Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is a guilty pleasure for me - her books are such easy reads that surely something's wrong with them. I started some years ago - the first I really remember is Ladder of Years, about a woman who walks away from her family during a trip to the beach, goes to the next town, and sets herself up: a rented room, a job, a routine. From that distance she communicates with her bewildered husband and children. I liked it because what mom hasn't enjoyed the fantasy of just leaving, pulling the rug from beneath her family's expectations of her? Imagine the family car suddenly having a mind of its own, and instead of schlepping on errands, taking off for parts unknown just for the change.

Then I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and began to know Tyler's milieu - the eccentric (which means off-center) characters who bumble through life trying to be fair, trying to understand a world that fails them, trying to reconcile their own histories with who they think they should be.

Tonight I finished Digging to America, a rumination on what America is, what makes a person American, and the nature of outsiders. Two Korean baby girls arrive on the same flight to Baltimore's airport, each met by her adoptive family. Because the Americans are loud and inclusive, they pull the Iranians into association which becomes friendship. The two extended families are full of ideas about each other, assigning cultural attributes based on peeping through this window onto others' lives. They're often comical, sometimes offensive (and offended), but as their lives intertwine they become just people, close in the way family members are: a source of irritation, but like a grove of bamboo, connected underground.

Tyler's a best-selling author, which suggests that eccentricity is a refuge for many readers: a place to contemplate and make peace with our own oddities, and to come away more tolerant of others' foibles. Much light fiction is escapist: science fiction, spy stories, steampunk, vampires, a school for wizards, mysteries in which we can read at a happy distance about someone else's fatal problems. But she writes another kind of novel: reflective, in which rather than forgetting our own lives in favor of those more glamorous and dangerous, we find the poetry and humor in ourselves. And appreciate ourselves more, as she exalts failings by showing the humanity and compassion that precipitate them. Her characters may not be swashbucklers, but by their own measure they dare, and sometimes succeed. And she is kind: the highest achievement in her books is the growth and recognition of love.

If I were teaching high school English, she'd be on my reading list. Her characters don't outgrow oddity, they learn to flourish within it - surely that would be a comfort to a fifteen-year-old who's pretty sure no one understands.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

A primary benefit of being in a book group is reading works one would never know of. Such is my experience with Tan Twan Eng's saga The Gift of Rain. This novel explores Malaysia in the years preceding and during WWII, as the Japanese prepare then execute their invasion.
The Gift of Rain is told in two parts. Book 1, set before the war, lays out for us the multicultural milieu primarily of Penang, a small island off the Malay coast opposite Sumatra. In flashback we learn the story of protagonist Philip Hutton, youngest son of a British industrialist by his second wife, a Chinese woman who forsook her family to marry, then died while their child was seven. The youth's two brothers and sister, from their father's first marriage, are estranged from him to varying degrees - like Penang, Philip is an island. When he's about eighteen he meets a Japanese gentleman who practices aikijutsu, an early form of the martial art aikido. Endo-san takes him under his tutelage, where Philip learns Japanese as well. Aikido differs from the other martial arts in its core belief that violence is a result of being out of harmony, and the proper response is not to react with violence but to use the attacker's energy to restore harmony. This ideal is not only at the heart of what Endo-san has to teach his pupil, it also stands as a metaphor for their relationship. Endo-san travels up and down the Malay coast, sometimes with Philip, who unwittingly provides him a great deal of information which later becomes useful to the invading Japanese.

Book 2 is about the war, and where there was much lightness in the first section, now all turns dark. When the Japanese invade China, the rape of Nanking horrifies everyone, and the local Chinese population swells with refugees. Endo-san is regarded with suspicion, as is Philip for spending time with him. Once the Japanese take over Penang, Endo-san openly works for the Imperial Command, and Philip collaborates, translating for them. Most stories featuring collaborators are told from their victims' point of view - it is fascinating to view such actions from the inside, watching a naive young man try to do something he considers honorable (save his family) while enabling atrocities.
Tan Twan Eng's language is often beautiful as he describes the peoples and cities of Malaysia, and the dilemma he explores is a wrenching one. Philip's lack of perception about Endo-san's presence in Penang may annoy some readers - but he's obviously in love with his mentor, and love is famously blind. Though the story delivers him a measure of comeuppance, the very fact of his survival may prove unacceptable to those who have been on the receiving end of that combination of passivity, naivete and fear that mark a collaborator. The road to hell is paved indeed with the best intentions.

