Literary fiction

Review: The Captain and the Enemy

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

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

/ rtrube54 / 5 Comments

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

/ rtrube54 / 3 Comments

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

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

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

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

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

/ rtrube54 / 4 Comments

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!

Review: Lucy by the Sea

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Lucy by the Sea, Elizabeth Strout. New York: Random House, 2022.

Summary: Lucy Barton goes with her ex-husband William to a house on the coast of Maine during the COVID lockdown of 2020.

On a premonition, Lucy Barton cancelled her book tour in Europe. Then her ex-husband William, a parasitologist, shows up at her apartment and insists that she pack up and leave with him to get out of New York City to an out of the way place in Maine. It is early March of 2020 and COVID-19 has arrived in New York City. William has followed the epidemic and can foresee what is in store. He wants to get Lucy and their daughters out of the city. Reluctantly, she closes up her place and goes with him to an old house with character on the coast of Maine, found for them by an old friend, Bob Burgess.

Much of the book is Lucy’s interior monologue. We go through those early weeks that we all remember of hearing of the rapidly climbing number of infections, of friends getting sick, of worries about family, particularly Lucy’s younger daughter, who wants to stay in New York with her loser boyfriend. We re-live socially distanced and masked encounters. And we remember lives reduced to daily routines of household life, Zoom calls, walks outdoors, punctuated by the news. At points, like many of us, Lucy wonders if she is losing her mind, or at least her memory. We relive that growing recognition both of how bad things were and that this wouldn’t be solved by a few weeks of lockdown.

Sharing a house with your ex raises all kinds of memories for both of them. William had gone on to a number of affairs and failed marriages. Chastened by age and health issues, he takes stock of all the failures in his life. For both of them, as they watch one daughter in an unhealthy relationship and another unable to have children and going through a rocky period in their marriage, they relive their own failed relationship as they try to offer what help parents can and cannot do, as they re-negotiate their relationships with their adult children, and with each other. I will leave you to find out how being in lockdown together works out for them.

Bob Burgess, whose wife is the town minister, becomes Lucy’s sounding board as they take walks together. Like so many of us, Lucy has to sort out all her feelings about those who don’t wear masks, including a sister who has converted to a conservative form of Christianity, who nearly dies but doesn’t. for all those who support the current president, for those who refuse the vaccine including a woman who she works with at a food pantry.

What is striking is that we see both her interior reactions and a posture of listening, of just trying to understand and not change. Coming to terms with some of the wounds of her own past, she finds herself in a place of gentleness with others, something I wish I could have achieved at times during this period.

Strout portrays people who grew during the isolation of lockdown. They examined their own and other’s flawed and broken and yet unique lives, and the efforts to love as best as they could. They nurtured relationships even as it appeared the country was trying to tear itself apart.

This is not a book to read if you don’t want to relive those years. But I found that the reading reminded me of my own journey of trying to make sense of our radically changed lives and country. And I got to do this with this delightful woman, Lucy Barton. I wonder to what degree she is an alter ego of Elizabeth Strout. What I do know is that I’ve loved her Olive Kitteridge books and this as well (Olive makes a kind of cameo appearance!). And there was the delightful discovery, in writing this review, that there are several previous Lucy Barton books. You can bet that I will be on the lookout for them!

Review: Third and Long

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Third and Long, Bob Katz. Minneapolis: Trolley Car Press, 2010.

Summary: When a drifter, once a Notre Dame football star, shows up in Longview, Ohio, he quickly becomes the town’s hope to save its major factory, lead its football team to victory, and maybe save the town.

He’d drifted from town to town after a brief football career, dropping out of Notre Dame. With experience in clothing manufacturing, he got off the train in Longview, Ohio in 1997 to apply for a job as factory manager of the Made Right Clothing Company, the major business in this Ohio River county seat. He almost didn’t make the cut until Marie, the administrative assistant who had taken a shine to him let slip he had a football injury. His abbreviated career at Notre Dame, under the name of Nick Nocero was enough to change the owner’s mind.

It became clear he faced a challenge. There had already been layoffs. Foreign competition was making it more difficult to get contracts. Yet the change was noticeable. Nocero cared, and would help out wherever needed. Working with the union steward, they met some rush contracts and business was up. But that just appeared to make them more attractive to some visiting Korean businessmen discussing a “strategic partnership.”

Longview High School, playing at Made Right Stadium, had fielded a string of mediocre football teams, the Bobcats, under Coach Pruitt, who has just suffered a stroke. The assistant, Sherman, was a math teacher who could do stats but knew little of the game. The Made Right owners put the pressure on for Nick to help. He assists and then takes over, which Sherman was only too glad for him to do. And the team starts winning. Marie’s son Brian plays for them, and he not only plays better, but starts becoming a better student.

Suddenly he is in demand. To speak to the Chamber of Commerce. To swap stories at the American Legion. To get a celebrity to the town’s Christmas tree lighting event. Both for the town and for him, it’s “third and long” and everyone is hoping for a miracle. The company, the school, the town have been just hanging on. Marie, a single mom sees a man who is worthy of her.

It’s hopeful. The team’s winning, the company is making respectable gains, and romance is budding. But there is a secret in Nick’s past that could trip him, and the whole shebang, up, downing them all for a loss.

