“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 7, 2014)

In The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris discloses the secrets of a Chasidic community in Golders Green, London, focusing on the tribulations of three families: the Kaufmans, Levys, and Zilbermans. The Kaufmans have eight daughters, one of whom, nineteen-year-old Chani, is seeking an intelligent, animated, and good-natured husband. The Levys, a well-to-do couple, want only the best for their son, Baruch, and plan to settle for nothing less. The Zilbermans are facing a major crisis. Rabbi Zilberman’s wife, Rivka, is no longer a contented spouse, mother, and homemaker; she is restless, edgy, and depressed. Adding to the tension is the fact that one of her sons, Avromi, a university student, is acting strangely. He is secretive, stays out late, and avoids telling his family where he has been.

Harris goes back and forth in time, creating a well-rounded portrait of a community whose members prize tradition, virtue, and spirituality. If anyone deviates from prescribed standards of behavior–by dressing immodestly, showing too much interest in secular matters, or flouting religious law–he or she risks censure or, in some cases, ostracism. However, the author indicates that many Chasidim have a great deal to be grateful for: particularly the support of relatives, friends, and neighbors and the peace of mind that comes from knowing one’s place in the world.

The cast includes the young and not-so-young, the experienced and naïve, the affluent and those struggling to get by. We observe Chani Kaufman navigating the dating scene with anticipation as well as trepidation. We also meet Baruch Levy, a twenty-year-old who fears that he is not ready to shoulder the responsibilities that marriage entails. Manipulating the matchmaking strings is the smug and calculating Mrs. Gelbmann, a shadchan who relishes the inordinate amount of power that she wields. Readers’ hearts go out to Chani’s mother, a long-suffering matriarch who, at forty-five, has already borne eight daughters and is thoroughly burned out.

Ms. Harris is knowledgeable about the Hasidic lifestyle, and portrays her flawed and troubled characters with understanding, insight, and compassion. Her decision to relate events out of chronological order is initially bewildering. However, it allows us to stand back and consider complex situations from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The author presents the limited options available to young people like Chanie and Baruch. Should they adhere to the accepted laws and customs handed down by their parents or follow a different path that might be more to their liking? Chani wonders, “What was it like to roam freely in the world and not have to think about your every action and its spiritual consequence?” For men and women who find the constraints of a sheltered and choreographed existence limiting, the choice to remain strictly observant is a difficult one. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a provocative, enlightening, and engrossing book, written with skill and flair, in which the author explores universal themes that will resonate with anyone who has clashed with loved ones, suffered unbearable losses, and has had to make difficult, life-changing decisions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eve Harris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and an interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin

Bibliography:

• The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013; April 2014 in US)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  FEB 10, 2014)

Julian Barnes’ memoir of grief for the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008 after a thirty-year relationship, must be one of the most moving tributes ever paid to a loved one, but also the most oblique. So let’s start with something simple, a photograph. Look up the title in the Daily Mail of London, partly for the marvelously-titled review “Lifted by Love, Grounded by Grief” by Craig Brown, but mostly for the photograph that accompanies it. Julian is seated. Pat stands behind him, her arms around his shoulders, her chin resting on the crown of his head. Her love is obvious, she whom Barnes refers to as “The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” But equally striking is the unusual vertical composition. Pat, who on the ground was a small woman beside the gangling Barnes, here appears above him, like a guardian angel reaching down.

Which is relevant, because Barnes’ book is about verticality, about love and loss, and incidentally about photography. The first of its three sections, “The Sin of Height,” is essentially an essay. It begins with three ascents by balloon: the English adventurer Colonel Fred Burnaby in 1882, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1876, and a French entrepreneur named Félix Tournachon in 1863. Tournachon was to become one of the most famous early photographers under the name Nadar; it was he who took the iconic photographs of Bernhardt, and it was in his studio in 1874 that the first Impressionist exhibition was held. Barnes’ second section, “On the Level,” is typical of many of his short stories (and also longer works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George), starting off from fact and developing it in the imagination. In this case, his subject is the passionate affair between Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt in the mid-1870’s, the remarkable openness of the actress with the soldier (on the level, indeed), and its inevitable end. All the way through these sixty-plus pages, you can see the author conjuring examples of daring and discovery, love and loss, and creating a language of metaphor with which to describe it.

