town bully, at the quarry, where they get the best of him, and encounters with a mysterious Native American living in a shanty down by the river, Warren Redstone. It is also a story that progresses by a series of deaths to which Frank is a party–the first is Bobby Cole, a mentally challenged boy, struck by a train passing over a tressle near the town where Bobby was sitting. Then Frank spots the body of a mysterious stranger, an itinerant who had died. Redstone is nearby, but had nothing to do with the death.

The next death is the hardest. Ariel doesn’t come home after partying with friends following an event where a musical piece she wrote was performed. A desperate search follows but it is Frank who finds her spotting her body in the river. Engdahl, Redstone, and Emil all are suspects. For some mysterious reason Frank can’t explain, he lets Redstone escape when the authorities are in pursuit, probably saving his life.

The tragedy hits them all hard. Jake gives up on God. Ruth separates from Nathan, who represents the God with whom she is angry. The tragedy deepens with the results of the autopsy and the events that follow. The words of Aeschylus are used at one point, “the awful grace of God” and it is this Nathan wrestles with as he tries to grapple with this death and guide his broken family and flock. He says,

“‘I confess that I have cried out to God, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’…’When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame him and cry out against him for not caring? What’s left to us when that which we love most has been taken?

‘I will tell you what is left, three profound blessings. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul tells us exactly what they are: faith, hope, and love. These gifts, which are the foundation of eternity, God has given to us and he’s given us complete control over them. Even to the darkest night it’s still within our power to hold to faith. We can still embrace hope. And although we may ourselves feel unloved we can still stand steadfast in our love for others and for God. All this is in our control. God gave us these gifts and he does not take them back. It is we who choose to discard them.“

We see people wrestling with the hardest of tragedies and struggling to hold onto the ordinary graces of God as they face this “awful” grace–these seemingly inexplicable ways of God. People practice ordinary grace in all their brokenness–Gus and officer Doyle fighting and then forgiving, an outing on horses at Gus’s girlfriend Ginger’s farm, congregation members providing food, music, prayers. A moment when Ruth and Frank sit together on the tressle where he’d spotted Ariel’s body, and grieve and extend comfort to each other.

The phrase “ordinary grace” is actually used only once in the book. At a reception after the funeral services, Nathan is unable to offer a grace before the dinner, wordless in his own grief. People look at one another wondering who will pray. Jake, who has turned away from God, says he will. And he prays without stuttering. Frank recalls:

“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.” 

Jake never stuttered again, finding the miracle he needed to believe again.

Krueger plumbs the depths of the darkness of inexplicable tragedy, those places we are inclined to wonder where God is and to rail against God. In one sense, there are no answers to dispel the darkness. Yet Krueger leads us to believe that for those who hold on, there is the ordinary grace to go on, holding to faith, hope, and love. There is no grace to make life go smoothly and tragedy-free. Life is not like that. But Krueger, in these ordinary, broken people in a small town, reveals the unconditional love of God in the love they give each other, and the faith that turns to God in anger, grief, hope, and a prayer before a meal, in which a quiet miracle takes place.

Review: Kafka on the Shore

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Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami. New York: Vintage International, 2002.

Summary: In two parallel plots Kafka tries to escape a curse and find his mother and sister (and himself) and Nakata tries to recover the part of him lost during a strange school outing incident in his youth.

This represents my first encounter with Murakami, one that left me strangely fascinated. I’ve not always found myself drawn to magical realism, but I could not put this down.

The story involves two connected plots, advanced in alternating chapters. The first follows the title character Kafka, a fifteen year old who runs aways from his father, the famous sculptor Koichi Tamura, to search for his mother and sister, who left when he was four. He makes his way to Takamatsu where he meets an accommodating young woman, Sakura, who shelters him when he awakens to find himself covered with blood and no memory of how it got there. His trek eventually takes him to a private library in a former wealthy home administered by Miss Saeki, who many years before had recorded Kafka on the Shore, remembering a young lover lost. He’s welcomed and protected, by Oshima, a transgender man. For a time he lives at the library, and then when in danger of being found by the police, who are seeking him as a material witness in the murder of his father, Oshima shelters him in a cabin deep in a forest in the Kochi Prefecture

