“Happiness is like water…We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JAN 12, 2014)

Chinelo Okparanta came to my attention after her story, America, was a finalist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. It tells the touching story of a very special friendship between two young women that challenges Nigerian traditions and social conventions… America has been published as one of ten stories in this, her first collection, Happiness, like Water. Okparanta is without a doubt becoming a promising representative of the new generation of Nigerian and African writers who are giving growing prominence to the field of African short fiction writing.

Chinelo Okparanta’s engaging stories in this book, some set in Nigeria, some among Nigerian immigrants in the US, explore a wide range of topical subjects and concerns. Mostly told through the eyes of a first person protagonist, she writes with confidence and sensitivity, her language is subtle, yet also lucid and powerful. Despite the short fiction format, her characters are realistically drawn and we can comprehend the challenges of their various circumstances. While her stories are rooted in her Nigerian background (she moved with her parents from Nigeria to the US at the age of 10) she addresses such issues as love, longing and betrayal, faith and doubt, and inner-family and inter-generational tensions and violence in such a way that they move beyond the specific and become stories of human struggle and survival. Yes, there is happiness too – fleeting moments that need to be savoured, hope for a future where it can establish itself…

Do I have favourites among the stories? Maybe I do, but each reader will find those that feel closer to home or that affect us individually more deeply than others. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Granta page on Chinelo Okparanta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another collection of short stories: That Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Bibliography:

• Happiness, Like Water (August 2013)

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)

“Americans are fundamentally unhappy, and they are fundamentally unhappy because they suffer from institutional addiction. If you consider the comfort (for most), the wealth (relative), and opportunities (many) with which Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUN 16, 2011)

One of Zeke Pappas’s biggest heroes is Joseph Cornell, an artist who created “assemblages”—most of Cornell’s work were glass-fronted boxes filled with a stunning variety of found objects. Zeke loves Cornell because he “devoted his life to the collecting the unhappy scraps left behind by others and trying to distill them and make sense of them. Cornell’s work to me is about our abandonment of joy, about our reckless inability to hold on to something meaningful. This is an attempt to find meaning—no, to find magic—in our collective dross, in the castoff and the forgotten,” Zeke says during one of his annual visits to the Cornell boxes collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cornell might well have served as inspiration for Zeke, who works at a mundane job in Madison, Wisconsin. After all, like Cornell, Zeke too wants to find the “magic in our collective dross.” To this end, Zee’s latest (and what he assumes will be his most enduring) work is documenting the unhappiness shared by his fellow Americans. He creates a project called the American Unhappiness Project, which simply documents responses to the question: “Why are you unhappy?” The project is funded by the Midwestern Humanities Initiative an institution that was created in the heyday of the roaring ‘90s but one that is fast fading into irrelevance in the late Bush years in which this novel is set. Responses to that elemental question, as one can imagine, are vast and varied and Zeke whiles away his time collecting and cataloging them all. His office assistant, the comely Lara, is also quite irrelevant to the project, and she knows it. As the institution and the project slowly wind down to their collective last breath, she tries in vain to alert Zeke about the impending disaster.

But Zeke has problems of his own. Back home, his mother is dying from cancer and he takes care of his orphaned grade-school-aged nieces. Zeke himself is a widower—his wife, Valerie Somerville, mysteriously disappeared on a boating trip many years ago. So it is only natural that Zeke wants a sense of normalcy in his life. “Lately when I see [my] friends, attacked by sticky fingers in a loud family restaurant near the Hilldale mall or struggling to change a diaper in the Borders bathroom, I feel not superiority and the tickle of my ample freedom but a searing feeling of envy and loss,” he says. “I want that, I think. That’s what I want.”

This “want” is further accelerated when his mother crafts a will naming Zeke’s sister-in-law Melody, as the potential guardian of the children. There’s hope however. Were Zeke to marry before mom dies, custody reverts back to him. So now Zeke is on a focused mission. With the help of a women’s magazine called Simply You, he makes a list of prospects and tries to woo them serially.

