#91: An Available Man

An Available Man, by Hilma Wolitzer

(New York: Ballantine Books, 2012)

Summary:
"In this tender and funny novel, award-winning author Hilma Wolitzer mines the unpredictable fallout of suddenly becoming single later in life, and the chaos and joys of falling in love the second time around. When Edward Schuyler, a modest and bookish sixty-two-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. There are plenty of unattached women around, but a healthy, handsome, available man is a rare and desirable creature. Edward receives phone calls from widows seeking love, or at least lunch, while well-meaning friends try to set him up at dinner parties. Even an attractive neighbor offers herself to him.

"The problem is that Edward doesn't feel available. He's still mourning his beloved wife, Bee, and prefers solitude and the familiar routine of work, gardening, and bird-watching. But then his stepchildren surprise him by placing a personal ad in The New York Review of Books on his behalf. Soon the letters flood in, and Edward is torn between his loyalty to Bee's memory and his growing longing for connection. Gradually, reluctantly, he begins dating ('dating after death,' as one correspondent puts it), and his encounters are variously startling, comical, and sad. Just when Edward thinks he has the game figured our, a chance meeting proves that love always arrives when it's least expected.

"With wit, warmth, and a keen understanding of the heart, An Available Man explores aspects of loneliness and togetherness, and the difference in the options open to men and women of a certain age. Most of all, the novel celebrates the endurance of love, and its thrilling capacity to bloom anew."

Opening Line:
"Edward Schuyler was ironing his oldest blue oxford shirt in the living room on a Saturday afternoon when the first telephone call came."

My Take:
This and I Thought You Were Dead, together, should be required reading for anyone who's laying low and convalescing, whether from a stubborn case of bronchitis or from acute heartbreak. What a lovely, understated story of widowhood, grief, loneliness, and ultimately, love. Edward is just so real and likeable; he felt like a distant but kind relative, or the neighbor you always meant to have in for supper. And some of his first forays into dating are both poignant and funny: the businesslike woman with whom he has nothing in common, but who nonetheless expects sex at the end of the evening; the friendly widow who can't stop talking about her late husband and displaying photo after photo of their lives together; the cosmetically-altered, seemingly ageless 70 year old. The supporting cast are also well-sketched, particularly Edward's fragile stepdaughter Julie and tough-old-bird mother-in-law Gladys. I'm even OK with the reasonably happy ending.

#72: Emily, Alone

Emily, Alone, by Stewart O'Nan (New York: Viking, 2011).

Summary:
"A sequel to the bestselling, much-beloved Wish You Were Here, Stewart O'Nan's intimate new novel follows Emily Maxwell, a widow whose grown children have long moved away. She dreams of visits by her grandchildren while mourning the turnover of her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood, but when her sole companion and sister-in-law Arlene faints at their favorite breakfast buffet, Emily's days change. As she grapples with her new independence, she discovers a hidden strength and realizes that life always offers new possibilities. Like most older women, Emily is a familiar yet invisible figure, one rarely portrayed so honestly. Her mingled feelings -- of pride and regret, joy and sorrow -- are gracefully rendered in wholly unexpected ways. Once again making the ordinary and overlooked not merely visible but vital to understanding our own lives, Emily, Alone confirms O'Nan as an American master."

My Take:
It was hard to sit down and start this one -- I was on a rereading crap, don't-tax-the-brain spree last week -- but once I did, wow. What a lovely, gentle, sweet book. Read the author's Songs for the Missing some time ago and enjoyed that well enough, but this one was something different altogether. First book I've ever read about aging that didn't make me absolutely dread the eventual sunset years of my own life.

#65: World and Town

World and Town, by Gish Jen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

Summary:
"Hattie Kong -- the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China -- has, in her fiftieth year, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. It is an utterly devastating loss, of course, and also heartbreakingly absurd: a little, she thinks, 'like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.'

"But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as -- quite unexpectedly -- by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.

"What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what 'worlds' are we make of the world.

"Moving, humorous, compassionate, and expansive, World and Town is as rich in character as it is brilliantly evocative of its time and place. This is a truly masterful novel -- enthralling, essential, and satisfying."

