AA – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 A TRICK OF THE LIGHT by Louise Penny /2011/a-trick-of-the-light-by-louise-penny/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:26:54 +0000 /?p=20617 Book Quote:

“The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  SEP 02, 2011)

Three Pines is a village near Montréal that is so small it does not appear on any map. For its size, this town has had an inordinate number of murders; solving them is the job of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and his team of detectives. This time, the victim is a woman, Lillian Dyson, whose art criticism years ago was so caustic that she was responsible for putting an end to budding careers. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light is all about artists—their insecurities, craving for recognition, pettiness, resentment, and jealousy.

Two artists, Clara Morrow and her husband, Peter, live in Three Pines, and Peter has been moderately successful. However, it is Clara who is having a private solo exhibition, a vernissage, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. For years she toiled in relative obscurity, receiving nothing but “silence from a baffled and even bemused art world.” Now that Clara has come into her own, Peter has mixed feelings about his wife’s long overdue fame.

This novel deals with relationships and emotions. Gamache is still barely on speaking terms with Olivier Brulé, who bears a grudge against him. Moreover, Gamache still has nightmares about a bloody raid he conducted that went terribly wrong, nearly taking his life and that of his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvior. Jean Guy is a wreck, who relies on pain pills to get through the day and is planning to end his miserable marriage (“all the petty sordid squabbles, the tiny slights, the scarring and scabbing”).

Louise Penny understands what makes people tick. She knows that they often show one face to their family, friends, and neighbors, while they bury their true feelings under a façade of amiability. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, the disappointments, and the bitter rancor that can eat a person up from within. She specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they desperately need help.

As a murder mystery, this is a fairly routine effort. There is little suspense (the list of people who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill Lillian is not particularly large) and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for other reasons: her eloquent use of language, analysis of people’s psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Ruth, an old drunk who insults people with wild abandon, Olivier and his beloved partner, Gabri, and Armand’s lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are all on hand, along with an assortment of art dealers, gallery owners, associates of the homicide victim, and the detectives who are under Gamache’s command. Penny explores what makes art memorable and also what it is like to struggle creatively. This alone makes A Trick of the Light both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 287 readers
PUBLISHER: Minotaur Books (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Louise Penny
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Chief Inspector Gamache novels:

]]> IMPERFECT BIRDS by Anne Lamont /2010/imperfect-birds-by-anne-lamont/ Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:25:07 +0000 /?p=8917 Book Quote:

“There are so many evils that pull on our children.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (APR 15, 2010)

If you are at all familiar with any of Anne Lamott’s books, Imperfect Birds will have a very familiar ring to it. It tackles the themes of addiction, spirituality, 12- step programs and enabling.

The novel is about Rosie,  now a 17 year-old adolescent who has her parents wrapped around her fingers. She is heavily into drugs and alcohol but is lying to her parents about the extent of her substance use, cheating on her urinalyses. She is a great manipulator and excellent with triangulation. Her mother, Elizabeth, and her step-father James, are at their wit’s ends. Rosie’s father, Andrew, died when she was a young child.

Elizabeth is a recovering alcoholic who has two years clean time. She has a feeling of emptiness and has never felt whole since Andrew died. Her rocky relationship with Rosie makes her feel fragile and distrustful of her own gut feelings. James is very grounded and tries to get Elizabeth to be more secure in her boundaries with Rosie and to trust her instincts, not to any great avail.

Rosie has two best friends, Alice and Jodie. As the book opens, Jodie has just completed three months at a rehab facility. They are all three using drugs and sometimes trading sex for drugs. They don’t use condoms and seem unaware of the dangers of unsafe sex.

Elizabeth doesn’t work outside the home. She and the family live in the vicinity of Marin County. James has a weekly show on National Public Radio and has published one novel. Up to this time, Elizabeth has considered herself his muse and now feels lost, her place in the family insecure. Marital stress is at an all time high due to Rosie’s lying, splitting and manipulation. Elizabeth, especially, is very enabling of Rosie’s behaviors.

The book discusses a lot about recovery and there is a lot of spirituality-centered talk in it as well. Elizabeth’s best friends are ministers and they are the ones that Rosie is referred to for counseling. Elizabeth, James, and their friends all used to drink together years ago and are all in recovery. Elizabeth is active in Alcoholics Anonymous. Additionally, she suffers from depression and is on medication for her psychiatric issues.