The second plot involves Nakata, an aging man who as a child was part of a group of school children who fell unconscious during a school outing during the Second World War. The others recovered to lead normal lives. After several weeks of lying unconscious, Nakata awakened but couldn’t remember anything and could no longer read or write or learn how to do so. He’d led a quiet life, working in a kind of sheltered furniture workshop. He eventually received a government subsidy on which he lived alone. He had a unique ability to understand the language of cats and to find lost ones and restore them to his owners. On one such search, he encounters a sinister character, Johnnie Walker, who has been capturing and beheading cats to make a magic flute. To recover the cat he is seeking, Johnnie Walker tells Nakata that he must either kill Johnnie Walker or he will kill the cat. Nakata, utterly non-violent, eventually does so, returns the cat, and then flees. Hitchhiking, he meets up with Hoshino who takes him to Takamatsu, where they have a variety of strange adventures including an encounter with Colonel Sanders, who is a kind of spirit guide (or concept).

That raises one of the main ideas in the novel–the way spirits leave the body encountering others. Though Kafka has fled his father to evade a kind of Oedipal curse, Kafka’s bloody clothes episode and Nakata’s murder of Johnnie Walker, who turns out to be Koichi Tamura, occur at the same time. Miss Saeki visits the room where Kafka sleeps in the library each night as a fifteen year old girl looking at a painting, eventually having sex with him, as later Miss Saeki herself does.

As I mentioned, there is a kind of Oedipal curse going on with Kafka, murdering his father, and sleeping with both mother (Miss Saeki) and sister (Sakura, in a violent rape dream).

Meanwhile, Nakata is also on a quest of the kind that he knows it when he finds it, trying to the patience of Hoshino, who is also transformed by his time with the old man. He’s only had a thin shadow since the childhood incident. Likewise, Miss Saeki, always at her desk writing…and waiting.

Two people, Nakata and Miss Saeki, trying to find what was lost. Kafka, trying to find himself, in his lost mother and sister. And Oshima? What is his role? Perhaps as a wiser guide than Crow, the alter ego of Kafka (which in Czech means “crow” or “jackdaw”), who just tells him he has to be “the toughest fifteen-year-old in the world.” As the novel concluded, I found myself wondering, what of Oshima? 

There is so much more, and I find myself with many questions like this one. It’s a book that invites multiple readings. As one may pick up from this review, there are scenes of violence, a vivid dream of a rape, and descriptions of sexual intimacies, so this may not be for everyone. None of it is gratuitous (well, maybe the scene in which Colonel Sanders fixes up Hoshino with a hooker, although there is something going on with sexual energy here). There is also the compelling power of music, whether it is Miss Saeki’s Kafka on the Shore or Beethoven’s Archduke Trio. I wonder about archetypes, if that is the right word, like Colonel Sanders and Johnnie Walker. This is one of those books I’ve finished but it isn’t finished with me….

Review: The Dutch House

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The Dutch House, Ann Patchett. New York: HarperCollins, 2019.

Summary: Two siblings, Maeve and Danny, seek to come to terms with past losses of parents, and their childhood home, a striking three-story home built by a Dutch couple.

This story, it seems to me is about the longings of people who care for each other, often at variance with each other, resulting in wounds of estrangement, with which we may spend a lifetime trying to come to terms. So it is with siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy, born seven years apart. Their father, an aspiring real-estate tycoon has bought an extravagant house in an old Dutch neighborhood of Philadelphia, once owned by the Van Hoebeek’s, whose forbidding portraits and presence fill the house. Danny, who has never known anything else is the narrator of this account. Conroy’s wife Elna, who nearly became a nun, cannot come to terms with a place so extravagant. Her absences become longer until she leaves permanently, devoting herself to a life helping the poor, first in India and later, at various places in the United States, including New York’s Bowery.

Cyril’s ambitions, represented in his growing portfolio of properties leaves him vulnerable to the longings of Andrea, who becomes his second wife, bringing her two daughters. She has no problem seeing the house as hers. She relegates Maeve to a third floor bedroom so her daughter Norma can have her room. When Cyril, making repairs on one of his buildings, drops dead of a heart attack, Andrea expels Danny from the house, forcing him to live with Maeve. Soon they learn they have been cut out of their father’s company and assets apart from an educational trust for Danny and Andrea’s two girls.

Maeve already has a job as chief financial officer for a frozen vegetable concern and uses acumen to look after her brother, using the trust first to send him to Columbia, and then through medical school. She pours her life out for Danny, who strikes me as spoiled and self-absorbed, at times, to the detriment of her own health as a diabetic. It seems her longing is to be needed. Yet the question of what Danny wanted wasn’t asked. Finally after his medical training, he pursues what he wants–to be like the father he had followed around collecting rents and making repairs as a boy. That longing clashes with his wife, Celeste who thought she was marrying a doctor, anticipating the life of a doctor’s wife.