My assumption was that in the third and longest part, “The Loss of Depth,” he would apply these things directly to his wife, giving us a portrait of her more intimate and revealing even than those Nadar took of “the divine Sarah.” But no, he does almost exactly the opposite; in photographic language again, what he gives us is the negative, leaving it for us to develop. Almost immediately, he plunges into a description of grief, the constant reminders of things no longer shared, the intolerable intrusion of friends with euphemistic circumlocutions or bracing suggestions, or worse still avoidance of the subject altogether. Pat (whom he never names except in the dedication) is present only in the spaces she has left in his heart; one of the things that turns him away from thoughts of suicide is the knowledge that he retains the mould of her memory; without him, that too would be lost. He comes back, to a degree, through art: through the discovery of opera, through reading, and above all through writing. As you read on, you see him using links to the earlier sections, a phrase here, an idea there, and you think: “Ah, now he is going to pull it all together, and himself too.” But it is never as easy as that. Barnes has great skill, but also the daring to leave doors open and loose ends untied; I am sure that “closure” is one of those words he hates. And that is fine, because this strange asymmetrical hybrid is Barnes’ tribute to a love that will never end, and probably the best book he has ever written.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 24, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Julian Barnes
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pulse The Lemon Table And: A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Bibliography:

• Metroland (1980)
• Before She Met Me (1982)
• Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)
• Staring at the Sun (1986)
• A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• The Porcupine (1992)
• Cross Channel: Stories (1996)
• England, England (1998)
• Love, etc (2000) (prequel to Talking it Over)
• The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003)
• The Lemon Table: Stories (2004)
• Arthur & George (2005)
• Nothing to be Frightened of (2008)
• Pulse: Stories (2011)
• The Sense of an Ending (2011; 2012 in US) 

Essays:

• Letters from London (1995)
• Something to Declare (2002)
• Levels of Life (2011; September 2013 in US)

“The first time I saw him fight was in the front of the school, winter. It was before I knew him. I noticed him walking across the parking lot–the long coat, his hair tossing around in the wind — with some guy I’d never seen before following twenty feet behind and two others fanned back like wings on a jet. It was the way the three of them were walking — tight, fast, closing quickly. That and the fact that instead of speeding up he seemed to be deliberately slowing down…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 5, 2014)

Brewster reads like a melancholy ballad sung by Leonard Cohen, Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. It’s like driving down a remote, one-lane dark road surrounding a black reservoir, the starless sky doomy and vast. You are headed toward a forgotten city. Now and then a beacon in the distance blinks like a metronomic eye. Brewster is a static town in upstate New York, where it always feels like winter, “weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys.”

It was the end of the sixties, and studious, unpopular Jon Mosher, the narrator, connects with rogue, slanty, Ray Cappicciano, and Frank “Jesus” Krapinski. They were 16 and wanted to get out of Brewster, dreamed of a better life. Jon, whose Jewish parents fled Germany to America, and opened a shoe store in Brewster, survived in a gloomy atmosphere, because his parents never recovered from Jon’s brother’s premature and tragic death years ago, for which Jon feels responsible.

Ray’s father is a racist, truculent ex-cop who drinks all day. Ray was the more mysterious, taciturn, and enigmatic of the three friends. His mother left before he could remember her, and his stepmother left when his baby brother, Gene (barely a toddler now) was born. Ray is devoted to Gene. Frank teaches Sunday school and believes in Jesus as the savior. All carried their parents’ burdens, and all vowed to leave Brewster for greener pastures after graduation.

Jon finds a sense of purpose on the track team, and Frank begins to question his faith when his family demonstrates hypocrisy, shunning his sister when she becomes pregnant. Ray hooks up with smart, beautiful Karen Dorsey, and they become a fearsome foursome. Oftentimes, Ray would disappear for days and come back banged up and bruised, from fights he said he competed in in Danbury. As more disappearances occurred, the tale hints at more ominous consequences.

