Category: american authors

I’ve read every single book Jonathan Tropper has ever published, oddly enough. They’re utterly readable works of commercial fiction that swoop in, grab a heart string or two, and carry you off into a story complete with humour and wit, with a healthy dose of good storytelling. Highly plot driven but ultimately about the main character, Doug Parker, How to Talk to a Widower is certainly as enjoyable as his two previous books, The Book of Joe and Everything Changes.

The title refers to a column the protagonist begins to write for a men’s magazine in the US upon the tragic death of his wife. Their relationship told mainly in flashbacks, and Doug’s inability to move past her death and get on with his life forms the emotional epicenter of the book. Hovering on the sidelines as he grieves are his highly dysfunctional family (a doctor of a father who has had a stroke; two sisters who take high-maintenance to new heights for completely different reasons; and a mother who pops prescription medicine and dolls out advice with the dryness of the martini she’s consistently holding in her hands), his friends (some, ahem, friendlier than others), and his teenage stepson. All the characters seem to orbit around Doug’s emotions until they simply can’t take it any longer. And the progression from widower to man finding his way in a life he never expected to find himself is oddly satisfying. It’s a sweet, satisfying, perfect-for-plane-rides book that kept me good company while we flew to Mexico.

I envy Tropper’s voice, the ease in which he writes tragedy into his characters, and the sweetness in terms of everyday family life he finds to colour out the edges of each of his books. On the whole, I’m willing to forgive the clichés, the movie of the week plot devices, in favour of wholly embracing the lovely mess Doug creates of his life. I got a little teary, I’ll admit.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The ARC resting on my tray table on top of two issues of Vanity Fair that I finished first. I think, if we had any spare cash at the moment, I would subscribe. Can one truly subsist without knowing the crazy ins and outs of world royalty you’ve never heard of? Without the February “starlet” who’s career plummets after their cover shot? Without the rambling articles of whats-his-name? Sigh.

With Christmas decidedly out of the way, and the two of us absolutely crashing last night while we watched (and I bawled, natch) one of the greatest of the great movies, The Shawshank Redemption, we now come upon one of my favourite weeks of the year: Between Christmas and New Year (BCANY).

Goodness, a whole lot of nothing happens BCANY, last year we recovered from Cuba, the year before that we recovered from getting married (and watched all of the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, awesome), and the year before that…well, you get the picture. We do a whole lot of recovering in the week BCANY. What generally happens is that I read a crapload of books, psyche myself up for the upcoming year, and generally bemoan the fact that I’m still sick (as defined by having to take stupid-ass medication) and going on my fourth year of dealing with this round of the disease.

So, as my year-end reading comes to a manic close, there might be a flurry of posts about different books I’ve finished. The first of which, Amy Bloom’s Away, I have to say I enjoyed very much, and I hope that it starts a sort of trend. It’s the story of Lillian Leyb, whose tale begins when her entire family is murdered in their home in a Russian pogrom and ends in the frozen tundras of the north. It’s an epic book, one that takes Lillian, in her grief, to New York City, where she lives in the Lower East Side, and then, upon discovering that her daughter Sophie isn’t dead after all, but rescued and spirited away to Siberia, on a journey all the way north. Lillian travels by train (in the closet), by boat (driven by her own hands) and sometimes by foot (blistered and bleeding), to northernmost Alaska, where she hopes to sail a boat across to Siberia and Sophie.

Bloom writes beautifully. The novel’s research isn’t obtrusive, but fits in the novel like sheets on a bed, lining Lillian’s story with bits to keep her warm despite what she endures. The book isn’t simply epic in scope, but also in story, along the way Lillian meets a cast of characters, and one would think it would be hard to keep them all straight, but Bloom’s skill as a novelist never allows a single thread to drop untied. Instead, she’s got a gift for ensuring that the reader knows the end to each main character. Tangential slips take off bit by bit as Lillian exits someone’s life, and every question is answered — even if it takes just a few paragraphs, Bloom makes sure you know what happens to the people that have touched Lillian’s life.

All in all, it was a delightful book to read, and I loved the Canadian content, the Telegraph Trail, Dawson City’s depleted “Paris of the North” status by the early 20th century, the bugs, and the idea of walking to the sound of your own voice, as Lillian does to keep going, telling Sophie stories with each step she takes. I won’t ruin the ending, but I will say that I’d highly recommend this novel, regardless of the fact that my RRHB thinks the cover might just be the most hideous he’s ever seen. I kind of like it, but am willing to hear arguments from either side.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Away standing up on my new bookshelves, already crammed with books, candles, sunglasses, ARCs, computer cords, pictures, receipts, CDRs, brochures and a whole host of other crap.

