Category: american authors

#35 – The Cookbook Collector

I truly admire Allegra Goodman’s storytelling techniques, and while her latest novel, The Cookbook Collector, isn’t 100% successful, it did manage to convey the same deep, emotional resonance that I found so affecting in Intuition. The novel opens deep in the heart of the Silicon Alley dot com explosion of the mid-1990s where the main protagonists in The Cookbook Collector, two radically different sisters, find themselves on opposite ends of the economic spectrum.

Emily is the CEO of a tech company about to launch its first IPO — she’s driven, successful and engaged to an equally driven and successful man whose career mirrors her own. Jessamine works part-time at a bookstore where her boss, George, collects rare books and sells them to like-minded men and women who like to own things. She’s still a student, and finds herself increasingly involved in causes — whether it’s Jewish mysticism or saving the redwood trees, Jess’s life drifts along in a mist of misguided intentions.

Where her sister drives to succeed, Jess can’t seem to find her footing. And Emily’s trouble comes when she discovers that monetary/business success can’t necessarily propel you into being well-adjusted in the face of tragedy and/or disappointment. Both girls show their strengths in different ways throughout the course of the novel, and their evolution is at once both as disconcerting as it is refreshing. In a sense, they take a cue from the central metaphor in the novel — this cookbook collection that George discovers and then covets — it’s full of rich lives, rich recipes, but it’s crammed into a kitchen not used for cooking. Where there should live pots and pans, there are books upon valuable books. And when you collect things, be it rare books or stock shares, there’s an element of your life that you aren’t necessarily living.

In a way, the journey that both Emily and Jess take moves from being a collection of attributes: motherless daughters, successful/unsuccessful, preppy/hippie, to fully realized human beings. It’s not an easy process for either of them, and there’s bookended tragedies that seem to define their growth — the death of their mother on one end and then the aftershock of 9/11 (with things I won’t spoil here) as the other. I’m not saying Goodman’s novel isn’t flawed, it is, the coincidences are a little too coincidental, and I’m not sure that any novelist has really gotten to the core of 9/11 in a way that I feel comfortable with — the way Goodman used it didn’t ring 100% true to me in this case. But she’s such a great writer of characters, and I still couldn’t put this book down once I started. Not sure I agree with the blurbage on Amazon and other places that compares The Cookbook Collector to an Austen novel, but I enjoyed so much about it, from the setting to the delicious descriptions of the cookbooks themselves (they are awesome, trust me), that it made for a truly satisfying summer read.

#23 – The Lacuna

While I didn’t make the Orange Prize deadline, I’m still reading the short-list nominated books over the summer. I am glad, however, that weeks ago I managed to finish Kingsolver’s magnificent (and winning!) novel before the announcement took over the world that the prize belonged to her. I’m still going to read the other short-listed books (I’ve got them all now and might take them up to the cottage with me this weekend) but I’ve already made up my mind that this novel truly deserved the win.

The book opens with a fairly typical “memoir”-type first section. A young boy, terrorized by howler monkeys on an island just off the coast of Mexico, lives with his mother in a tumble down estate with a sort of stepfather. It’s here that Harrison, born to a Mexican mother and an American father, finds his first lacuna, a hidden pool, which becomes significant later in life. The lacuna — literally and metaphorically — figures heavily in the novel, and not just because of the title. Harrison himself is a lacuna, keeping his inner life, his feelings, his sexuality, hidden except for the prime few who know the right times to dive in and avoid the tides.

The novel changes in tone after the first section, written by Harrison as memoir (he becomes a fiction writer as a career) and then we’re invited into reading about the rest of his life through private journals he left in the care of his secretary, Violet Brown. Interspersed with the journals are newspaper articles, transcripts and all kinds of other ephemera, which encourage you to scavenge, in a way, for the story. Harrison remains a mystery until the end, and the ending of this novel is magical — it’s totally worth the little bit of time it takes to get into the story, and Kingsolver’s masterly way of incorporating real characters into her fiction never suffers from what I like to call The Forrest Gump Affliction. It’s inherent and real in terms of the story, which comes from excellent research (one would imagine) and a keen sense of how a novel should work.