Opening Line:
"It's the bai shu you'd notice most -- the thousand-year-old cypresses -- some of them upright, some of them leaning."

My Take:
I've gotten backlogged again (gee, why on earth would it be hard to keep up with a list no one reads?) but this one was pretty good. How does Hattie make a life and find meaning for herself with her husband and best friend gone? How do her new neighbors, Chhung and Sophy and the rest of their family, Cambodian immigrants fleeing the trouble their kids tend to get into in the big city, build their own lives and hold on to some semblance of family when absolutely nothing in this new world makes sense? More a character study (not only of the people but the town in the story) but still pretty satisfying for that -- enough so that I'm looking forward to seeking out other Gish Jen novels in the future.

#49a: Getting to Happy

OK, as I never finished What They Still Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School and have no interest in renumbering everything from there to here, we're just going to call this 49a and get the numbering back on track.

#49a (i.e., really #49 because #40 was a bust and wasn't really #40) was Getting to Happy, by Terry McMillan (New York: Viking, 2010).

Summary:
"An exuberant return to the four unforgettable heroines of Waiting to Exhale -- the novel that changed African American fiction forever. Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale was more than just a bestselling novel -- its publication was a watershed moment in literary history. McMillan's sassy and vibrant story about four African American women struggling to find love and their place in the world touched a cultural nerve, inspired a blockbuster film, and generated a devoted audience. Now, McMillan revisits Savannah, Gloria, Bernadine, and Robin fifteen years later. Each is at her own midlife crossroads: Savannah has awakened to the fact that she's made too many concessions in her marriage, and decides to face life single again-at fifty-one. Bernadine has watched her megadivorce settlement dwindle, been swindled by her husband number two, and conned herself into thinking that a few pills will help distract her from her pain. Robin has an all-American case of shopaholism, while the big dream of her life-to wear a wedding dress- has gone unrealized. And for years, Gloria has taken happiness and security for granted. But being at the wrong place at the wrong time can change everything. All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They've exhaled: now they are learning to breathe."

My Take:
Enjoyed it. Good, light-but-not-too-cotton-candyish fun.

#14 - Mary Ann in Autumn

#14, last week, was Mary Ann in Autumn: A Tales of the City Novel, by none other than Armistead Maupin (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Summary: "A hilarious and touching new installment of Armistead Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series. Twenty years have passed since Mary Ann Singleton left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York. Now a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael 'Mouse' Tolliver, a gardener happily ensconced with his much-younger husband. Mary Ann finds temporary refuge in the couple's backyard cottage, where, at the unnerving age of fifty-seven, she licks her wounds and takes stock of her mistakes. Soon, with the help of Facebook and a few old friends, she begins to reengage with live, only to confront fresh terrors when her checkered past comes back to haunt her in a way she could never have imagined. After the intimate first-person narratives of Maupin's last novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn marks the author's return to the multicharacter plotlines and darkly comic themes of his earlier work. Among those caught in Mary Ann's orbit are her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michael's transgendered gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson; and the indefatigable Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann's former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. More than three decades in the making, Armistead Maupin's legendary Tales of the City series rolls into a new age, still sassy, irreverent, and curious, and still exploring the boundaries of the human experience with insight, compassion, and mordant wit."

Opening Line: "There should be a rabbit hole was what she was thinking."

My Take: Read this one in a single sitting last week, one night when I was both bored and restless and just didn't have enough brainpower to slog through another chapter of Yellow. While not the strongest of the Tales series, this much-later sequel certainly stands solidly among them. The return of two characters from Mary Ann's checkered past was an intriguing, if not fully credible touch; I won't spoil the details save to say dead ain't dead until you've seen the body. And I really enjoyed seeing Maupin's take on the San Francisco of the early 21st century: DeDe and D'or now grandmothers, but still bickering or living and letting live over certain matters of taste; Jake and Ben's latter-day take on queer life and culture; the funky Gen X/ Gen Yer Shawna turns out to be. The one character I particularly missed seeing was Brian, who we learn is now RVing from national park to national park somewhere ... but I suppose what makes the story fairly plausible is that characters do grow, change, and move away from time to time. In short, I don't know if this book by itself would draw me into the series if I hadn't read the others ... but it was a decent evening's entertainment, and a fitting continuation of some old favorite characters' stories.