Bob Katz has captured life in an Ohio town. The cover even looks familiar, like I’ve been in this town. Nearly all the small county seats are just hanging on, if that. If that one big employer pulls out, it changes everything. It has for a number of them. He also captures how a winning team can lift a whole town. Nick both intrigues, with the sense of mystery surrounding his life, about which he say little, and his ability to lead and inspire. Katz understands what a famous pastor once observed, that people love to be led well. The people of the town did, the kids did, and I found myself rooting for Nick, as he tries to make the most of this “third and long” shot to show what he can do, who he can be. This is a finely written story speaking to the hopes we cling to for ourselves, and for the places we call home.

____________________

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

Review: Hangdog Souls

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Hangdog Souls, Marc Joan. London: Deixis Press, 2022.

Summary: A fugitive English soldier in southern India makes a Faustian bargain winning endless life at the cost of countless others over three centuries.

John Saunders is a fugitive English soldier in the Dravidian highlands of southern India as the British colonials are invading. He has a beautiful wife and an adorable son, who has captured the eye of the corrupt ruler with a mysterious machine in the dome of his castle complex. John is feigning that he is Portuguese and has brought seeds of eucalyptus trees that he hopes to establish in the highlands, making his fortune. As the British lay siege, he plans an escape for himself and huis family, but is found out by the ruler, who offers him a Faustian bargain, to become the “bridge” for souls, offering them a better world for their lives.

His trees are saved, and recur throughout the succeeding vignettes. But his wife and son are not. But John cannot die, even from a wound that nearly beheads him. He must live with his shame while ushering others to their fate. The story unfolds as a series of vignettes over 300 years. A priest burdened with the death of his wife Emma who encounters John. A butterfly enthusiast seeking the Black Papilio, and finding so much more. A functionary of the Sarpal Tea Company sent to the Kalisholi estates to investigate accounts ends up offering himself to a snake at a time when the local gods demand five garlands, five lives. A tourist glimpsing the mysterious woman in a blue sari, An embalmer who must create images of three gods using human corpses. A boy indentured to an uncle who immolates himself after listening to John’s story.

On it goes until three hundred years later, a Keralan particle physicist, Chandy John, involved in an experiment that has driven the previous scientist mad. Will he succumb to the burden of his own losses and griefs, having lost his wife in a tragic accident or will he break the cycle?

The book revolves around the question: What weight can balance the death of an innocent? How much grief must John bear for the grief he causes, and for how long? When will the scales be balanced? John is able to do what he does because of the griefs others bear. The appeal of escape through death, perhaps atoning for one’s guilt and shame. But the question makes us wonder if in fact whether there is any human counterweight to the death of an innocent?

I’ve seen this book classified in the horror genre. It seemed to me to have elements of horror, historical fiction, and magical realism about it. I’m not sure I know what it is. For the first hundred pages or so, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Yet as story after story unfolded, variations on a theme I found myself wondering how or whether this would all end, and drawn into the storytelling to find out.

____________________

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

Review: Recapitulation

/ rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Recapitulation, Wallace Stegner. New York:Vintage, 2015, originally published in 1979.

Summary: When former ambassador Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City for the funeral of an aunt, long-forgotten memories of his youth come back to challenge how he has remembered this formative part of his life.

Memory is a funny thing. What we remember and how we remember former events and people are far from static. They are written and re-written, deleted and restored throughout our lives.

Bruce Mason is a successful former ambassador, still on call for delicate negotiations. It is how he is known, and knows himself. His youth in Salt Lake City has faded to the far recesses of his memories and thoughts. That is, until an aunt for whom he is a guardian passes and he must return as the last living relative to bury her.

When he arrives, he is given a package saved by his aunt. In it are a letter sweater, letters and mementos from Nola, his one serious relationship with a girl. He spends much of his short stay remembering her–how they met, were drawn to each other, the times they were intimate, and the choice he made to delay marriage to pursue law school, sending her pretentious but unfeeling letters, led her to break off the relationship and take up with Bailey, his sexually seductive friend.

He also gets a call from Joe, the high school friend who drew him out of the isolation enforced by his bootlegger father. He worked for Joe’s dad, who wanted to bring him into the business. Joe brought him into a social network that drew him out of his shell. He keeps putting off calling him back, visiting the house late at night but never connecting.

Other memories flood back. The tragic life of his brother. His bootlegger father who he could never satisfy and who constrained his youth, both in not interfering with clients and keeping hush-hush his illegal activity. His long-suffering mother, dying of breast-cancer while his father makes another “business trip.”

He walks and drives the streets, so changed from his youth, bringing back other memories. The aunt’s funeral, concluding the book, ends with a thunderstorm, in some ways cleansing away all the memories as Mason prepares to depart. Or does it?

We are left wondering about the connection between the person he was and the pain he had known, and the person he has become. How is the man he is now related to the youth he remembers. We wonder why he doesn’t want to see his best friend, and why he had not been in touch with this friend after he left Salt Lake City.

And reading this makes one wonder how we have edited our own memories of the past. What have we stuffed in a closet? What self have we crafted and cultivated in our adult lives? Some, it seems, spend most of their lives wistfully looking back on the years of their youth as “the best years of our lives” while others try hard to forget them? It seems to me that Stegner’s novel, for the latter group, underscores the truth that “you can’t go home again” and if you do, you better be prepared for what you may find.