The novel explores the questions of fate and past lives. Though Philip rejects the idea of reincarnation, ultimately he falls back on it as some small justification for things he has done. Certainly he suffers, but not as much as those betrayed by his choice to make himself a tool. Ultimately, it is only through the broad view that humans are flawed and deserving of forgiveness, that I am willing to think of Philip with anything but contempt.

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is the most precise writer since Henry James. Where he carries the reader to the heart of his observation in a closing spiral of phrases set off by commas, Lively offers carefully-spun details, the particulars of work and relationships. And where James offers a Pointillist view of his subject, those dots of deliberately expressed color coalescing at a distance into an image, Lively weaves in tapestry fashion - these threads, these shadings - from which patterns emerge, become vivid; yet, a few more passes of the shuttle subtly change what we see. And when she is finished, Ah. We know she's done, every thread has been incorporated, nothing remains to say, the picture is complete.

Lively's novel The Photograph begins straightforwardly enough: Glyn, a landscape historian rummaging through old papers in his closet, discovers an envelope he's never seen. The photo inside is of a group of people: his wife Kath, her sister, her sister's husband, a woman friend and her man friend. And his wife and her brother-in-law are holding hands in an intimate clasp, unseen except by the camera. Kath has been dead some years - how can this revelation make a difference now? And yet, as Glyn confronts those in the photo with its evidence, one person after another finds life shaken from its moorings. This sylph with her vital glow revisits them all, undoing their certainties, reasserting the mystery that surrounded her.

Lively uses her found-object catalyst to examine people's relations to work, to family, to friendship, to the entire range of emotions from dissatisfaction and jealousy to the full storm of love.

This slight novel, 231 pages, pulls no punches, employs no gimmicks, promises nothing it does not deliver. We are in the hands of a master. There is no bombast, only the struggles and escapes familiar to us all, directed and pointed to illuminate a life. If you appreciate clear simple language which lays bare the hidden heart in all its complexity, you should read this fine book.

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, begun in the 1920's and still in some draft version when he died in 1940, is nevertheless a masterpiece.

Four stories entwine in the narrative: the devil visits Moscow with his retinue, predicting to the editor of a literary journal the improbable circumstances of his death. Satan's presence soon leads to overcrowding in the mental hospital as people babble about impossible occurrences. The second story, a novel rejected by Soviet publishers, recounts Pontius Pilate's days during and immediately following the crucifixion of Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The novelist, despairing of a life of fruitless endeavor, throws the manuscript into his stove, but as the devil remarks, "manuscripts are not so easily destroyed." We're given a taste of life in Moscow, among theater-goers and at a large restaurant frequented by writers and poets. And the author of Pilate's story, the Master, is the lover of Margarita, a woman of strong will and courage who makes a pact with the demons in order to bring peace to the man she loves.

In the satiric vein of Gogol, whose comic novella The Nose ridicules bureaucratic self-importance, Bulgakov's devil plays with people's greed and vanity. Booked for a magic show at the city's largest theater, the devil materializes a boutique and invites women to come try on - and keep - the lovely gowns and shoes. They hurry in, shedding their own clothes, dressing in finery. He flings money at the audience, who scramble to collect the notes. After the performance's abrupt end the crowd leaves the theater, only to find their new clothes vanished and the money worthless. A thousand women in the streets in their underwear must of course attract attention, but since the truth - that magic has been practiced - is impossible, officials deny the reports. They ascribe the sight to mass hypnosis, just one of the author's digs at the lockstep mentality of Stalin's time.