It’s one of my favourite books for the year, hands down.

#21 – Black Water Rising

I finished Attica Locke’s debut novel last week. It was a quick, enjoyable read, but I’m not 100% convinced that it’s the best of the best of women’s writing for the year (as judging from its Orange Prize shortlisted status). Yet, that said, there’s something about commercial fiction writing that I admire. The way the plots drive forward ceaselessly, the way the action never seems to stop, and the muddled way the somewhat damaged protagonists always seem to figure it out in the end. Locke’s narrative reminds me a little of a Dennis Lehane novel — she’s got the same strong characters, the same driving storylines, and the same gift with both prose, and I really enjoyed her main character, Jay Porter.

The gist of the book is as follows: Jay Porter’s a black lawyer in Houston. It’s 1981, and he just can’t get his practice off the ground. He’s not a bad lawyer — he’s just attracting the wrong kind of clients. Making it on your own isn’t easy and money is beyond tight. Also, Jay and his wife Bernie are about six weeks away from having a baby. The timing couldn’t be worse for him to get wrapped up in a case that he, literally, saves from drowning.

Yet, when on a romantic boat ride with his wife to celebrate her birthday, they hear shots in the distance. Then, a splash in the water, and screams for help. Soon, Jay’s jumped overboard, swimming, diving, then rescuing a white woman who looks to have obviously been attacked. When they drop her off in front of the police station, Jay and Bernie think that’s the end of it — only it’s just the beginning and this one incident will soon change his life in ways he never expected.

Jay finds himself embroiled in a case that involves a lot of crooked people. It digs up his past, makes him face certain demons, and even puts his life in danger. And here’s where the novel kind of broke down for me — there were a lot of cliched, “car on the railway tracks against a running train” moments in the novel. Locke’s a screenwriter, and so you can see why she’d fall back into certain cinematic touch points, but I didn’t find those aspects of the story believable. To me, car chases and railroad crossings are the stuff of films, not real life, and I found it hard to swallow when Jay was in these precarious situations.

Interspersed with this case that just won’t let him out of its clutches, Jay becomes involved with a situation with his father (a Reverend) and some of his constituents. There’s a labour dispute that has its heart in the desegregation of the stevedore unions, and when a young boy is violently attacked for no reason, the situation heats up. So, now, Jay has two unsolvable situations on his hands: an ever-increasing case with the almost-drowned woman; and the union dispute that could lead to a lawsuit.

How Locke wrote with the difficult parts of the story that had to do with race relations, the south, and the complex issues of labour surrounding integrating the unions that deal with the docks was incredible. Those part of the novel sang for me — the setting, the politics, the very nature of Jay’s own troubles with the law before he set himself to rights — the writing was sharp, the relationships taut, and the book felt wholly original. It’s a shame that there couldn’t have been more of that and less of the played-out gunshots and car chases.

Regardless, once I picked this novel up, I didn’t put it down — I wasn’t sidetracked by other books (read The Lacuna and the new Stieg Larsson). Locke’s a real talent and I hope she continues to publish in this vein. I’d be happy to see what Jay Porter gets himself mixed up in next. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed he stays away from the railroad tracks in any future books.

#17 – So Much For That

Amanda (my intern) and I will be co-reviewing the book over at Savvy Reader, just like we did for Cool Water, but I still wanted to write my own thoughts down about this exceptional novel. No, that’s not hyperbole — I truly think Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That is exceptional from start to finish. And when I did finish the book on my way home yesterday, I ended up bawling like a baby on the subway with all kinds of commuters looking at me oddly. Yes, it’s a good thing I had the physical book and not a gadget, or else they would have really thought me strange.