This is a coming of age story, sans sentimentality. It is a tale of loss and the long shadows cast from tragedy and adversity. The tone of the novel is both reflective and melancholy, and the sense of suffocation and imprisonment, and thwarted hopes, swirls like the icy wind of Brewster’s winters. There’s a feeling of paralysis, and yet, woven within Jon’s voice is the promise of a thaw, of a hibernating redemption within an unquiet stillness. This hope buoys the narrative from a relentless pessimism, and also mitigates the pressure cooker of looming menace. I couldn’t be sure how it would evolve, the youthful dreams suspended and the freighted sorrow of their lives more dire as the novel progresses.

“There was no going back, though thinking about it, I’m not sure there was much to go back to anyway. Truth is, there’s nothing more stupid than fighting something there isn’t–a lack of love, a lack of respect. It’s like fighting an empty room…You punch the air, you yell, you weep, but there’s nobody there–just this feeling that there’s something holding you back, that there’s a place outside that room that could answer everything, that could tell you, finally, who you are. And you’re not allowed to go there.”

Slouka’s prose is assured, meditative, and beautiful. I was a fan after I read The Visible World, which shared some themes of displacement, the legacy of war, and urgent love. This novel is a sterling tour de force, which left me both shattered and hopeful. If you like literature with depth, emotion, atmosphere, and authenticity, you will be touched by the pathos and humanity of Brewster.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 60 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Limited edition (August 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Mark Slouka
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Kept by James Scott

Bibliography:

• Lost Lake: Stories (1995)
• God’s Fool (2002)
• The Visible World (2007)
• Brewster (August 2013)

Nonfiction:

• War Of The Worlds: Cyberspace And The High-tech Assault On Reality (1995)
• Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (2011)

I know that I can no longer reach her.

I know that, should I try to reach her–should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in–she will fade from my touch.

Vanish.

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 10, 2011)

Blue Nights is ostensibly about the loss of a child. In reality, however, it is about the passing of time. Indeed, it is the passing of time that captures all loss, loss of children, of loved ones, and ultimately, of self. It is the classic Heritclitian flow and Ms. Didion has here given herself to it fully, embracing every ripple, bend and eddy. With superhuman strength she resists fighting the current. She does not emote. She does not wax sentimental. Rather she turns her hard-edged and beautiful prose squarely upon her subject matter–as she always has done–and sets to work. Yet even she wonders if the manner in which she practices her art is up for the task. Halfway through the book she wrestles with the question: “What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point–the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated–what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?” How can one write about the loss of a child with prose chiseled from tempered steel?

How does one make sense of it, bestow order where there is but chaos, the losses, the aging and the attendant frailty?. How does the writer rise to this? She exhibits no pretension, no artifice. There is that line, repeated throughout her previous memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking: “She’s a pretty cool customer.” Never did anyone seem so cool than the writer does here. She is a reporter, a cool and trained observer, even when she is her own subject matter. Yet she is laid bare. “When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room…” she writes, noting her infirmities, “is this what I am actually saying? Does it frighten me?”

Yet, she is present, bold and unflinching. She is serious. We can ask for nothing more, and at times wish she would hold back–a trait, I would wager, of which she is not capable. In characteristic Didion fashion she brings her steely eye and razor-precise prose to her subjects: the loss of her daughter Quintana Roo, and, unflinchingly, her advancing inescapable personal extinction. Her narrative is peppered with bits of her childhood, her fading friendships, the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the adoption (March 1966) of Quintana. All this reflected against the backdrop of growing old. It is all loss.

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast,” she writes.