Rosie tests Jame’s and Elizabeth’s limits to the max. She breaks curfew, sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night, asks Elizabeth to withhold information from James, and generally lies, steals, and is rude, disrespectful and snide to both Elizabeth and James. She is a bright girl who is a whiz at physics who also reads Robertson Davies and Maria Rilke. Despite her intelligence, she has little or no insight about the extent of her substance problems.

The author does an excellent job of showing the strain and difficulties posed by a drug abusing adolescent. There is too much about spirituality for my taste, but this is to be expected in a book written by Lamott.

The novel very excellently shows the grip of addiction, the pain that it causes loved ones and the strains it puts on marital and family relationships. Lamott is the perfect writer to tackle a topic like this, a topic that is harrowing, frightening and life-threatening. This is a good book, one that every parent will benefit from.

* Editor’s note:  Rosie is the same character that appears in Rosie (1983) at age 5 and then in Crooked Little Heart (1997) at age 13.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 17 readers
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Hardcover (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE: Imperfect Birds
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Anne Lamont Fan Page
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Made me think of this book:

Blame by Michele Huneven

Bibliography:

Non-fiction:

]]> NIGHT NAVIGATION by Ginnah Howard /2009/night-navigation-by-ginnah-howard/ Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:28:32 +0000 /?p=6125 Book Quote:

“Drug dramas. And manic-depression. Hard to know which roller coaster you’re riding.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (NOV 11, 2009)

Ginnah Howard’s Night Navigation is a powerful and unflinching novel about drug addiction and mental illness. It is beautifully written in a terse and spare style that is both rich and evocative. The narrative reminded me of the music of Erik Satie or the pizzicato violin in the andante movement of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. The writing is that beautiful and melodic. It made me rise out of myself into the world that Ms. Howard has created.

The story takes place in a one year time period in upstate New York. Del is a retired high school teacher and artist. She is the mother of 37 year-old Mark who has been diagnosed as a MICA, a dually diagnosed “mentally ill chemical abuser.” Mark is manic depressive and a heroin addict. He has been in and out of rehab and various psychiatric hospitals. As the book begins, Mark is once again wanting to go to detox and then rehab in a therapeutic community. Like a fugue, the chapters switch back and forth between Del and Mark, sharing their thoughts, feelings and actions. They are superimposed yet also separate.

Mark is on a lot of psychotropic medications including Zyprexa (an antipsychotic), neurontin (a mood stabilizer), and an antidepressant. He talks about the various side effects of the medications: weight gain, fuzzy tongue, tardive dyskinesia, an incipient manic episode. He has a history of stealing in order to get money for drugs. He once took Del’s car, worth $8,000 and sold it for $700. He has drug dealers after him trying to get the money that he owes them. When the novel begins, Mark is living with Del, a living situation that is not working out for her. She is terrified every time the phone rings – that it will be one of Mark’s dealers, that someone will be calling to tell her about a crisis, or that she will be notified that Mark is dead. Del is an enabler and is working hard to let go of Mark, to not buy into his life issues. “When the phone rings, think marsupial: once he gets too big for the pouch, out you go.” She is torn between being “Mama Marsupial” and being “Mama Bear.” What makes it so difficult for Del to let go of Mark is that her husband, Lee, committed suicide when her sons were boys. Mark’s brother, Aaron, also committed suicide seven years ago. Del is terrified that she will lose Mark, too.

There is a lot about twelve-step programs in this book and the author is very familiar with them. She writes about AA, NA and Al-Anon with a knowledge that is authentic and wise. When Del is thinking about the family program at Mark’s rehab center, in which family “are integrated into the clinical process as thoroughly as possible on an encouraged voluntary basis,” her response is “As thoroughly as possible . . .on an encouraged voluntary basis. Between these carefully edited phrases, this chorus: Night after night we expected to find out this person was dead. Hundreds of promises have been broken. You want us to open up, on an encouraged voluntary basis, to hope again, as thoroughly as possible to feel that pain once more.” For Del, every day is a challenge. She tries to avoid the telephone, she has to walk past the cabin where Aaron was living when he took his life. “What happens in her gut when the phone rings and whether she can look up this hill or not are the two barometers of how she’s really feeling.”