#10 - The Gendarme

The Gendarme, by Mark T. Mustian (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010)

Summary: "What would you do if the love of your life, and all your memories, were lost -- only to reappear, but with such shocking revelations that you wish you had never remembered?

"Emmett Conn is an old man, near the end of his life. A World War I veteran, he's been affected by memory loss since being injured during the war. To those around him, he's simply confused, fading in and out of senility. But what they don't know is that Emmett has been beset by memories, of events he and others have denied or purposefully forgotten.

"In Emmett's dreams he's a gendarme, escorting Armenians from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begins to break down, Emmett sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie and beg her forgiveness."

Opening Line: "I awake in a whispering ambulance."

My Take: A good story, but didn't quite live up to the potential it suggested at first. I'm reminded of one oft-offered criticism of the movie Julie & Julia: that Meryl Streep's performance as Julia Child was so compelling, the contemporary storyline featuring Amy Adams as the underemployed blogger seemed lacking by comparison. So it is here. By itself, the account of young Turkish Ahmet's service as a gendarme, overseeing the Armenian deportation to Syria, and then deserting the army to follow Araxie, the young Armenian woman who's somehow captivated him, is serviceable enough, albeit not completely convincing. As is almost always true of war stories involving genocide, the Turkish treatment of the Armenians was unimaginably brutal; we see this hear in Ahmet's descriptions of his comrades' behavior, and we simply don't learn enough about who he was before joining the army to know why he'd be any different. Why, then, does he become so enchanted with Araxie that he believes himself in love with her? Even more implausibly, why does Araxie seem to return his affections to some degree, when he's attempted to rape her and murdered her adoptive father in cold blood? And how, exactly, does Ahmet Khan find himself returned to the battlefield, wounded at Gallipoli, and eventually swept off by an American nurse to his new life as Emmett Conn?

Surprisingly, it's the story of 92-year-old Emmett, set in Georgia in 1990, that's far more captivating. Having lost his wife Carol (the aforementioned American nurse) to Parkinson's disease some years earlier, Emmett is alone, though daughter Violet visits often. At the novel's outset, he learns from the irrepressibly positive Dr. Wan that he's suffering from a brain tumor. Violet, Dr. Wan, and nearly everyone else in Emmett's orbit is quick to blame the tumor for the seizures and visions Emmett's been having, but in fact, Emmett is merely remembering, even reliving, his past. Violet and the doctors just assume these dreams need to stop, but Emmett needs them somehow -- desperate to remember who he was and what he did during the war, however shameful it may be, and to find out what became of Araxie. Ultimately, he is confined to a state psychiatric hospital for monitoring, but refuses medication after but one night when he realizes it suppresses his dreams.

Again, the elderly Emmett's story is well-written and gives the reader a lot to chew on, but I was left feeling like I myself was confused and drifting in and out of the story line. Perhaps this was deliberate on Mustian's part, but it seemed more like there were just plain pieces left out of the puzzle. It's the author's first novel, so I'm inclined to think maybe he just hasn't hit his stride yet. Be that as it may, I still think the book was a bit overrated. The horrors of war have been done many times before in literature; making the perpetrator an old man who now looks back with some horror on what he's done is an interesting spin, but doesn't by itself overcome the novel's shortcomings. In short, liked the book well enough, but wasn't overwhelmed.

#94 - Straight Man

Yes, I know I'm not actually posting this till 2011, but my 94th & final book of 2010 was Straight Man, by Richard Russo (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

Jacket Summary: "In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character -- he is a born anarchist -- and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo -- side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down."

Opening Line: "When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as he is, refuses to trade in."

My Take: I always enjoy Russo's books and this one didn't disappoint. Straight Man does for second-tier liberal arts colleges what Jane Smiley's Moo did for the gargantuan public universities of the Midwest. Obviously, most back-cover blurbs tend toward the hyperbolic, but here I have to agree: this is either the saddest comic novel or the funniest sad novel I've read in quite a while. The above summary notwithstanding, it's not quite the laugh-a-minute riot you might expect. Rather, the humor here comes in Hank Devereax's, the supporting characters', and the town of Railton's unvarnished warts-and-all humanity.