Bulgakov fought obscurity and the censors, and he portrays officialdom as selfish, incompetent and short-sighted. Likewise, the literati ignore the poet who witnessed the editor's bizarre death; from his room in the mental hospital he struggles to convince anyone of what he's seen. 
Something strange happened to [the poet] Ivan Nikolayevitch. His will seemed to crack, and he felt weak and in need of advice. 
"But what is to be done?" he asked timidly.
This is the famous question posed by Lenin during the Revolution, and coming from this poet who mistrusts his own senses, it strikes an absurd and pitiful note in contrast to the thundering challenge issued by Soviet Russia's hero. Small wonder the novel didn't see publication until 1966.

The chaos sown by the devil and his henchmen is wild and fantastical. Scoundrels inflict their bombast and corruption on other scoundrels, and bureaucrats scurry to gather evidence they refuse to believe, while credulous men populate the mental hospital - the perpetrators do not strike us as evil. Rather, they have come to torment the pompous and reveal the idiocy of fools - we could wish for such powers!

The Dovekeepers

Alice Hoffman's novel The Dovekeepers recounts the story of the Jews of Masada in 73 CE (Common Era, aka AD) who resisted the Roman army, dying in martyrdom rather than be slaughtered by their enemies or taken into slavery.
Through the first-person narratives of four unusual women she recreates the disparate events that brought refugees, warriors and the devout to the nearly inaccessible mountaintop palace built for King Herod centuries before.

Yael, whose voice we first hear, is an assassin's daughter who flees Jerusalem with her father as the Romans conquer that city and destroy the Second Temple. They survive in the desert, a fitting locale for a fierce woman whose element is fire, and who identifies with the lion, ruler of the hottest summer month. They seek her brother Amram, a warrior, and follow rumor of him, finding him finally in Masada where he is a man of renown. In that city she joins the other women who care for the doves, gathering the birds' dung to fertilize the fields and orchards that make the redoubt a place of plenty.

Next we meet Revka, widow of a baker, refugee with her daughter, son-in-law and young grandsons from the sacking of their village. Unaccustomed to the dangers surrounding them, they linger at an oasis where the boys and Revka bear witness as renegade soldiers rape and murder her daughter, while her son-in-law is out praying - for it is Yom Kippur. Revka later poisons the soldiers, but their deeds cannot be undone. When her son-in-law returns he goes mad, and the four of them journey on to Masada where his only desire is to join the warriors there, and kill. The boys are struck mute by the horrors they have seen, and Revka only wills herself to live so she can care for them. The dovekeepers when they arrive are Shirah, a woman from Alexandria, and her two daughters, Aziza and Nahara. 

The third portion of the book is narrated by Aziza, sixteen when she begins her story. Her mother's eldest, she does not know her father. Her sister and brother are children of a chieftain from Judea, one of a tribe of bloodthirsty horsemen who raid caravans crossing the desert. This chieftain honors Shirah though he purchased her, and raises Aziza to ride and hunt. The girl, whose element is steel, loves the ways of men. Once her mother declares she has a signal from her lover, the family slips away in the chieftain's absence to the shores of the Dead Sea, buying passage. Once across, they make their way to Masada. There Aziza attracts the eye of Amram, Yael's brother - but it is an escaped Roman slave brought by a raiding party to the fortress and put to work (still a slave) assisting the dovekeepers, who understands her skill with weapons and teaches her archery. She lives a double life: as a woman, restricted in her actions; and as a warrior, dressed as a youth, a deadly shot and fearless but unable to reveal her identity.

At last we hear Shirah's voice. She is a witch and prophetess whose element is water, taught several languages along with knowledge of herbs, spells and divining by her mother, who sent her from Alexandria at thirteen to be safe with kinsmen. There she falls in love with her cousin, who later becomes the charismatic figure inspiring the people of Masada to live in relative equality - men and women are treated differently, but there are no rich and poor - all share in bounty and starvation alike, devoted to God. Eleazar and Shirah have loved each other since they met, though he is married already. When she is discovered to be pregnant - and unwed - she is cast out of his household, from whence she falls in with the chieftain. She brings her children to Masada so she can be near her love; here she is feared and hated, though individually women seek her out for help in securing a man's love, curing ailments or easing childbirth.