Early in the book, reflecting on the loss of her daughter, she wonders, “Had she no idea how much we needed her?” When I first read this–it is a sentence repeated throughout, like a mantra–when I first read this my mind filled in the blanks quickly rushing ahead. My mind read, Had she no idea how much we loved her? I stumbled over the word need and had to reread the sentence. Was love too strong an emotion to bring to the page, I wondered? Or was she saying something else? A few pages later, while remembering the adoption of the infant Quintana, she asks, “…what if I fail to love this baby?” (Her italics.) Only here will love appear as a doubt-filled question.

Late in the book she finds herself in the hospital. She had awakened in the night on the floor of her bedroom, lying in a pool of blood. “It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness.” The event, however, is not the point. The point is the question of who to contact in case of emergency. “Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?” (Her italics.) She goes through the lists of people, possible candidates. But there are problems. They live elsewhere, or are out of the country, or aren’t someone with whom she wants to share such intimacy. Or are gone. Ultimately she concludes, “Only one person needs to know.” And then the bookend to Had she no idea how much we needed her? “She is of course the one person who needs to know.” And she is gone.

It is the intertwined nature of family and friendship, of life itself, on display here. The denouement comes in the fashion in which it all unravels, how fast the end arrives and the struggle of the observer, the chronicler–indeed, the mother–to survive. As she confesses at the book’s end: “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joan Didion
EXTRAS:	Powerful Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Year of Magical Thinking

Bibliography:

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) 
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006) (first seven previous books in one)
• Blue Nights (November 2011)

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

“Henry was not used to people disliking him. He had sauntered through life in the glow of easy approval. The incident on Westminster Bridge had not only been an affray, it had been an affront. The instant aggression and then the viciousness of the subsequent persecution had perplexed him. He worried that luck was deserting him.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 9, 2011)

David Abbott starts his mesmerizing and haunting debut book, The Upright Piano Player, with a quote from Nietzsche: “The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claims that meanwhile we have improved.”

It’s an apt quote because indeed, actions have consequences in the case of his protagonist, Henry Cage. Henry is, indeed, a caged man – uptight, disconnected, and alienated. Throughout his life, he has amassed the trappings of success: a sterling career, a spirited and beautiful wife, a sensitive son, an elegant London townhome. Yet he has squandered his gifts, eventually losing his marriage, destroying his relationship with his son, and ending his partnership in his firm – not of his own accord.

And then, on the eve of the millennium, a random act of violence occurs. Henry inadvertently pushes into a stranger on the crowded Westminster Bridge during a New Year’s Eve encounter. The stranger, Colin, is an angry and vindictive working-class man who strikes back in a disproportionate way and then begins to stalk Henry. A sense of menace ensues, a little reminiscent of the atmosphere in Enduring Love by Ian McEwan.

Henry is a man on the edge, ready to “improve,” to re-engage with his family and the world around him. For the first time in years, he truly reaches out, flirting with the idea of a new romance, reconnecting with his ill ex-wife, striving to create a bond with his now-grown son and his grandson, Hal, whom he has only just met. Yet at the periphery of his life is the stalker who is threatening to destroy all that he is working to put together again.

The reader knows, from the first 10 pages, that the ending will be heartbreaking and that another random incident will occur that will turn him into a man torn apart by grief. As a result, this is a particularly voyeuristic “read;” we know that none of Henry’s well-meaning actions will save him from a wrenching fate that no parent or grandparent should ever have to endure. We, as readers, maintain full awareness of where life is going for Henry, something that is denied to the protagonist himself. Henry remains blinded; for example, when he views a barn owl with his grandson, he thinks, “It had seemed a gift. Like the sighting of a kingfisher, a singling hour, a portent of favor. How wrong could a man be?”

Throughout the arc of the book, we observe Henry from a distance. He is not a particularly introspective man, a trait that I often find unsatisfying. However, not here; David Abbott pulls it off, propelling us along on Henry’s journey. All the while, we know that Henry will be unable to sidestep his fate; despite his rediscovery of self, he will need to confront the loss and grief that is his destiny.

