****Love & Treasure

Posted on by
peacock

photo: kansaikate, creative commons license

By Ayelet Waldman – This lovely novel opens with a prologue set in 2013, involving elderly Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie. Her new husband has abandoned her, and she’s just quit her Manhattan attorney’s job to come stay with Jack in Red Hook, Maine, and her beloved grandfather is dying. It’s questionable which of them needs more tender care.

Searching a drawer, Jack runs across a worn black pouch containing a jeweled peacock dangling on a chain. “Whose was it?” Natalie asks, her curiosity aroused. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He charges her with the near-impossible task of returning it to its rightful owner, which will require unraveling its history.

The book then reveals how the pendant came into Jack’s hands at the close of World War II. It had been one item among thousands and thousands on the Hungarian Gold Train, a 42-car freight train the Germans were using to remove valuables—most of them looted from Hungarian Jews—to Berlin. The train was seized by French troops and finally came under U.S. military control and the contents warehoused in Salzburg, Austria. (The U.S. government kept most details about the Hungarian Gold Train secret for 50 years.)

Items were pilfered from the horde by thieves and the soldiers guarding it; U.S. military commanders used the warehouse as a department store for outfitting their quarters with fine china, silverware, crystal, furniture, and oriental rugs. Jack, in charge of the loot, had to comply with his superiors’ orders and was constantly frustrated at his inability to protect and preserve these treasures, much less return them to their rightful owners. His responsibilities as a soldier and as a Jew are at war within him.

Waldman writes compellingly about Jack’s situation and the treatment of the Displaced Persons flooding Salzburg, many of whom were concentration camp survivors. He meets one, a Hungarian with flame-red hair, Ilona Jakab, and falls in love. Jack keeps the peacock pendant in her memory, but never loses the feeling that taking it was dishonorable.

In her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s charge to find the pendant’s rightful present-day owner, Natalie travels to Budapest and finds much more than she expects. That section of the book is a treasure hunt, a mystery story, and a romance.

The last major section of the book dips back in time to 1913. It’s narrated by a libidinous psychiatrist charged with “treating” Nina S., an early suffragist who wears the pendant, and whom he rapidly concludes is quite sane, just at odds with her repressive father.

Natalie, Ilona, and Nina are interesting, compelling characters in challenging situations. Waldman doesn’t tell a good story once, but three times. Descriptions are vivid, characters’ motivations heartfelt, and conversations witty and spirited. Occasionally, she may be a little heavy-handed, and occasionally a verbal anachronism or clunky love scene sneaks in, but overall, the stories have strong narrative power. I don’t quite understand all the carping about this book in the mainstream media—each reviewer seeming to fixate on some different issue. I found it not only an exploration of conflicting loyalties, identity, and the struggle to be honorable, but also a fascinating historical mystery.

Love & Treasure is certainly timely, given recent renewed attention to the issue of Nazi plunder. The peacock pendant, silent witness to the pain and abuse of history, is the treasure in Waldman’s story, but love is the constant.

All the Days

Posted on by
All the Days, McCarter Theatre

Caroline Aaron & Stephanie Janssen in All the Days (photo: T. Charles Erickson)

At McCarter Theatre in Princeton through May 29, is the world premiere of Sharyn Rothstein’s new family “dramedy,” All the Days. Three generations have their issues: divorced parents in their sixties, uptight divorced daughter, and a grandson approaching his bar mitzvah. The central conflict, though, is mother-daughter. Author Rothstein says, “Mothers and daughters, if they can stand it, should see the play together.”

The action begins in the mother’s kitchen as she recuperates from eye surgery, and her daughter convinces her to come to Philadelphia “until the bar mitzvah.” The Philly living room becomes the setting for most of the play’s numerous short scenes in which the characters laugh together, yell at each other, and reveal their secrets and desires.

Caroline Aaron plays mother Ruth Zweigman, overweight and overbearing, afflicted with diabetes and its consequences. To manage her fears and resentments, not to mention her grief over the death of her only son, she lashes out. Early on, I found her constant comebacks and jibes simply unpleasant, but Ruth warms as the play unfolds.

Daughter Miranda (played by Stephanie Janssen) doesn’t have the temperament for the constant sparring with mom and fled Long Island for the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. A social worker and newly converted Christian, Miranda’s in the business of fixing other people’s problems, and is frustrated by a mother who doesn’t want to be fixed.