As each tells her story, we move closer to the Roman army's siege of Masada and the martyrdom of the 900 Jews who defended it until they were overwhelmed. There is much in this book that is grim and brutal, and none of the characters have clean hands except the Essenes, a nonviolent sect anticipating the end of this world, who eschew possessions except the scrolls they copy to leave buried in jars in different places: the Dead Sea scrolls. The Romans do not spare them, but their writings survive in hiding.

There are fanciful elements to the novel: a cloak of invisibility used by the assassin; a woman who faces down a lion and a leopard unscathed; a witch who can summon a deluge; a slave kept useless in chains for months while his keepers starve; the convenience with which characters' paths diverge and reconnect and destinies are sorted out. And the editor in me finds Hoffman's redundancy exasperating - in succeeding paragraphs she tells and retells the same moments, as though she doubts the reader's attention. Nevertheless, she's done her research, and though I'm no historian, in the main I trust her recounting of this group's rebellion against Rome, their courage and struggle to survive, and in the end their accord, their willingness to die at each other's hand not the Romans'. Hoffman has brought history to life with her strong characters and visceral imagery.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Reviewed by NC Weil

Michael Chabon is an engaging writer - he tells a good story in a listen-to-this-one style larded with history, specialized allusions to music, movies and food, and emotional tides. Truth is essential to fiction - a false statement jars the reader into losing faith in author and story both. But from doubleknit suits and musical knowledge, to the uneasy political correctness of white Berkeley (featuring a cameo by prospective US Senator Barack Obama), Chabon is right on. He polishes those details till they shine, their specifics putting us firmly in a place and time.

He structures the story so collisions loom: Gwen Shanks, pregnant midwife, in a foundering marriage with Archy Stallings; Archy's partner Nat Jaffe with whom he co-owns Brokeland Records, a used record store tended with love and knowledge in a struggling neighborhood on the edge where yuppie post-radical Berkeley meets dumped-upon poor cousin Oakland (Brokeland being a conflation of the two); Nat's wife Aviva who is Gwen's partner in a midwife practice; the Jaffes' fourteen-year-old son Julius ("Julie"); his friend and crush Titus, a refugee from familial chaos who has showed up in Oakland to be near his father Archy Stallings; Archy's martial-artist blaxploitation-flick absentee father Luther Stallings - all these characters need something from each other, owe something to each other, but live as though they don't have to change.

The collisions: race, money, generational failures, politics, ego.

Gwen, Archy, Luther and Titus are black. Nat, Aviva and Julie are white and Jewish. Archy fools around (hence Titus), including an affair in the midst of Gwen's pregnancy. Nat has bipolar tendencies: moody, volcanic and prickly, liable to regrettable outbursts. Gwen, who dreamed of bringing black babies into the world outside of the expense and hierarchy of the medical establishment, finds herself serving a wealthy, neurotic white clientele while black women shun her craft for the security of hospital deliveries. The tenuous rights of midwives keep Aviva and Gwen's practice marginal, and a birth emergency responded to by an arrogant white doctor triggers an outburst from Gwen, imperiling the women's hospital privileges. Meanwhile Gibson Goode, black sports hero and entrepreneur, is launching an investment with the support of local political figures: a megastore a couple of blocks from Brokeland Records, featuring among other things a quality vinyl section. Nat and Archy raise opposition to the project among the fringes, but their stand seems quixotic against Goode's deep pockets and political clout.

Meanwhile, Luther Stallings and his co-star Valletta, still a head-turner in her fifties, show up intending to raise the money to make one final film. Luther, for decades a drug user and lowlife, has cleaned up, but Archy cannot trust him. Titus and Julie however, cult film aficionados, discover Luther and fall in with the glow of his plans. The old kung fu master still has some moves, and amid the wreckage of his life, he puts them to good use.