This is, after all, a cautionary tale, a tale about whether “upright” motives can create harmony in lives that are tossed around by life’s circumstances. It asks provocative questions: how much of life results from past choices and how much is totally random? The Upright Piano Player is written by a founding partner of the United Kingdom’s largest advertising agency, and this is his first novel. Hopefully, it is not his last.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Q Blog interview with David Abbott
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst

Bibliography:

• The Upright Piano Player (June 2011)

“My assignment: get on the trail of Svensson the man.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAY 4, 2011)

Husbands and wives who work together either end up with their marriage in trouble or being the best of friends. In German author, Thomas Pletzinger’s novel, Funeral for a Dog, it’s the first scenario for journalist Daniel Mandelkern. Mandelkern is an ethnologist who is supposed to be writing “about anthropological concepts like matrilineality and male childbed,” but instead he’s been getting a series of shit assignments from his boss/wife Elisabeth. Mandelkern is beginning to wonder if there’s an underlying message to these assignments and then he’s told to interview the reclusive Dirk Svensson, the author of a wildly successful illustrated children’s book “The story of Leo and the Notmuch.” Mandelkern protests against the assignment, and with his marriage in crisis, he storms out of his apartment on the journey to interview Svensson.

Mandelkern’s assignment is simple: interview the author and go beyond the “brief bios and conjectures about Dirk Svensson.” As there are no in-depths interviews of Svensson, this is an important assignment. No one knows exactly where Svensson lives–somewhere North of Milan on Lago di Lugano, and Mandelkern isn’t in the best of tempers when he reaches his destination. He’s met by Svensson and his three-legged dog, Lua. They are joined by Svensson’s lover, Tuuli & her son.

Funeral for a Dog starts off simply enough with a series of seven postcards sent from Mandelkern to his wife, Elisabeth. These postcards contain just a few sentences, and the words break off only to be picked up by the next card. These cryptic messages give the idea that Mandelkern has undergone some sort of cathartic experience due to the assignment. Then the book opens with a window into Mandelkern’s problematic marriage. Elisabeth publicly addresses her husband by his last name, yet privately she insists that they have a child. An early episode in the book describes sex between the couple as “warlike,” and afterwards, Mandelkern packs and leaves.

What should be a simple assignment becomes increasingly complex. Staying with Svensson, Mandelkern discovers a secret manuscript called Astroland about Svensson’s past and a ménage-a trois. At this point, the narration divides between Svensson (through his manuscript) and Mandelkern. Some parts of the novel contain a symbolic quality–Mandelkern, for example, repeatedly mentions that he cannot wash off menstrual blood left from sex with his wife. Is this symbolic for the traces of Elisabeth he cannot erase?

Pletzinger has an unusual style that took this reader some getting used to. Chapters are short, and some are transcribed phone calls and interviews. Paragraphs are the sort of note taking and questions one would expect from a journalist on assignment:

“And this thought too is only pilfered. The room smells of damp stone, even though it isn’t raining (the roof is cracked). Again the thought of Elisabeth and the assignment she has given me, for a moment I’d like to call her, we have important things to talk about, but my telephone is in my suitcase at the Hotel Lido Seegarten. I’m drunk once again, too drunk for research, I can only speculate. I should put aside my pen, I could break open the suitcase, my questions remain:

–How do I find out who Felix Blaumeiser was?
–Why does Lua only have three legs?
–Tuuli says Svensson can’t paint—who painted those pictures?
–Who exactly is Kiki Kaufman?
–How do I open the suitcase?”

The book’s intricate plot is built on the themes of love, loss and relationships. Given the title, it’s not difficult to predict the death of the dog, Lua, but that’s just one loss; there are others, and part of the novel takes place in New York 9/11/01. The motif of Borroemean rings occurs in the novel which underscores the meta-meaning of the triangular relationship between Svensson, Tuuli and a third character, Felix. Funeral for a Dog is for those who like their novels teasingly-complex, non traditional and non linear.

Readers should be aware that some passages include details of cockfight and another section details the capitations of chickens.

(Translated by Ross Benjamin.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (March 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Thomas Pletzinger
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman

Bibliography:

• Funeral for a Dog (March 2011 in US)