Ruth’s ex-husband Delmore, played by Ron Orbach, is trying to rekindle a relationship with his prickly ex-wife, drawing on her nostalgia and, perhaps, thinking ahead to what his “liver disease” will bring. Ruth sets him straight, saying, “You can’t live in the past and the future at the same time.”

Rothstein holds a degree in public health as well as her MFA, and wove into this play significant public health concerns—problems of diabetes, diet, and stress-related illness among them.

It takes an unerring sense of timing to keep a two and a half hour production moving without a single check-your-watch moment, which McCarter Artistic Director Emily Mann accomplishes superbly as director. Mann says, “I laughed out loud as I read [Rothstein’s] fiercely funny characters, exquisitely wrought, struggling with dilemmas at once heartbreaking and hilarious.”

Leslie Ayvazian plays Ruth’s sister Monica, absolutely able to give as good as she gets and a long-time realist where Delmore is concerned. Justin Hagan plays Miranda’s boyfriend Stew only now meeting her parents and soon realizing why he’s been spared heretofore. Yet Stew recognizes the mother’s essential loneliness and suggests she meet a friend of his—an herbalist, whom Ruth styles “a medical man,” who soon evolves into “a doctor, a surgeon.” This friend, Baptiste Wright, played by Raphael Nash Thompson, provides a welcome layer of calm and understanding to Ruth, like a smoothing, soothing layer of butter over the bumpy and fractured muffin underneath. Matthew Kuenne is the bar mitzvah boy.

Production credits to Daniel Ostling (sets), Jess Goldstein (costumes), Jeff Croiter (lighting), and Mark Bennett (music and sound  design).

For tickets, call McCarter Theatre’s box office (609)258-2787  or visit the box office online.

****Little Sister

Posted on by
Lake District

photo: Vicki Weisfeld.

By David Hewson – This third police procedural in Hewson’s Netherlands series again features Amsterdam police brigadier Pieter Vos and his misfit Frieslander colleague, Laura Bakker. The story centers on the plight of Mia and Kim Timmers—two from an original set of three. Mia and Kim have been institutionalized for a decade in a remote facility for young female mental patients deemed dangerous.

Ten years earlier, when the girls were 11, their parents and the third triplet, Little Jo, were murdered by parties unknown. That same night lead singer of the local pop band The Cupids was murdered and the girls accused of the crime.

The girls have aged out of their facility, and the psychiatrist in charge says they are no longer a danger. They are released. A male nurse assigned to drive them to an Amsterdam halfway house is found murdered, the girls have disappeared, and before long, another corpse is discovered. Did they do all this? Any of it? Secrets highly placed people have tried to hide for a decade are bursting to come out.

It’s a good study of the kinds and extent of evil that can occur when society judges some people not worth caring about and turns its back. Is what happens to the girls hidden or just not seen? Locating the institution on the island of Marken, connected to land (and reality, normalcy) by only a thin thread of road atop a grassy dyke, is symbolic as well as plot-relevant.

As in the earlier books in the series, Vos lives on his decrepit houseboat with wire-haired terrier Sam. Hewson’s descriptions of Amsterdam when Vos is walking Sam, for example, and of the part of the country where the sisters are from—the Waterland—are created with admirable atmospherics. He ably summons the low flat green country, its dykes and lakes, a land criss-crossed with sparkling channels where “life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.”

Hewson provides plenty of interesting suspects, though some of them appear rather intermittently, and I had occasional difficulty recalling their identities. Although I enjoyed this book, it seemed about fifty pages longer than it needed to be, with some motivational untidiness around the climactic scene.

Hewson is an accomplished crime writer and has worked with Shakespeare scholar AJ Hartley on novelizations of Hamlet and Macbeth. I listened to Macbeth: The Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming, and Hewson’s prose—description of the witches, for example—was riveting. He brings that same ability to describe an environment in which difficult choices become inevitable to the story of Mia and Kim Timmers.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

****Made in Detroit

Posted on by
moon

(photo: halfrain, creative commons license)

This is a review of two books with the same title and of the same re-readable excellence.

Made in Detroit, the memoir by Paul Clemens, is a tale of growing up in the 1970s in one of the Motor City’s last white neighborhoods. It’s fascinating to see the whole “minority status” issue turned on its head, and he comes out of it with decidedly mixed emotions. It’s a struggle, a worthy one, and following his evolving attitudes and understanding of both whites and blacks around him is a thought-provoking journey for readers, as well.