Shep Knacker has always been a self-starter. Despite his lack of a university education (his pastor father still holds the fact that he never went to college against him), he managed to build up a million-dollar handyman business before selling it to a bohunk (one that keeps him employed, more to humiliate Shep than anything else). On the eve of Shep finally taking the plunge into his ultimate dream of The Afterlife, escaping to foreign soils where he and his family would live off of the proceeds of his company’s sale, tragic news stops him in his tracks. Shep’s wife, Glynis, has never been all that supportive of The Afterlife. She resents the idea that he wants to get away from everything (modern life, her) and spend his dying days on Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania. So when Glynis announces that she has a very rare and very virulent form of cancer (mesothelioma) that requires immediate and expensive treatment, it’s almost a passive aggressive attack on her husband and his dreams. Upon hearing he’s about to up and leave for Pemba, has even bought the tickets, she announces almost blithely, “I do wish you wouldn’t… I’m afraid I will need your health insurance.”

The other set of main characters in the novel are Jackson, Shep’s coworker and best friend, and his family. His eldest daughter, Flicka, is a teenager who suffers from Familial Dysautonomia (FD), yet another rare and difficult disease. Carol, Jackson’s wife, is Flicka’s primary health care provider, and the family’s other daughter, Heather, often feels excluded because her sister demands so much attention. They are a typical New York family — they own a house in Brooklyn with a hefty mortgage and the couple works night and day to afford the care for their daughter, much of which isn’t covered by their combined insurance policies.

Regardless of how you might feel about the debates raging south of the border — the ridiculous “Tea Party,” the sensational news coverage by the right, the objections by the right, all of it — the idea that health care and the fundamental lack of affordable ways of getting it, form a central thesis in the novel. It’s topical and timely, but not preachy. Oh, it passes judgement but more in the sense that it allows the reader to draw her own conclusions by presenting facts and an honest, if fictional, situation.

Annnnwaaay.

In the face of their diseases, both Glynis and Flicka find comfort in one another — that’s not to say that they are “happy” by any means to be sick. The opposite, in fact, is often true, and Shriver’s uncanny ability to write characters who are at once complex and yet so unbearably human comes into sharp focus in this novel, just as it did with We Need to Talk About Kevin. The impact of the two unhealthy individuals shatters each family in different ways. The patients are angry, upset, and unflinchingly honest when they need to be about their diseases. But the road to acceptance, to leading a life where disease is always present and can never be escaped (and here’s something I know better than most), is never easy. Glynis fights to live. Sometimes, Flicka fights to die.

The moral issues Shriver explores, the sheer expense of health care in the States, the value of a human life (the millions of dollars spent on treatment), becomes so much more than a moral question — it’s the entry point for examining American society in general. From Jackson’s anti-establishment rants to Glynis’s fervent need to blame someone for her cancer (in this case, it’s the company who produced artistic supplies for her metalwork training when she was a student — they contained asbestos, the cause of her cancer). And because Shep has always paid for everything, that’s just his role in his family, he pays and pays and pays — for Glynis’s treatment, for his father’s old age home, for his sister’s heating bills (and is she ever a piece of work). No matter how hard he works, no matter how much he cares about his family, his life seems to crumble down upon him as penny by penny disappears from his Afterlife account.

At any point in this novel, there are moments when you simply don’t like the characters. You can’t believe they’re acting so selfishly, are so obtuse. And then, something happens and you see them in a different light. I’d argue that few living novelists do this as well as Shriver. She has a talent for pulling out extraordinary details in ordinary lives and writing them in a way that’s original and provocative.

As a girl who has dealt with a serious illness for all of her adult life, I couldn’t help but associate with the two characters dealing with disease. And while my Wegener’s is nowhere near as aggressive as Glynis’s cancer (because it’s moderated with medicine, unchecked it’ll kill me in terrible ways) or as impactful as Flicka’s FD (primarily because you can’t tell I’m sick by looking at me; at least I hope you can’t), the psychological warfare that disease plagues one with remains ridiculously effective throughout this entire novel. Shriver’s research reads impeccably — she writes the side effects, the symptoms, the treatments, the physical implications of each disease in such rich detail — and it’s the main reason the reader becomes so emotionally involved with this story. And the ending, well, I’m not going to spoil it — I’m only going to say it’s absolutely perfect and calls to mind the absolutely perfect ending of another exceptional novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.