I set out wanting to love Hillary Jordan’s novel, Mudbound, for one simple reason: the cover art is deliciously beautiful. The story of an almost-spinster, Laura, who marries late in life (at the ghastly age of 31), and soon finds herself on a mudbound farm in the Mississippi Delta caring for a cantankerous, racist father-in-law, a broken drunk of a beautiful brother-in-law, as well as her husband and two daughters.

Torn apart by two wars, Laura’s husband, Henry, having endured the First World War, and his brother Jamie barely escaping the Second, the family tries to hold itself together in the face of adversity. It’s always been Henry’s dream to have land, and so when he buys a farm in the Delta and announces that’s where they’re all moving, Laura tries her best to remain positive and supportive. But when tragedy after tragedy forces them to live in the broken-down farmhouse with no indoor plumbing or running water, the true natures of everyone involved soon becomes apparent, which sets the story on its inevitable course.

Being a landowner means taking responsibility for the share croppers, and Henry, while fair, isn’t one to rock the boat. Legions of racism, deeply embedded in the small-town South, cause all kinds of problems that are exacerbated by the return of Ronsel, a Sergeant in the Black Panther tank brigade, he’s the eldest son of Henry’s best farmer, Hap. When Ronsel and Jamie forge a clapped together friendship shook out over the lid of a bottle, the entire community turns against them, and it’s this relationship that truly propels the conflict in the story.

Tragic, sad, moving, and inevitable, the novel captured my attention from its first page and I didn’t put it down. It’s one of those “read the whole book in one shot” kind of novels, and I highly recommend it.

Eli Gottlieb’s new novel Now You See Him, which I read in ARC format, comes with a note from the publisher that says, “I simply ‘couldn’t put it down’ — and you won’t be able to either.” And while I would agree that it’s a literary page-turner, an elusive form of the popular novel that’s so hard to get right (see Laura Lippman’s excellent What the Dead Know as an almost perfect example), I’m not sure it’s 100% effective all the way through.

The first two-thirds of the novel, where it deals with the untimely murder-suicide of Rob Castor, a writer from Monarch, New York who killed his ex-girlfriend, Kate Pierce, before taking his own life, are quite good. Told from the perspective of Rob’s best friend Nick Framingham, whose having a hell of a time reconciling the absence of such a fury of a man from his life, the novel unravels layers and layers of untold stories, family secrets and hints to the obsessive nature of the crime. The novel rips along and I was quite taken by Nick’s mid-life crisis.

But somewhere in the middle it gets kind of lost, and sort of muddled. There are obvious influences on Gottlieb’s novel, namely John Irving, and if you’re a fan of the former than I have no doubt that you’d enjoy this novel. While I read the novel primarily in transit back and forth from work, it never grabbed me the way I thought it would, despite the quality of Gottlieb’s prose. And by the end, I have to admit, that I was rolling my eyes at certain plot twists towards the end, but that’s no comment on the novel, but rather my own cynical nature. We’re offering the book up in our Facebook group later next month, so I’ll be curious to see what other people think too.

Moments ago, lying in bed trying at long last to finally get rid of this stupid cold that’s been plaguing me for one whole week now, I finished Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. I started this morning. Less than two hours ago, truly. The book pulls you along like a long drive made shorter by great conversation, good scenery and brilliant company. It kind of makes time disappear.

Upon the death of her dad, Richard, Clarissa, 28 years old and engaged to a lovely philosophy professor named Pankaj, discovers that he’s not really her father. When her mother abandoned the family fourteen years ago, she left no clues to Clarissa’s true identity past a never-ending dissertation on the Sami and a birth certificate. Clarissa feels betrayed and abandoned by almost everyone in her life who knew that Richard was not her biological parent, and leaves behind her entire existence one night to travel to Lapland, where she hopes to find her real father, and maybe some clues about why her mother left all those years ago.

To give any more away would spoil the novel, as its prose is so tight, there’s not a wasted word, really, that almost all of the 226 pages carry important bits of story. Vida’s writing is crisp, clean, and echoes the scenery in a way, it too is sparse, complex with history, and utilitarian. So much of the story in the novel comes as a surprise, from beginning to end, and it goes in places that you, as a reader, simply don’t expect. The title, taken from a Sami poet named Marry Ailoniedia Somby, becomes so meaningful once you come to the end of the book, and it’s impossible not to feel a great deal of pain alongside Clarissa, as she takes this incredible journey towards finding out her true identity.