Chief among these prospects is the barista at the local Starbucks, Minn, whom Zeke impresses by accurately predicting random customers’ orders. Starbucks, especially one that makes a well-crafted Americano, is one place where Zeke is relatively happy. “At least among a certain well-educated demographic, Starbucks is a ritual—costly and mildly unhealthy as it is—meant to mitigate our day-to-day unhappiness,” Zeke says.

As the novel moves along, the Feds increasingly hound Zeke—they need to find out exactly how he’s spending the taxpayers’ money after all. Even worse, the principal funder for the initiative, a local Wisconsin senator, has been engaging in inappropriate homosexual relationships with prostitutes.

Finally, Zeke is out on the streets and his flailing attempts to find a wife despite insurmountable odds, start to wear the reader down. My American Unhappiness becomes increasingly surreal towards the end and Zeke’s endless soapbox stances on George W. Bush begin to look like polemic rants. At one point in My American Unhappiness, when Zeke pronounces that he’s on a roll, his assistant Lara, says: “You certainly are. A roll of BS.” It’s tempting to agree with her somewhat.

One responder to the Unhappiness Project sends Zeke a clip from a Robert F. Kennedy speech in which Kennedy quotes playwright Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” If wisdom were indeed to follow all that pain, Zeke’s is hard-won. There is definitely some measure of earned wisdom at the end, but it remains to see if Zeke will use it in constructive ways.

Bakopoulos is most definitely a talented writer but My American Unhappiness too often struggles under the weight of its own ironic asides. Like that famous artist, Joseph Cornell, Bakopoulos too is capable of picking up the everyday and turning it into magic. Fortunately for the reader, there are a few—though not nearly enough—flashes of that very same magic in My American Unhappiness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dean Bakopoulos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Happiness™ by Will Ferguson

Bibliography:

• Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2005)
• My American Unhappiness (June 2011)

“Don’t we all assume we’ll do it differently, not repeat the past? We believe with all out hearts that we can rise above the things [our parents] couldn’t. Sometimes, our beliefs blind us.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 19, 2010)

At first I thought this book was not for me as a male reviewer, for its focus is so much upon its central female character and her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. But I soon found Dori Ostermiller gripping me with her writing, and her uncanny ability to plot the emotional seismograph of a woman on the brink of an affair. “I want to ask if she ever felt she was falling through her life, pulled down through dream and memory by a force larger than gravity. I want to know if she felt the splintering pain of it — a terrible, fruitful pain like birth, a pain you can’t stop because you have to know what’s on the other side.”

The speaker is Sylvia Sandon, a 38-year-old artist living in the Berkshires, cautiously probing her mother about her own experience with adultery. Up to this point in the book, we have seen Sylvia in alternating chapters: as a rising teenager in California in the seventies caught on the edges of her mother’s affair, and as a mother herself three decades later, getting drawn into this affair of her own. While Ostermiller’s identification with the younger Sylvia is strong, her insight into the adult woman is extraordinary, as she struggles in vain against her attraction to the divorced father of one of her art students. One may not approve of Sylvia’s choices, but my goodness one feels for her.

Lurking in the background, however, is also the specter of child abuse. Not merely the physical violence that Sylvia’s father visited on her in his drunken rages, but the more subtle co-dependent relationship she was drawn into with both parents, which can be equally harmful in the long run. Sylvia’s mother recruited her daughters as allies, enablers, and secret-keepers in her long-running affair, playing into the unhealthy rivalry the girl was already feeling towards her father. Now Sylvia looks like repeating the mistake with her own children. Although the novel threatens to settle into a pattern in its middle section, Ostermiller keeps some surprises in store, showing that it may be possible to learn something from old errors. While avoiding facile conclusions, I found the outcome far more moving than I ever imagined I would.

It is not quite a perfect novel, though. It is hard to believe that Sylvia’s mother could keep her affair hidden from her husband for so long, when she even takes the children on holiday with her lover. More serious to me as a male reader is the comparative lack of dimension in Ostermiller’s male characters, unless she simply sees the world of men as inherently flawed. Sylvia has a tyrannical grandfather, a father given to outbursts of violence, and a well-meaning but excessively absent husband. To her credit, Ostermiller shows some of their good sides also, as when Sylvia, on the edge of her affair, is tormented by happy memories of her own courtship. But the male portraits are partial, and always seen through her eyes. Even Tai, the man she falls in love with, does not emerge as a character in his own right, so much as somebody who can touch Sylvia’s own private yearnings: “His lips fanned out inside the oval of his beard, broad and lonely, and it reminded me of the Northern California coast for some reason — a kind of beauty shot through with loss.”