I've often said that even when a novel's primarily a character study or portrait of a place, I need at least some plot to hold my interest. In Straight Man, Russo's kind enough to oblige me in this regard. The frame story -- Russo's colleagues' efforts to oust him as chair, while at the same time his dean and old friend is trying desperately to throw him a life jacket -- is serviceable, if not particularly meaty in itself. What holds the reader's attention, though, is wanting to know how all the secondary story lines and characters turn out. Will Hank give in and sleep with his alcoholic colleague's lovely adjunct daughter, the peach-eating Meg? Will his daughter Julie ever grow up and turn responsible? Will his wife, Lily, accept a plum out-of-town job -- and what would that mean for his comfortable, if uninspired, small-town academic life?

Probably one of the most interesting and, to me, appealing aspects of the story and Hank's character is his complete refusal to take anything seriously. I've worked with people like this (hell, I've probably been a person like this), and frankly, usually find them as exasperating as Hank's colleagues and family seem to find him. Here, though, I also saw the pathos and loneliness just beneath the surface -- a testament to Russo's subtlety and skill at capturing the nuances of personality.

Entertaining enough to pass muster as a vacation read, but serious enough not to leave you feeling like you've just eaten a bag of M&Ms. If you're looking for an interesting, moving character story, and can accept its somewhat slow pace as part of its charm, I recommend it highly.

#64 - Choke

#64 was Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk (New York: Anchor, 2001).

Summary: "Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be 'saved' by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve."

Opening line: "If you're going to read this, don't bother."

My take: This is only my second Palahniuk book, but I think I should have taken the narrator's advice above. Pygmy, at least, had some places where I could see and appreciate the humor, but Choke -- meh. At least some reviewers seem to love Palahniuk, brilliant satirist, blah blah blah, so maybe it's just me that Doesn't Get It.

But hey, it's just me reading these books and writing this blog, and Choke was a week of my life I won't get back. (It's a slim book, too, but it didn't call to me the way some others do.) Funny parts, yes, but overall, the characters are thoroughly repulsive, and the book left me feeling like I needed a shower afterwards. I don't mind books that unsettle, but don't feel the need to be disgusted for no reason.

#56 - That Old Cape Magic

That Old Cape Magic, by Richard Russo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

Jacket summary: "Following Bridge of Sighs -- a best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as 'an astounding achievement' and 'a masterpiece' -- Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.

"Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents' respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that's now thirty years old and has largely come true. He'd left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they'd moved into an old house full of character, and they'd started a family. Check, check and check.

"But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura's, on the coast of Maine, Griffin's chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?

"That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter's new life, and, finally, what it was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has. The storytelling is flawless throughout, moments of great comedy and even hilarity alternating with others of rueful understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and its ending is at once surprising, uplifting, and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written."

Opening line: "Though the digital clock on the bedside table in his hotel room read 5:17, Jack Griffin, suddenly wide awake, knew he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep."

My take: I think Russo's quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary American authors. I loved Empire Falls, appreciated Bridge of Sighs ... yet That Old Cape Magic, a wholly different story than either of the others, doesn't disappoint. While shorter and more straightforward than the earlier 2 books, it's not quite the fluffy beach read the jacket suggests, either. Griffin's parents, especially his mother, are too over-the-top awful to be believed. Joy's aforementioned large, unruly family was way too real, almost a West Coast version of my own. And Laura and Kelsey's ugly duckling turned rich, successful swan, Sunny Kim, is both appealing and a cypher; I wanted to see more of him. Russo strikes the perfect balance between realistic characters and scenarios, but then spinning them out just a little too far so we can see them for how ridiculous they are and maybe even laugh at them (and ourselves) in the bargain. A keeper, this one is.

#46 - Homer & Langley

Homer and Langley, by E.L. Doctorow (New York: Random House, 2009).

Jacket summary: "Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers -- the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers -- wars, political movements, technological advances -- and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians ... and their household lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves."