Highly, highly recommended. This is not a novel that will disappoint even the most cynical of readers.

WHAT’S NEXT: Ian McEwan’s Solar. I’m 30 pages in and loving the Salman Rushdie “man in midlife crisis” of it all.

#13 – Then We Came To The End

Oh, I fell hard for you from the very moment I cracked open your spine. Your story, about a collective of young people who work at a Chicago advertising agency during a time when the country was facing tough economic times. You have such a way with words, with storytelling, that’s unique, modern, and terribly engrossing. Sometimes, you’re sentences were so lovely, my heart ached a little in turn.

Sometimes, because your story was so much like events in my own life, I could recognize myself in your characters — the close-knit working quarters, the ambitious feeling of being young, in your first or second real job, and having routines. I’d imagine it’s hard to write a convincing novel about something as mundane as work, but you manage to make it feel relevant, current and interesting. I think, in a way, anyone who works in an office environment can relate to the trials and tribulations of being “walked Spanish down the hall.” Of the resentment and anger you feel, of the pressure to move on maybe before you’re ready, of the way life sometimes forces you in a direction you never imagined.

Your story rolls along, and you feel like you’re sitting on the dock on a hot summer’s day, being lulled by words instead of waves. Even when you are writing scenes, stories, thoughts that have been said so many ways before, your story still feels original. Maybe it’s your voice. Your use of “we” throughout. Maybe it’s how you never give in to the apparent. How you continuously surprise us with your narrative — sure you deal with topics that can be construed as “well trodden territory” (breast cancer; angry, belligerent ex-employees pulling a Michael Douglas) — but your book never takes the easy way out, you never write what’s expected.

Thank you.

#12 – Invisible Man

My goal for February was to read a couple books for Black History Month. Not surprisingly, I managed one: Ralph Ellison’s classic, Invisible Man. The novel is substantial, both in its scope and narrative approach. It took me ages to read–and I abandoned it at one point and picked up a different book, read magazines, anything really to escape the relentless story.

The title, metaphorical, not literal, refers to the narrator’s lack of identity as a black man. He can walk down a street and no one sees him. He can stand on the street and people will pass on by as if he wasn’t even there. Invisibility — blessing and a curse — defines his life. And what a troubled life, kicked out of school (not his fault), and settling in New York City, things go from bad to worse for the man. The novel, which was first published in 1952, and it was interesting to read it now, over fifty years later. Ellison’s writing style, while imbued with the tone and tenacity of the time, doesn’t feel dated. In fact, the book reminded me a lot of The Best of Everything, not in its subject matter, characterization or plot, but more because of its uncanny ability to bring the story to life and embed in a very particular time and place.

My 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die tome suggests the novel has existential themes, and I’d agree, the narrator can’t help but contemplate his existence; it’s the purest form of a Manichean dialogue, race goes beyond allegory, it’s essential and he’s essentially being defined against it by just about everyone he comes into contact with him. There were moments when the cruelty of the world became almost too much for me to bear — I turned away like I did when I watched Inglorious Basterds, when the violence, meant to be too much, shocked me into tears.