And yet this is the imagery of an artist, which Sylvia is. When struggling to get a handle on her feelings, her confused emotions do become a kind of poetry. And I realize that Ostermiller is being entirely consistent in viewing her men exclusively through Sylvia’s eyes. Her mother’s lover is no more fleshed out than a young girl would see of him. Her own lover exists mainly in a dream world, because she never sees him in his everyday one. Her husband remains a shadow until she begins to think seriously about what she might be giving up by leaving him. I can admire the intensity of Ostermiller’s identification with Sylvia from a certain distance, but I bet there are many readers out there who will say: “In different circumstances, this might well be ME.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mira; Original edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dori Ostermiller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other books to explore: Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart She is Me by Cathleen Schine

Bibliography:

• Outside the Ordinary World (July 2010)

“In any work of fiction, weren’t those things that had really happened to the writer–or, perhaps to someone the writer had intimately known–more authentic more verifiable true, than anything that anyone could imagine? (This was a common belief, even though a fiction writer’s job was imagining, truly, a whole story–as Danny had subversively said, whenever he was given the opportunity to defend fiction in fiction writing–because real-life stories were never whole, never complete in the ways that novels could be.)”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 26, 2009)

I had dinner recently with a friend who asked me what I was reading. “The new John Irving book,” I told her. She became instantly animated. “I love John Irving,” she declared. “I’ve read everything he’s written, and watched the movies too.” I was almost finished with the newest Irving book, Last Night in Twisted River, and was exhausted at what I found to be its inherent ups and downs. I needed her enthusiasm. “Tell me why you like him so much,” I asked. “Well,” she began, “his characters are always so interesting. And the stories, they’re usually tragic but still somehow funny. I love how he can do that.” I understood both these comments–and agreed. “He’s just different than all other writers.” I understood that too–I think.

Last Night at Twisted River is a story about Great North Woods lumbermen, three men specifically. There is Daniel Baciagalupo, who is twelve when the novel opens; his father, Dominic, known at the lumber camp, where he cooks meals of high repute, as “Cookie.” And there is Ketchum, best-friend of Cookie, woodsman extraordinaire, a man among men. The book opens in Coos County, New Hampshire in 1954 and ends in 2005, Pointe Au Baril Station, Ontario. The arc of narration, the event that ties down this fifty-one year span is the frigid clumsy death of Angel Pope, a too-young lumberman, who slips into the Twisted River during a log drive and never surfaces. “The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.”–is the wonderful opening sentence to this long tale of bitter winters, even more bitter women, murder and violence. And of course, this being a John Irving novel, bears.

You might have noticed above that I used a semicolon. You don’t see semicolons much any more. I mentioned this because semicolons are discussed in the novel, as are other fine points of writerly interest. (“The semicolons came from those old-fashioned nineteenth-century novels that had made Daniel Baciagalupo want to be a writer in the first place.”) Though Last Night in Twisted River is the story of lumber drives, revenge and manly pursuits, it is also a novel about writing, about books and learning to read and write. It is a novel within a novel, as the young Danny matures and discovers his calling as a writer, including proper use of the semi-colon. Grown up and successful after nine novels–some books sharing remarkable similarity to Irving novels–Danny turns to his childhood in the woods for material. I found this part of the book the most interesting. It was like sitting with Irving and listening to him talk about his craft, about foreshadowing, and tension, about narration and timing. This section also shines a light from within on the balance of the book, as we learn from Danny that the protagonist of his novel will share a resemblance to his family friend Ketchem and that only late in the book will his Ketchem be brought to full life. “It is good to make the reader wait,” says Danny. And it is in our book, late, when Ketchem is given full exercise, that the narration sings. For instance,

“Even with a stick shift, Ketchum managed to drive right-handed. He stuck his left elbow out the driver’s-side window, with the fingers of his left hand making only coincidental contact with the steering wheel; Ketchum clenched the wheel tightly in his right hand. When he needed to shift gears, his right hand sought the navel-high knob on the the long, bent stick shift–in the area of Carmella’s knees. Ketchum’s left hand tentatively took hold of the steering wheel, but for no longer than the second or two that his right was on the gearshift.”