Opening line: "I'm Homer, the blind brother."

My take: Didn't know quite what to expect here, but this was an interesting book. Loosely based on the famous if bizarre lives of the real Collyer brothers (no, I'd not heard of them either, but they died in the 1940s), it follows 2 Fifth Avenue recluses from their childhood and youth (long-haired pianist Homer goes blind; Langley goes off to fight the Great War and comes back ... different) in the 1910s, through their brushes with the Jazz Age (their long-time cook's grandson becomes a jazz horn player of some renown before moving South to wed and ultimately dying in WWII), Great Depression, and mid-20th century gangsters, and eventually providing a temporary crash pad for a tribe of hippies in the 1960s. Aside from the historical background, not much actually happens to the brothers -- largely, they become increasingly withdrawn and reclusive while the outside world transforms itself -- and normally, this bothers me in a story. Not here, though; the characters and their/ Doctorow's observations on 20th century history and progress make for compelling reading even without an action-packed plot. As was my experience with Ragtime, I find Doctorow a bit slow going in places, but I always feel richer for having read it. Homer and Langley is no exception.

#40 - Independence Day

Also just finished Richard Ford's Independence Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Summary: "Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He's still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank's Independence Day, however, turns out not as he'd planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. Independence Day captures the mystery of life — in all its conflicted glory — with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power."

Opening line: "In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems."

My take: Not exactly what I was expecting, and maybe not quite what I was in the mood for, but still an interesting meditation on suburbia in the late 1980s, life and parenthood after divorce, autonomy vs. interdependence, and aging in America. Can't really complain that there's no plot here, as this is essentially a road novel with a twist: Our hero, Frank Bascombe, travels (by way of his girlfriend's beach house at the Jersey Shore) to Connecticut to pick up the aforementioned teenage son Paul, and from there to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame in Worcester, Mass., and Cooperstown, NY. The pacing is fairly languorous itself, and much of the book seems a bit dated, but Frank is indeed a likeable, interesting character ... which was what moved me to see the novel through to the end. (I wish I could say the same for his irritating son, or his ladyfriend Sally, who I Just Didn't Get.) Well-written, provocative in places ... but not one I'll return to again, I don't expect.

#38 - The Master Bedroom

Tessa Hadley's The Master Bedroom (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007) was aptly named; it did an excellent job of putting me to sleep.

Summary: "A single woman at loose ends becomes the object of two men's affections -- a father and his teenage son -- in this sly, richly drawn novel. After more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him. For his part, David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks -- his wife, Suzie, has begun acting strangely, moving out of their bedroom, neglecting their children, and disappearing for days at a time -- and he begins to seek refuge with Kate from the newfound chaos of his life. David's seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate's eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns."

Opening lines: "It was not a sign. Kate refused to let it be a sign."

My take: I read this New York Times review, I read the jacket flap (basically what's written above) ... then I read the book itself, and came away wondering if the reviewers read the same thing I had. What can I say except that the book was boring? OK, I'll grant Times reviewer Liesl Schillinger one thing: Hadley's novel does raise some interesting ideas:

"What if it had been Mrs. Robinson who was the pursued, and Benjamin the pursuer? What if, when the young man came knocking, the grown woman hid, locked her bedroom door, and 'stayed motionless on her bed, not answering, hugging her knees tightly?' What if, when he refused to believe she couldn't love him, she didn't run to him, but from him?"

Set aside, for a moment, the implication that the answers to these "What ifs" are "erotic" and "tantalizing" rather than stalkerish and scary. Forget that The Graduate, while a brilliant movie that expertly captured the zeitgeist of its time, was first a real ho-hummer of a book. Those things aside, Master Bedroom may suggest some interesting questions, but it doesn't come close to answering them in a satisfactory manner. The above review notwithstanding, I'm inclined to agree with Joanna Briscoe's Guardian review:

"'[T]he author refuses to let dramatic action, an escalation of tension, or any other conventional narrative lubricant dictate the rhythms of everyday life. ... [T]he 'clever and sceptical and difficult' Kate cares for her mother, Billie, immerses herself in classical music and nurtures at best ambivalent feelings towards David Roberts, a dependable, married doctor involved in public health, then continues to oscillate between indifference and essentially invented interest.