I was first supposed to read Ellison’s masterpiece in university. At the time, I was too wrapped up in Faulkner, a writerly obsession I carried with me from high school. Since then, I’ve carried my same copy around with me from apartment to apartment, keeping it on that metaphorical ‘to be read’ someday shelf with many other books from school. Slowly but surely, I’m working my way through a lot of them. Because I read so much modern Can Lit, and let’s face it, books that are published by the houses where I worked over the last five years, I’ve been rebelling a little. When I go to the shelf I’m inspired to pick up big, heavy books like Invisible Man and give my brain a work out. I imagine writing a paper filled with literary theory, can smell the air in the library as I do research, and think that Invisible Man does exactly what a classic piece of literature should do, it lasts.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001 Books, natch.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I can’t blog about the book I read this week, Emma Donoghue’s Room (#13), because it’s not out until Fall 2010. But I will say this, it’s exceptional — a literary page turner of the likes I’ve never read before, and it’s become one of my favourite new books of the year. I can’t wait to talk to people about it once it’s actually published. So I’m going to try to finish the totally absurd The Third Policeman (also a 1001 Book), and a couple other Irish writers because it’s March and my theme is, well, Irish writing this month.

#7 – Burning Bright

As I’ve been, well, telling just about anyone who’ll listen, I’ve had a whopper of a cold since last weekend. I abandoned my Reading Nonfiction for January for a few days only because my head, eyes and nose hurt so much it was impossible to concentrate on the written word. However, I did manage to finish Tracy Chevalier’s Burning Bright.

When the novel opens, the Kellaway family, after suffering through the tragedy of the death of a son, move from the country to bustling London. Tom, a chair maker, his wife, daughter and son, Jem, eventually settle in Lambeth near Astley’s Circus, and next door to William Blake. The other prominent family (of scallywags) includes Maggie Butterflield, her elder brother Charlie, and their parents. Their lives intersect with one another over the course of the novel, both because they’re neighbours, but also through the burgeoning relationship between Maggie and Jem.

Life in London isn’t easy at first for the Kellaways. Jem’s mother Anne, at first, stands at the window watching the fine dresses and hats wander by, afraid to conquer the streets on her own. But when their patron (of sorts), Mr. Astley, sends them tickets to the circus, her life is transformed. Thomas and Jem start to work for Astley (who has a scoundrel of a son) as carpenters and soon everyone’s smitten with London life, in a way.

But the good tidings can’t last, and events put pressure on both families. Whether it’s the shock of what Maggie did in Cut-Throat Lane or Jem’s sister’s disasterous love affairs, soon personal issues send the Butterfields and the Kellaways reeling. Set against the fiery London just before and after the start of the French Revolution, it’s interesting to see how history and famous people (William Blake) intersect with the presumably “real” everyday people who would have lived during 1792. While I’ve yet to read a novel by Tracy Chevalier that captures the emotional resonance and lasting power of Girl with a Pearl Earring, I totally enjoyed Burning Bright. It’s very good historical fiction and it really was just what I needed last week.

#5 – In Defense of Food

Carrying forth with my “I should read more nonfiction. I’ll do it in January” mentality, I finished Michael Pollan’s excellent In Defense of Food this week. I know Foer’s critical of Pollan’s approach in Eating Animals, but I still find him to be the most logical, engaging food/environmental writer (and I don’t read widely, sorry!) that I’ve read in years.

The book has a simple edict: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Throughout its 200-odd pages, Pollan explains what he means by these simple statements. He defines what “food” is (it should be recognized by your ancestors, live in the outer edges of a grocery store, and grown) for people who may have been confused (or living under a rock), sets out simple ways to find it, and then encourages them to eat it (at a table, preferably).

The idea of becoming a selective omnivore never would have entered my mind five years ago. When our neighbour planted tomatoes and some herbs in our backyard I was so grossed out at the thought of eating something pulled right from the dirt that I poo-pooed the vegetables before even picking them. And then I tasted them. Now I can’t eat a pale, lifeless grocery store cucumber without longingly thinking about the ones that I’ve grown.

Your muscles have memory, and so do your taste buds, and Pollan’s so correct when he says that finding connection to your food by something as simple and inexpensive as a vegetable garden remains a resoundingly rewarding activity. My beans taste nothing like the waxy, protected grocery store bags of veggies I had to buy for Christmas. It might be a silly thing to say, but my crazy, intrusively kind neighbour changed my outlook on food completely. Then Pollan came along and gave me cause to shout.