I can feel the breeze in my hair reading this. Unfortunately, writing like this, precise and sharp, is sadly missing in most of the book. Sentences are too often repetitive–”the war…would drag on and on.” and “he sat, listening and listening.” And they are clunky, as in, “Yet, as Danny would one day consider, maybe this was a writer’s peculiar burden–namely, that the anxiety he felt as a father was conflated with the analysis he brought to bear on the characters in his fiction.” Prose is the stream of narration and without it, to use a metaphor from the book, there will be a log jam. Once the log jam is broken up, the flow returns. So it is in this book.

Irving’s books, some say, have grown darker and more disturbing through the years. I have not read all of his work, I confess, so I cannot attest to this first hand. But of the books I have read, I can tell you that this book is perhaps the darkest and offers the least relief. Irving has explored the caprices of fate before, it is a constant Irving theme. And it is here too, in the fashion of an accidental murder early on in the book. As a consequence of the murder, Cookie and his son Danny set out from camp and cannot return–ever. They must live on the run. Sadly, this theme is a log jam. We are to believe that men late in life, in their seventies and eighties, are still set on revenge; that an accident cannot be explained; that violence is a given. Regardless, we follow Cookie and Danny to Boston’s North End (where Danny goes to prep school, as Irving went to Exeter), then Iowa City (where, like Irving, Danny studies at the writer’s workshops), then back east to Vermont and finally settling in Toronto (Irving home cities).

Fate, “the fragile, unpredictable nature of things” and “a world of accidents”–these are the worlds explored in this novel. Accidents abound: Young Danny’s mother falls through the ice and drowns in the river–the same spot where Angel, the young lumberman, will years later drown. A woman is mistook for a bear and killed with a skillet. A dog attacks a runner and sets into motion a world of events that lead, one to the other, to a surprise encounter and ultimately a double murder. It is dark stuff here, indeed. And unlike previous Irving works, there is little humor. There is a comment made of a woman in the novel, “Nothing but happiness would explain why she was so boring.” From that we can infer that unhappiness is interesting. Granted, there is a lot of unhappiness in this book. Unfortunately, it could be more interesting. There is slight traction to the unhappy themes explored here. And where there is happiness that is not extinguished, specifically at the book’s end, it is,yes, boring.

It was this unevenness, the unhappiness fronting for the interesting, that troubled me. It was overwrought and hard earned–too hard earned, so as to not be reliably honest to the book. I got a sense that Irving was exhausting old notebooks and filling chapters with previously unused material. I want to be fair, this is a big book and just to sustain a narration for 553 pages is a supreme accomplishment. To do it without blemish is an act of genius. I believe in Irving’s genius, but it is not apparent here. This is an accomplishment, but not a work of high order. It is, at times, a very well told tale, but it is not lasting.

With the well-drawn similarities between Danny and John Irving I find it sadly interesting that Danny is advised and later repeats this observation: “…writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die…”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (October 27, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	Last Night in Twisted River
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Irving
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of A Prayer for Owen Meany Another book that involves an accidental murder: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney A more on fiction that discusses the art of writing: Generosity by Richard Powers The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Setting Free the Bears (1968)
• The Water Method Man (1972)
• The 158 Pound Marriage (1974)
• The World According to Garp (1978)
• The Hotel New Hampshire (1981)
• The Cider House Rules (1985)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
• A Son of the Circus (1994)
• Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996)
• A Widow for One Year (1998)
• The Fourth Hand (July 2001)
• Until I Find You (July 2005)
• Last Night in Twisted River (October 2009)
• In One Person (May 2012)

Non-Fiction

• The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (1997)
• My Movie Business: A Memoir (1999)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (July 2002)
• Study Guide for A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY (July 2002)

Movies from books:

• The World According to Garp (1982)
• Hotel New Hampshire (1984)
• Simon Birch (1998)
• Cider House Rules (1999)
• The Door in the Floor (based on a Widow for One Year (2004)

“I choose my favorite summer dress, an olive green thing with shiny metal beads sewn all around the neckline. It hangs like a sack and feels so good, it’s like being naked.