"Kate, 43, then meets Jamie, David's 17-year-old son, and finds herself shunted into a Mrs. Robinson role as the teenager turns up at her house panting for sex and adult enlightenment. Kate's affair with Jamie is, like her emotional relationship with his father, essentially devoid of intensity. As David observes, 'even passion seemed to have reduced itself to drudgery,' while Kate has 'a chilly vision of herself on the slope down from summits that had hardly happened. Suzie falls under hippie-dippie influences; Kate visits London; everyone has holidays, reads books, and discusses the larger issues of life. Moral inquiry is lightly won."

Yawn. Books that hint at being juicy entertainment but then don't follow through annoy me. On to some non-fiction for a change.

#33 - A Fair Maiden

For me, Joyce Carol Oates' books are the reader's equivalent of a train wreck. Almost, but not quite; the writing is superb, so it's not as though the stories have no redeeming value. It's more that they always leave me feeling, well, more than a little icky. And yet I'm always quick to snap each new one up when I come across it. I can't seem to look away.

A Fair Maiden (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) is no exception.

Summary (from Library Journal Review): "A summer nanny in an upscale New Jersey Shore community, 15-year-old Katya Spivak is approached by wealthy 68-year-old author and artist Marcus Kidder -- and one immediately wonders where this is leading. Oates (Dear Husband) creates a growing sense of evil as Katya becomes more involved with Kidder. First she visits him innocently enough with her charges for tea, then comes over alone when she needs money to help her mother out of a jam; finally, after one unreasonable demand, she rebels. In exploring Katya's life and relations, including her gambling, man-chasing mother, jealous sisters, and criminal boyfriend Ray, Oates makes it clear why a wealthy, sophisticated man would become irresistible to Katya. The answer to the question whether Kidder's intentions are good or evil and whether Katya will eventually be saved or ruined lead to the climax of this short but satisfying novel."

Opening Lines: "Innocently it began. When Katya Spivak was sixteen years old and Marcus Kidder was sixty-eight."

My take: A good book, especially if you enjoy Oates' work and/or have a taste for the contemporary gothic and vaguely grotesque. I did, however, come away feeling like the ending, while unsettling, wasn't nearly as horrific as the jacket blurb had made it out to be. Yes, Kidder is a lech, and when you finally realize what his ultimate plan for Katya is, your (or at least my) reaction is somewhere between a shudder and an "Ew!"

What's interesting, though, is the nuanced way in which Oates manage to make your basic (albeit rich) dirty old man appear almost sympathetic. By comparison, the blurred snapshots of Katya's other romantic/ sexual encounters, unremarkable though they may be, seem far more perverse and ultimately damaging. What's worse for an impressionable, not-as-worldly-as-she-thinks young working-class girl: a brief liaison with a much-older man who asks about her dreams and tells her repeatedly that she's talented and beautiful, or a blatantly coercive on-and-off affair with an only-slightly-older cousin who also happens to be an ex-con? How will each one affect the woman Katya ultimately grows into? Without giving too much away, there's a violent encounter between the two towards the end of the book that didn't hit me till after the fact as, "Wow. This says something about what's in store for Katya, from here on out."

I do, of course, need to jump on my socioeconomic soapbox for a minute, and argue that Oates' depiction of Katya's home town of Vineland may be unfairly bleak. OK, it's not quite Knockemstiff, but still ... no matter how blue-collar the town, I find it hard to believe that no one of Katya's acquaintance has ever done anything except get pregnant or join the military out of high school. Surely there'd be a cousin or neighbor at community college somewhere? Believe me, I totally get the "working-class kid goes to upper middle/ upper-class summer resort" culture shock thing (been there, done that), but a bit more subtlety on this point might have made the point more effectively.

#32 - Noah's Compass

It's been a busy weekend, both book- and otherwise. Stay tuned for a blogolanche, starting with Noah's Compass, by Anne Tyler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

Jacket summary: "Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn't bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.

"His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is -- well, something quite different."