Meanwhile, Maeve and Danny continue to wrestle with the father and mother they lost, symbolized by the Dutch House. Repeatedly, they sit together, parked across the street wondering why their mother had left, why their father had so compromised their interests, and what had become of their evil stepmother. They try to understand their past and its hold on their lives. It turns out that they end up being versions of the parents they had lost.

I’ve often wrestled with what I’ve felt to be the unsatisfying endings of many of Patchett’s books. For one, I felt that Patchett wrote an ending I found to be satisfying. Not everyone lives happily ever after but there are real resolutions, real reconciliations. Danny, as narrator, grows in a trajectory of maturity and character. I’ll leave you to discover how Patchett accomplishes this. Like her other novels, she explores the unique ways in which families can be unhappy. In the resolution of this one, I found it satisfying in the authentic growth of the characters. I leave to you to discover how she does this and what you think.

Review: The Shadow of the Wind

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The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Translated by Lucia Graves). New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Summary: Daniel Sempere’s life is changed when he finds a mysterious book in the Cemetery of Lost Books, and embarks on a quest to learn the true story of its mysterious author, one that places him in great peril.

Daniel Sempere is the son of a widowed bookseller, struggling to retain the memory of his mother’s face. Then his father takes him through the labyrinthine streets of Barcelona to the Cemetery of Lost Books where he is directed to find one book that would become his. The book he chooses will be one he is to make sure never disappears. The book he chooses is one titled The Shadow of the Wind by a Julian Carax. He is enthralled and would know more about its author.

His father sends him to a fellow bookseller, from whom he learns that he possesses the only copy, all the others having been burned. He falls for the man’s blind daughter, several years older than he, and even gives her the book at one point, only to catch her in flagrante with her piano teacher. He retrieves the book.

A mysterious, and seemingly sinister figure approaches him to buy the book. He calls himself Lain Coubert, the name of a character in the book. He smells of smoke and his face darkened, shriveled. Daniel refuses, keeps his commitment to the book, and to learning the truth of Carax. He is aided by a beggar, Fermin, who he and his father take in. Fermin turns out to be a fascinating figure, and his and Daniel’s investigations take them on escapades throughout the city, one of the funniest in an asylum where they make a promise to a horny old man, He becomes Daniel’s mentor in the art of love as Daniel falls in love with his friend Tomas’ sister Beatriz.

Their investigations bring upon them an old enemy of Fermin in the form of police detective Fumero, an ambitious figure who pushed a mentor to his death, and has a vendetta against Carax. Their investigations also lead to a woman with a connection to Carax’s publisher, Nuria Monfort. They learn that Carax had been in love with Penelope. the daughter of the powerful Aldaya family, coveted by Fumero. In the end, he flees to Paris, where Nuria came in contact with him. He was supposed to have returned to Barcelona for Penelope, only to have supposedly died in a duel–Julian’s father seems to indicate that it was not his son whose body was found. It turns out that Nuria knows much more, revealed in a letter she writes for Daniel when she realizes her own life is in danger. It occupies the last third of the novel, revealing the truth about Carax, as well as truths of which Carax was unaware.

The reader notices the parallels between Julian Carax and Daniel. Both worked for fathers, with mothers dead or estranged. Lain Coubert, a character of Carax, haunts Daniel. Then there are the loves of Julian and Daniel, including Daniel’s trysts with Beatriz in the abandoned Aldaya mansion. Above all, there is the book, and Daniel’s quest to know its author.

It’s a plot that drew me in, along with the delightful and sometimes riotous relationship between Daniel and Fermin. One almost can visualize their Barcelona (and the book includes a walking tour of the real places). Zafón has been compared to the likes of Eco and Marquez. I actually preferred Zafón, whose writing involved more realism and less magic, One delights in the affection of Daniel’s father for his son, and the loyalty between Daniel and Fermin, who supplants his friendship with Tomas. The one plot element I wonder about was using Nuria Monfort’s letter to unravel the mystery of Carax. So much of the story is in that letter, which is a engrossing read, but one wonders if Zafón could not find another way to unravel the story through the investigations of Daniel and Fermin.

The novel doesn’t end with the letter bur I will refrain from saying much more except to say, what an ending, well worth the 450 pages that precede it!