While the book might linger just a little bit too long on the science and evolution bits, the idea that we’re getting it so fundamentally wrong on such a massive scale still catches my breath in my throat. Maybe we can change the world one seed at a time. Maybe we can’t. But I won’t stop digging in the dirt and doing what I can regardless.

#4 – The Happiness Project

Many, many years ago, after what felt like a lifetime of taking prednisone for the disease and suffering through the awful “induced psychosis” and resulting debilitating depression side effects, I began to explore the idea of happiness. My doctor recommended reading Mark Kingwell’s In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac, which I did, until I got about halfway through. It just wasn’t practical. I didn’t need an empirical exploration of what “happiness” was — I needed some magic lessons to lift the pressures of my troubled life and float me away on a magical river of self-understanding, satisfaction and, yes, intense happiness.

Like so many aspects of my (naive?) twenties, you have to grow up a little and realize that happiness isn’t something that magically appears. It takes hard work, it’s incremental, and it’s perhaps not even the point. Gretchen Rubin’s year-long experiment, her aptly titled The Happiness Project, comes to some of the same conclusions. Rubin doesn’t set out to radically renovate her life.

Instead, she took incremental steps to increase her happiness on a daily basis. She tried everything, from smiling yoga to starting a YA book club, and created a theme for each month in the year to centre and ground her expectations. Not everything worked. Which, I imagine, was to be expected, but I’m going to summarize, perhaps incorrectly, that the point of Rubin’s book wasn’t to just find new things in life that equated a happy pill — it was to try and experience organic growth around the goal of leading a happier life.

Yet, like Kingwell’s book, I found Rubin’s to be also somewhat unsatisfying. She’s got a sweet, chatty tone to her writing, did massive amounts of research, and put herself out there (warts and all as they say) in an intensely personal way. Yet, the book, on the whole, felt a little superficial. And perhaps that’s just me as a reader; I did want some broader, philosophical implications from studying happiness for a year. But, in Rubin’s defense, that’s not at all what she set out to do. There’s a lot of hows in Rubin’s book, and not a lot of whys. She’s a goal-orientated person (and loves her gold stars) and therefore her quest for happiness consists of plenty of goal-orientated activities.

When it comes right down to it, maybe I’m looking for a balance between both books in my own search for understanding — a book that takes happiness outside of the person, looks at it from a different perspective, what does it mean and why it’s important, and then provides some guidance about how to get there. There’s an undercurrent to The Happiness Project that equates, in my mind anyway, that the end result is somehow deserved — but I know I’m reading my own thoughts into her project. The idea that by being happier herself Rubin can then infect others with these lightened feelings seems simple enough. But, like I said before, the book feels a bit too much like a happiness “to do” list to me. Maybe I wanted Rubin to dig a little deeper (why did she have so much clutter to begin with, what’s the emotional resonance behind any of the projects she embarked upon over the year) — the book felt rushed to me: did this, check, tried that, check, improved this, check, now on to the next thing.

However, I’m not even going to remotely suggest that it’s not a good idea to spend a year trying to a) improve yourself, b) improve the lives of your family or c) try to make it through life with a lighter, happier load. For this, I tip my hat to Gretchen and her year-long quest to be herself, sing in the mornings, and do what she loves. And also, I say a hearty hallelujah to the author for setting out from the beginning the differences between suffering from a depression (Rubin’s not at all depressed) and that all encompassing sadness, and the meaningful way she wants to set out to improve her life on a daily basis. Not once does she mix up “sadness” and call it “depression.” The slippage of the word depression into the lexicon whereby it becomes interchangeable to ‘sadness’ enrages me.

Annywaaay, Rubin’s clear, honest and forthright; she’s intelligent, a keen reader, and doing good in the world by helping the many readers of her successful blog — those are also things wherein I cannot find fault. But maybe for her next year, she might explore a little self-help Beth Lisick-style, because Helping Me Help Myself still remains my favourite of the happiness-seeking memoir genre.