Opening line: "In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job."

My take: A gentle book, rather than a life-changing one, but I enjoyed it all the same. Something about it evokes Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, though I haven't read that one in years; perhaps it's that Liam's personality has shades of AT's Macon Leary, or that the quirky and vaguely pathetic Eunice reminds me of AT's dog trainer/ love interest Muriel Pritchett. If you can't get this from the text itself, the title suggests what it is Tyler's asking us to consider: How do we navigate through our lives when all the familiar landmarks are gone?

For Liam, the answers are none too quick in coming. Even before he is injured, the beginning of the story finds himself "interested" in the prospect of downsizing and economizing, but it's a muted enthusiasm at best. As he settles into bed on his first night in his new condo, he muses:

"Most probably ... this would be the final dwelling place of his life. What reason would he have to move again? No new prospects were likely for him. He had accomplished all the conventional tasks -- grown up, found work, gotten married, had children -- and now he was winding down.

"This is it, he thought. The very end of the line. And he felt a mild stirring of curiosity."

Once he awakes in the hospital, though, with a concussed head and a bitten, bandaged hand, he becomes desperate to reconstruct what happened. His family, such as it is, offers little help. Ex-wife Barbara is too busy ranting about Liam's choice of apartment, and eldest daughter Xanthe is convinced the culprit is Damian, her younger sister's boyfriend, who helped Liam move. Middle daughter Louise, a fundamentalist Christian stay-at-home mom pregnant with her second child, seems wrapped up in other things, while youngest daughter Kitty sees this mainly as an opportunity to move in with Liam and away from her constant squabbles with Barbara.

Undeterred, Liam seeks the help of Dr. Morrow, an acclaimed neurologist whose son he'd tutored many years back. While the doctor himself offers little practical assistance for Liam's condition, Liam encounters Ishmael Cope, a venerable and wealthy local businessman, in Morrow's office. Upon learning that Cope has a "professional rememberer" -- a hired staffer whose job is to attend him, take notes, and do whatever else she can to supplement Cope's failing memory -- Liam is intrigued. His curiosity and confusion lead him to track down Cope's rememberer (or "social facilitator," as she calls herself), Eunice, and an odd, almost-but-not-quite romance develops between the two.

Noah's Compass, however, is not primarily a love story, at least not the way the phrase is usually meant. Liam's relationship with Eunice never progresses beyond kisses, and frankly, always just seems Off (as it's probably meant to). No, the book is primarily about connectedness and isolation (no surprise for Tyler fans); we see Liam's tentative but growing relationships with the typically self-centered Kitty, his young grandson Joshua, and even his no-nonsense sister Julia. The conclusion is satisfying, and passes my "not too tidy" test. Definitely a good one to come back to and chew over.

Not with a bang, but with a whisper

Well, I did it. I started this blog back in January to keep track of the books I read during the year, wondering if I'd make 100. Not quite a week into October, I got there. Yesterday, I finished my 100th book of the year: Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, by Mitch Albom (Doubleday, 1997).

That explains the title of this post: In a word, eh. Just in case you've been on Mars for the last 12 years, this is the author's account of his weekly visits to an old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, during the last few months of Schwartz's life, while he was dying from ALS. It's a short book, with most chapters only a few pages; I read through it in the course of one Sunday afternoon. Yes, it's uplifting and heartwarming, and all the things you wouldn't expect of a book about dying. Yes, some of the aphorisms Morrie offers during what he deems his last class, or Mitch's last thesis, make for nice sound bites: "Love is the only rational act." "Learn how to die, and you learn how to live." You get the idea.

Perhaps if this was the first of Albom's books I'd read, I'd have found it more moving. This wasn't the case, however. After having read The Five People You Meet In Heaven and For One More Day, though ... this one seemed rather predictable. Tugs the heartstrings, makes you think about what really matters in life, not too taxing intellectually, sells like hotcakes. While Albom is a skilled writer, and his devotion to Schwartz was certainly admirable, I'm starting to think that having read three of his books, I've seen what he has to say. I'd probably read his latest, Have a Little Faith, if I stumbled across it, but won't go out of my way for it.