And it’s not what you’d expect.

I also wish that I could bend my rules about my Around the World in 52 Books challenge to maybe count this book as Lapland, if only because Vida does an excellent job of exploring the culture of the Sami without turning her novel into a lesson in anthropology. In that way, it’s like Mister Pip, and I feel richer for having read the book. I am also ashamed at how little I know about the non-Irish and non-British origins of my family. I recognized the glögg that Clarissa drinks in Helsinki only because my aunt once told me her grandmother always made it at Christmas. We’ve now lost all those traditions. But this novel almost makes me want to take a trip to Sweden right now and discover all the things about our family that have been lost over the many years since immigration.

Regardless, the book remains steadfast with Clarissa’s view, and that’s its strength, how she understands and sees the world, and how she sees herself, as one part of her life definitively ends and another begins at a moment she would never see coming. How nothing in life turns out how you would expect on the day before your father dies. How everything changes afterwards.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Boring, yes, but the book sitting on my desk surrounded by all the various drafts of my longish story that I’m working through at the moment.

EDITED TO ADD: I had totally forgotten about this BookTV interview with Vendela Vida about the book. Isn’t she lovely and well spoken?

For those of you who know my extra-curricular freelance activities, you can probably guess why I was reading Louisa May Alcott’s sequel to Little Women, Little Men. Not one of her go-to classics (apparently, those are the aforementioned original and Jo’s Boys), I still enjoyed it, and remember reading the novel years and years and years ago during my Louisa May Alcott period spanning an entire summer when I was 11 or 12.

The adventures of a grown Jo as she navigates motherhood and a school she and “Father Bhaer” have set up in Aunt March’s old estate, Little Men roams around the adventures of the rag-tag bunch of students they take in over the course of the novel. While I sometimes found the “messages” of Alcott’s fiction dated, I still truly enjoyed the journey each of the children take during their unusual residency at Plumfield.

And it’s hard not to have just a little crush on the imaginary Dan, even if you’ve made the mistake of trying to watch the abysmal movie version starring Mariel Hemingway and Chris Sarandon. Seriously. It’s awful.

I will say one thing, however, I bought an omnibus that included all three books, and after finishing my work with Little Men, I sort of said to myself, “Am I really done?” I almost started working away on Jo’s Boys just so I could remember what happens to Demi, Nat, Dan and the lads. Who knows, maybe I’ll create another reading challenge for myself called ‘books I wished I’d abridged’ and put it at the top!

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto took me a few weeks to finish. I kept starting it and then stopping it and then starting it, forgetting where I was, stopping, sleeping, and then starting again. Finally, after finishing up my manuscript and having true free time for the first moment in what felt like a summer of hectic classes, tonnes of other manuscript revisions, and loads of my own writing, I took an afternoon to finish the book while RRHB fiddled about and before my aunt and I set out on a Scrabble marathon to end all Scrabble marathons (she bingoed, and then won; I put up a noble fight).

Annnywaaaay. Bel Canto. This book won all kinds of awards six years ago: the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as well as becoming one of the most beloved books around. Set in an unnamed country (I think) in South America during a birthday party at the Vice President’s house for a Japanese business man who loves opera, and adores the opera star Roxanne Coss who is paid to perform for him, a group of revolutionaries burst in an take the large group hostage. When they discover that the President himself was absent from the party (he stays home to watch his soap opera), the terrorist sequester the group away for months on end waiting for their demands to be met by an increasingly uncooperative government.

The group bides their time, first in terror for their lives, and then in a quiet kind of acceptance of the terms of their imprisonment. They have little freedom, but are fed; they have no rights, but soon adjust to their new life as captives. It seems as with any group of people shut up in close quarters with their fellow human beings, lives change in ways that are irreversible. People fall in love. People change. People become a truer version of themselves.

Now, I’m not about to say that I didn’t enjoy Bel Canto, because I truly did—it’s a novel deserving of its prizes, but my emotional response to this novel wasn’t even remotely close to that of Run. It’s well written, the plot if fascinating, and the characters are meticulously drawn. Yet, there’s a chill that runs through this book that I wasn’t expecting regardless of the beauty in Patchett’s voice.

If anything, it made me think that above and beyond listening to classical music a lot these days, I should really also give opera a try.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I am sad to say that, again, I left the book up north without taking a picture so I give you a fuzzy shot of me and my nephew Spencer. Just because.