#3 – Her Fearful Symmetry

Let me start off with a confession, as so many of my book reviews do (which leads me to ask one simple question: does anyone actually care about what I confess?), I hated The Time Traveler’s Wife. I found Niffenegger’s book to be slightly absurd, overwritten, and ridiculously implausible. In a way, I guess you could say I wasn’t a fan of supernatural romance.

With that in mind, I have no idea why I wanted to read Her Fearful Symmetry in the first place. I mean, the book got terrible reviews, and even the somewhat kind piece by Emma Donoghue in the Globe hits upon the novel’s central flaw: that too much symmetry makes a bit of a mess of a book. Yet, I was utterly intrigued. And, last night I stayed up way, way passed my bedtime to finish it. In fact, I turned off the light, closed my eyes, tossed and turned for a bit, thought about the book, got up, turned the light BACK ON, and then read the last 150 pages. What kind of a book does that?

The story opens as Elspeth Noblin dies from cancer. Her ravaged body is held by her lover of many years, Robert, and it’s sad. A tad cliched, terribly overwritten, but sad nonetheless (all of the things that annoyed me about the first book). But I was so engrossed by the sheer force of Niffenegger’s story that I almost missed my bus. And buses in Toronto are loud. And I was standing rightnext to the stop.

Elspeth leaves the bulk of her estate to her nieces, the daughters of her twin sister Edie, with whom she hasn’t spoken in over 20 years. It’s not a straightforward kind of will, for what kind of novel would include such boring, plot-sucking details as that, and Elspeth demands: a) that the twins, Julia and Valentina (ugh, that name, ugh) must live in her flat for one year and b) their parents, Edie and Jack, are never to set foot in the apartment.

The girls, who are mirror twins, are looking for an adventure. Julia, aggressive, demanding, controlling, pretty much makes decisions on behalf of Valentina. And Valentina, desperate to get away and have her own life, simply can’t figure out how to break the bond. These problems are somewhat cyclical, something akin to what their mother and Elspeth must have gone through when they were young.

Once in London, and this won’t spoil the story too much, they’re literally and metaphorically haunted by Elspeth. She’s a force in the novel: both as a character who left behind gaping holes after her death (for her lover Robert, for her family) and as a paranormal spirit who simply can’t move beyond the confines of the very apartment she willed to the girls. Lots of creepy stuff happens. Lots of silly stuff happens too.

The setting of the novel aptly reflects the atmosphere Niffenegger tries to create — the apartment building, which contains Robert, Elspeth and Martin’s homes collectively (Martin is an older gentleman whose wife, Marijke, has just left him because he refuses treatment for his highly advanced case of OCD) sits right beside Highgate Cemetary. And Robert, an historian who’s finishing his PhD thesis, works as a graveyard tour guide. Their lives swirl and intersect around one another, relationships develop, both romantic and friendly, and it’s this part of the book that I enjoyed the most — the “up and move to London” portions.

However beyond the fascinatingly banal everyday life sections, Her Fearful Symmetry moves into the absurd. The sections where the implausible happens were the hardest for me to get through. What I honestly loved about this book were the parts with OCD Martin. As a girl who knows and understands what those compulsions are like, I found his character, his struggles, incredibly moving and effective. I was less convinced by the last third of the novel, and wholly disappointed in the book’s main twist. Yet, as I said above, I stayed up way, way beyond my usual bedtime just so I could find out what happened. It’s a rare writer who can capture your attention like that and not let it go.

Was this book worthy of Niffenegger’s massive advance? Probably not. It’s terribly overwritten and full of needless details. Is it worthy of being on the bestseller lists? I’d hesitate, and then say yes, if only so the publisher can recoup their advance, but also temper my negativity by giving the book an overall thumbs up for being a truly enjoyable commercial read.