I should ask to be buried in this. Katya would be horrified, because it’s not at all appropriate. Ivan wouldn’t want any part of that decision, nor would Max. Death and fashion together—not a male specialty. Irina would argue with Katya just out of habit.

No, it would be selfish for me to dictate what happens after I’m dead, when it couldn’t possibly matter to me.  I’m being greedy enough by daring to set the agenda of my own demise.

If I have to go down,  fine.  But I’m going down with both tits swinging.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (OCT 19, 2009)

In Real Life & Liars, protagonist Mira Zielinski represents a new demographic for our times: hippie turned senior, at age sixty-five still free-spirited and defiant, who has decided to refuse treatment for her recently diagnosed breast cancer. She’s also decided to withhold the diagnosis from her three grown children, as they converge on the family home in Charlevoix, Michigan for a grand 35th anniversary party. As it turns out, however, the Zielinski children are bringing home a few secrets of their own.

Author Kristina Riggle’s intelligent, entertaining debut novel is tightly chronicled, covering four points of view over the course of the party weekend. Eldest daughter Katya is stressed over her unruly teenagers, her husband and his suspicious behavior, her own too-tight hold on maintaining the perfect life. Middle child Ivan, dreamy high school music teacher and struggling songwriter, can’t seem to find the right woman, even when she is right there under his nose. Irina, young and irresponsible, recently saddled with a surprise pregnancy and much older husband, is already questioning the wisdom of this latest impulsive decision of hers.

Amid the weekend festivities is a growing storm—meteorological and otherwise—that promises to bring these disparate issues to a head, bring family members face to face with their problems and each other, clearing the way, however violently, for resolution and redemption.

In the wrong hands, the subject of a life-threatening cancer diagnosis could have become a maudlin, sentimental read, but Riggle has crafted a story that renders the issue entirely palatable, while still treating it with the dignity and thoughtfulness it merits. Mira’s observations, her down-to-earth introspection, are both hilarious and bittersweet. Her ponderings over how one actually leaves life and loved ones behind are the sort of thought-provoking questions that make this novel rise above the mainstream in today’s commercial fiction.

Additionally, Riggle successfully delineates the four diverse point of views, telling the story in brief sound byte chapters composed of snappy dialogue and vivid prose. Mira’s voice is the most distinct, told in first-person versus the others’ third-person narration, a set-up that suits the story well. Katya’s story and point of view are the second most distinct, although her strident personality throughout the story—think PMS on steroids—grows a little exhausting on the reader. Yet her predicament rings true, free of cliché, and flashbacks to her teenage years, showing a more vulnerable girl desperate to fit in, with a mother determined to cultivate the opposite, offer a welcome soft touch to Katya’s character. Irina’s story, as well, profits from backstory that paints the portrait of a youngest child, born after her mother was “done” with parenting, who now analyzes her own unplanned pregnancy and her past with new eyes.

Chosen as a Target “Breakout” pick in August, graced with irresistible cover art, Real Life & Liars will hold strong appeal for women’s fiction readers, or anyone who likes their fiction intelligent but breezy, relevant and unforgettable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Avon A; 1 edition (June 16, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kristina Riggle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other recent debut novels: Tell Me Something True by Leila Cobo Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro

Bibliography:

• Real Life & Liars (2009)
• The Life You’ve Imagined (2010)
• Things We Didn’t Say (2011)
• Keepsake (June 2012)

“He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (OCT 18, 2009)

There are many reasons why Thassadit Amzwar should not be the way she is—always happy. For one thing, she has lost most of her family in the ongoing Algerian civil war. Her father is killed and her mother dies soon after from pancreatic cancer. She has left her home behind and is now a refugee studying in a mediocre college, Mesquakie, in Chicago.