Del’s life is paved with crisis after crisis. Mark wants everything done right away, yesterday if possible. Del jumps to accommodate Mark’s requests and demands. This makes her relationship with her long-time partner, Richard, rocky. He wants her to have clearer boundaries and limits with Mark. He doesn’t really get the pressure and fear that Del is living under. Ms. Howard is carefully non-judgmental about Del and Mark, presenting their situations and outcomes in a compassionate and straight-forward way. Even when Del repeats the same errors in judgment that allow her to be used by Mark, there is no condescension or sense of “I told you so” in the story. Concomitantly, Mark is not judged when he relapses or acts in a profoundly wrong manner. These are two people who love each other, trying to get through their days, one day at a time – – difficult days that Ms. Howard knows no one but them can truly understand.

It is poignant when Del is sitting in her living room and “She sees she’s pulled the cushion over to rest on her knees. The pillow to shield against a head-on.” For this is the stuff of her life – – head-on collisions with no seat belt. The author understands addicts and addictive thinking, the way that an addict manipulates, is self-centered and loses sight of right and wrong in the desire to get the next fix. She realizes how difficult it is for Mark to try one more stint in rehab, this time in what he calls a “junkie boot camp. Going to tear you down; then build you back up. Mortification and absolution.” Of course Mark isn’t able to cut the mustard in this type of environment but this is not held against him. He is an addict and addicts do what they have to do to get their way, always. As the saying goes in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Fake it till you make it.” It’s all faking, all the time, until real recovery sets in. For Mark, he’s a fledgling at all this and has never had any real time being clean and sober. He’s never made it to true recovery.

Anger is a huge issue for both Del and Mark. They have difficulty discussing Lee or Aaron’s suicide with one another and their anger comes out sideways at one another or turned inward against themselves. One day, while in rehab, Mark is looking in a mirror, “He is the only one left in the bathroom. The face is a death mask. Shifting into Aaron’s face. All his teeth ache. Stuff surging up in front of him that he’s pretty sure isn’t there. Dad in the pole barn, blood all over. Aaron, drifting down. And always the low hum.” The ghosts of Aaron and Lee are always in the background of Mark and Del’s lives. They live in despair, fear, if only’s, what ifs, and quiet desperation. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be the only two members left of a nuclear family, the only half of that family that has not succumbed to suicide.

Ms. Howard knows mental illness well. She describes the incessant smoking that most manic depressives and schizophrenics need in order to balance their minds. Mark says to himself at one point, “The trembles are back to moderate and transmissions from outer space reduced to occasional.” And this is a fairly good day for him. On bad days he hears click-clacking, humming, and feels like his head might explode. His mouth is like mush and it’s hard to speak. Del hates to see Mark like this and she sees herself as a rescuer even if she can’t be a savior. It is the only action she can live with – – for what would happen to her if Mark took the same route as his brother and father.

One might think this is a depressing book and in some ways it certainly is. However, it is a book about hope and resiliency, about love and coping, and about acceptance and second chances. As Roethke, the poet said, “What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.” With Mark and Del, we have two noble souls struggling to survive. Thriving is still a long way down the road. But neither of them give up. They keep at it, one day at a time. This is a remarkable book in its reality and starkness, in its ability to light the way for two tormented souls. It is a book that kept me up all night reading because I could not put it down.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 34 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 14, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE: Night Navigation
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Ginnah Howard
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: A Cure For Night by Justin Peacock

Blame by Michelle Huneven

Somethings that Meant the World to Me by Joshua Mohr

Bibliography:

]]> BLAME by Michelle Huneven /2009/blame-by-michelle-huneven/ Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:37:49 +0000 /?p=5220 Book Quote:

“She stood before the court and touched the dark tumult, the awful thumps and booms, bodies on the ground, a wheeling of stars; with such images came the inevitable, engulfing nausea of knowing it could never be undone.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (SEP 27, 2009)

Michelle Huneven’s new novel, Blame, has one of the best prologues to come along in a long time. Here, we are introduced to Joey Hawthorne, a preteen struggling with the impending death of her mother to breast cancer. One day tall, handsome uncle Brice shows up to pick her up from summer typing lessons and she immediately suspects something is wrong—her mother will die shortly thereafter.T hrough Brice, Joey is introduced to his temperamental girlfriend, Patsy MacLemoore. Patsy is drunk and in an attempt at some sisterly bonding, makes a failed attempt at piercing Joey’s ears. This beautiful chapter introduces us not just to the brash Patsy but gives us a look at how Joey views both her and the events of that surreal night. Years later, the very same Joey will play a crucial role in Patsy’s life—at that point one can’t help but revisit this chapter and admire how well the author, Michelle Huneven, has tied the different story elements together.