Chabon's sentences have to be unpacked - you can't skim this book and have any idea what's going on. An example:
"In fact, Gwen disbelieved in qi and in 97 percent of the claims that people in the kung fu world made about it, those stories of people who could lift Acuras and avert bullets and bust the heads of mighty armies by virtue of their ability to control the magic flow. Ninety-seven percent was more or less the degree to which Gwen disbelieved in everything that people represented, attested to, or tried to put over on you. And despite midwives' latter-day reputation as a bunch of New Age witches, with their crystals and their alpha-state gong CDs and their tinctures of black and blue cohosh root, most midwives were skeptical by training, Gwen more skeptical than most. Nonetheless, she felt something coursing through her and around her, mapped by the flying beads [of the restaurant beaded-curtain divider she'd just torn down after seeing her husband sitting beyond it with his inamorata]. She glowered down at the bastard who had somehow managed  to conceal his bulk behind her 3 percent blind spot and sneak into her life."

The avalanche of detail overwhelms the story at times, but Chabon won't leave us in this chaos. His characters crash into each other, illusions shattering, and they have to chart new courses onward in life. He cares enough about them to invest each with her or his own dignity, purpose and hope, giving us ample reasons to trek along on their adventures. But he also crafts each with a fatal weakness - not fatal meaning "going to die" but signifying "of fate" - their own flaws which have made them who they are as well as setting them up for the struggles we witness. And these weaknesses, ultimately, are what make this a fine story - we understand these people, we sympathize. We want them to work it out.

Admiring writers

First I'm going to apologize to Ann Patchett, who is a lovely writer. I just finished Run, her novel about family and politics and race and religion and Boston, in which a group of related characters are thrown together into new combinations in the aftermath of an accident. I enjoyed the book: well-crafted sentences, insightful observations, a vivid sense of place.

"Don't move her," a voice above her said. It was an adult voice, but she did not regard it. One of the first rules of safety in scouting was not to move a person after an accident, but that knowledge came second to the fact that no one can breathe facedown in the snow. When she had turned her mother just enough, she brushed the snow out of her nose and eyes. There was blood beneath her head, a bright and shocking soak of red against the white, but the sight of her mother's face, the weight of her head in her hands, calmed her and she was able to stop making that noise.

Fine work, an excellent writer.
Patchett's characters are well-drawn but they are characters. The ways they interact show us universals of the Human Condition. She limns ambition, disappointment, determination and love, and these qualities define the characters as her words skein and float and accumulate.

But I also read a couple of chapters of Fall of the Rock Dove, a novella by A. Rooney. He too chooses words with care, but his observations hit a different set of synapses. My head is nodding while my brain is still sorting out exactly what he's said, let alone why.

As storms go this wasn't much but like most of our wet ones it came up from the Gulf, over the mountains, and picked up some cold along the way. The moisture in the air makes it easier to smell people on the bus - cigarettes, bacon, perfume and cologne, shampoo and conditioner, marijuana. It feels a little bit like we're spying on each other, crossing into each other's lives. 

Rooney's characters are people, living below and beyond the page, stuck in their struggles, small happy moments drowning in a sea of disability, disrespect and suicide. They are part ridiculous, part pathetic, part canny. Through their eyes we see a world that sneaks past us constantly, that we have trained ourselves to fail to notice. His words clang and hiss and startle.

[Trevino] also checks with Miss Cleo for her psychic predictions and except for Monday [when they all have to go to the Disability office to qualify for their weekly payment], he always asks her which days are best to go out. Bonifacio and Trevino got into it once when Bonifacio told him that Miss Cleo's psychic hotline was bullshit, that they busted her. I had to separate them but imagine a fight on a city bus between two disabled guys - one blind and the other with hooks.

You can't look away. This very short book is packed with pain and vitality, defensiveness and hope.

She never said it but I think my mother thought cars were messy, unpredictable, and expensive, and they could control you. I think not having one was mostly my mother's idea but because my dad was easygoing and had never driven before he went along with it. As a child, explaining to your friends that your family doesn't own a car takes some doing. They think you're either joking, lying, or really poor.

A. Rooney, I've got to hand it to you: the people you put on the page will stay with me. Sorry, Ann Patchett: I liked your novel but it never quite got its feet dirty. But Patchett has a reputable publisher and best-sellers to her credit; Rooney's work is self-published. Go figure.