It is here that she runs into Russell Stone—who is teaching the creative writing course she is enrolled in. Stone is a disillusioned writer who works at a day job editing content for a self-help magazine. Along with his students—who are various shades of young adults—Stone is really struck by Thassa’s boundless enthusiasm for life. She is labeled “Miss Generosity” –for the eternal sunshine she visits on those around her and for her generosity of spirit.

Stone begins to wonder about Thassa—how can one who has been through unspeakable horrors be so cheerful? Does Thassa have a psychological problem that she needs to be protected from? To get at the answers, he meets a school counselor, Candace Weld, who, incidentally, is a spitting image of his ex-girlfriend. Candace sympathizes, even applying a label to Thassa’s condition: hyperthymia, a rare condition that programs a person for unusual levels of elation.

Parallel narratives track the career of a famous geneticist Thomas Kurton—a scientist who is well versed not just in science but also in the marketing of it. Helping him achieve his high-profile career is Tonia Schiff, a host of a nationally televised science program, a “thinking man’s babe.” Schiff often gives the scientist Thomas Kurton a forum to bring his research to the public.

Meanwhile back at the college, one day Thassa is raped by one of her fellow students—the news item that follows would have easily disappeared from the public radar screen if it were not for the fact that Stone mentions one word when he is interviewed for the story: hyperthymia.

This word catches Kurton’s attention. Up until now, Kurton’s research is almost there—trying to prove the genetic basis for happiness and other kinds of moods. To him, Thassa seems like a godsend and soon enough she becomes the subject of his research and Thasssa rapidly gets on to the national stage as the “happiness” person. She even appears on the Powers’ equivalent of Oprah after which she has surely and firmly jumped into the public fishbowl.

An endless media frenzy ensues and Powers details the rapidly spirally downturn Thassa’s life takes. “Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafes, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even warzone journalism all turn confessional,” Powers writes of the contemporary sound bite culture we live in. “Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.” The huge hype Thassa’s story brings about is cataloged well by Powers although sometimes you begin to wish he would have stopped while he was two steps ahead. It is at this point that the story teeters on the verge of being a tad formulaic. Incidentally, I thought it ironic that I finished the book on the same day that the “balloon boy” made all the headline news. The parallels between that incident and the media’s obsession with Thassa seemed all too apparent.

Generosity is also a beautiful exploration of the craft of writing—in fact there is a separate train of thought throughout the novel where a narrator explains what elements of fiction are being executed at what stage. This kind of technique brings with it its own risks—one of them being that the novel might seem too gimmicky and worse, overly scripted—but fortunately that doesn’t end up being the case. In one brilliant paragraph, Powers likens the six thousand years of writing to a 600-page novel. “The last chapter is filled with deus ex machinas, and on the very final page, the very last paragraph, the characters throw off the limits of the Story So Far and complete their revolt,” he writes. Which, in the novel, they actually do—sort of.

Arguably Powers’ strongest talents lie in presenting cutting-edge scientific facts in the form of literary fiction. The brain and its workings seem to be his particular favorites. In the spectacular, award-winning The Echo Maker, Powers’ protagonist was a young man suffering from Capgras Syndrome (a form of delusion in which you believe a close relative is actually an imposter) in the wake of a near-fatal accident.

In Generosity too, Powers mines the riches of scientific advances in genetics. As Thassa’s fate careens out of control, Powers effectively shows us how quickly scientific facts—or any other for that matter—can be distorted to reflect one’s own beliefs.

A few days ago, on NPR, a reputed scientist said that the biggest problem facing science these days (especially in the United States) is the rise in the number of people who don’t believe in it. “We need effective communicators, people who can bring science to the public,” he said. People, I suppose, like Thomas Kurton, Tonia Schiff or even Richard Powers.

What’s especially commendable is that above all, Powers consistently delivers powerful, readable stories. The fact that he is also the only writer I’ve read who has successfully used the word “amygdala” in his writing—that, I’ll admit, is the sort of stuff that gets me all weak in the knees.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and audio excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Orfeo The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)