Patsy MacLemoore occupies center stage from the second chapter on. At the outset, she wakes up from an alcoholic stupor and finds that in an act of drunk driving, she has hit and killed a mother and daughter—two Jehovah’s Witnesses who were hanging around on her driveway. “Patsy pictured them again and again, as if they were borne on a conveyor belt from some charred storehouse of memory,” Huneven writes. Shortly thereafter Patsy is sentenced to years in prison and spends her time going through the daily grind. Interestingly enough, she observes that prison doesn’t really allow you the mental space for atonement—you focus on what it takes to make it clean through to the other side.

And get out she does. Years after she is done with prison, (understandably) the accident haunts Patsy and affects her every decision either directly or in more subtle ways.

A Berkeley graduate, Patsy is smart and incredibly bright—she goes back to her job as professor of history at a small college in California, after her release. As part of her probation, she is forced to join AA. She has decided anyway, that getting sober would be a necessary part of her road to redemption. Educated people have the most difficult time getting sober, an ex-prison mate, Gloria, tells Patsy and she is right. Patsy doesn’t care much for the rituals at AA. She “recoiled at the loser litanies and simplistic religiosity,” Huneven writes. Yet it is through AA that she forms a loosely knit community of friends—her ex-boyfriend Brice turns out to be gay and his partner, young Gilles, is a fellow AA ex-addict. Huneven does a masterful job here at portraying the friendship between the two.

Eventually, as Patsy slowly tries to make some sense of her life, she meets Cal Sharp—a much-revered man at AA. Once an addict himself, Cal is a successful, retired businessman who now mentors other addicts and gets them on the road to recovery. While she doesn’t fall desperately in love with him, nevertheless, in Cal, Patsy sees someone she could spend the rest of her life with. They get married and despite the fact that she later meets a brilliant researcher her age whom she develops a deep affection toward, Patsy stays true to the marriage. She even puts up with an extremely bossy stepdaughter who gradually takes over the house with her own family.

Throughout you can see the impact the accident, which happened 20 years ago, has on Patsy’s life. She even decides against having kids of her own knowing that she has killed another’s. This way, when people look at her life, they’ll at least know that she wasn’t callous, she figures. “She’d never considered herself thoughtless or immoral. Fun, a little hell-bent, maybe, impulsive, but always amusing. And basically a good person,” Huneven writes describing Patsy’s feelings about herself. “Now, seeing the miles driven drunk, the pranks, the commitments ignored, the marriages violated, and her obliviousness throughout, she seemed despicable.” You empathize so much with Patsy all throughout precisely because she—one who is so gifted and talented—is so harsh on herself. Yes, she makes an awful, tragic mistake but it is to Huneven’s enormous credit that Patsy doesn’t come across as a mere caricature, a drunken lunatic, but as someone who is human and fragile coming to terms with her checkered past.

Much later, she comes across some information that puts the accident and therefore her life in a new light. Here too, reactions of family and close friends are simply brilliantly done.

Michelle Huneven’s Blame is a masterpiece of character study—through a narrative arc over 20 years she shows the gradual transformation not just of Patsy MacLemoore but of a whole host of associated characters, including that of little Joey Hawthorne.

When visiting her therapist once, Patsy explains why she visits every week: “Guilt. I want to learn how to live with it,” she points out. When everyone else including the victim’s husband Mark Parnham has forgiven Patsy, she has not learned how to forgive herself. Blame superbly shows just how many lives can be permanently crippled in the blink of an eye: the victims of a tragic accident, for sure, but also the perpetrator who can spend a lifetime making amends.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 120 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Michelle Huneven
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More explorations of blame and guilt:

Read our review of:

Bibliography:

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