Clemens’s family is Catholic and he gets a Catholic education as parishes and schools close one by one. Meanwhile, the family’s economic stability is increasingly shaky due to the rapidly declining auto industry. Yet, the Church and his father’s love of cars were two constants in his life. He says his family members weren’t readers. “There was enough serious content, enough transcendence, in cars and Catholicism; it wasn’t necessary for them to concern themselves with ideas buried away in books.”

Made in Detroit, the book of Marge Piercy poetry, covers an enormous swath of emotional and physical territory. She uses the simplest language to express the deepest thoughts and makes it “poetic,” without superfluous lily-gilding. I was first drawn to her work by her poem “In Praise of Joe.” As a dedicated caffeine consumer, we recognized each other across the page. Here are the two lines that snared me forever: “It is you who make me human every dawn. All my books are written with your ink.” And here’s a bit from the title poem:

The night I was born the sky burned red
over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives.
The elms made tents of solace over grimy
streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.

Clemens’s book takes place some decades after the night Piercy was born, yet the burning skies (steel mills then), sirens, and desolate streets were only more so in his youth. Despite all the city’s frustrations and conundrums that Clemens describes so well, despite a college education that could have taken him anywhere, he returned to the city. “At times, I feel like a failure in several directions simultaneously,” he writes. “That, with my education and reading, I should be more broad-minded than I am; and that, with the education I received from my father and Sal, I should be angrier about what the broad-minded morons have wrought. . . . Detroit, which drives people to extremes, has left me standing in the middle.”

Clemens’s book makes an interesting counterpoint to Angela Flournoy’s novel, The Turner House, describing the experience of a closeknit black family in Detroit and Susan Messer’s beautiful Grand River and Joy, about a Jewish businessman’s reluctance to flee to the suburbs around the time of the 1967 riots. Perhaps one family story at a time, it might be possible to assemble a picture sufficient to comprehend this fascinating, catastrophe-ridden American city.

The Winner’s Circle

Posted on by
horse racing

At Belmont, 2013 (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

Horses, horse people, jockeys, trainers, and touts. Watching the Kentucky Derby—“the most exciting two minutes in sports”—last Saturday made me think of some of the great books about horses and the quirky, obsessive people who surround them.

The horses are huge, but run on the most fragile of ankles. The jockeys are small, but mostly heart. Racing is a quick way to burn money. No wonder storytellers have capitalized on its dramatic potential.

Horse Heaven – by Jane Smiley. Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, yet I found this novel way more satisfying. She’s developed a stableful of engaging characters as you follow the fates of several horses bred for racing, a risky proposition in the best of times. As much about people and their passions and predilections as about horses, of course.

Lords of Misrule – by Jaimy Gordon. Winner of the 2010 National Book Award, this novel is set in the lower echelons of horse-racing, among people for whom the twin spires of Churchill Downs are a distant dream. She has an almost miraculous way of capturing the way horse people think and talk.

The Horse God Built – by Lawrence Scanlan. This one I haven’t read, but it was too tempting to include a book about Secretariat—“the horse God built.” Secretariat won racing’s Triple Crown (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes) in 1973, with track-blistering performances. This nonfiction book is Secretariat as seen through the eyes of his groom and a story of friendship. This is one of six great nonfiction books about racing compiled by Amy Sachs for BookBub.

Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand, was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Toby Maguire, Jeff Bridges, Chris Cooper, and real-life jockey Gary Stevens. A heartwarming story, this production includes footage shot from the midst of a race—an unforgettable view of why this sport is so dangerous. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 77%, audiences 76%.

Luck – HBO. For the full immersion experience, try this nine-episode series, developed by David Milch. It’s all-star cast includes Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz, Richard Kind, Nick Nolte, Michael Gambon and, again, jockey Gary Stevens (who raced in the 2016 Kentucky Derby at age 53). The three touts, convinced they’re on track for riches, are priceless. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating 87%; audiences 78%

Sing Street

Posted on by

Sing Street

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo & Lucy Boynton in Sing Street

A charming movie from Ireland about a half-dozen Dublin boys at the Synge Street Christian Brothers School who start a band (trailer). We sort of know this story. We’ve sort of seen it before. But the freshness of the acting make it fun all over again. Conor Lalor (brilliantly played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is a new student at the school and the adolescent boys there plan to make his life miserable. Life at home is bad, too, with his parents fighting and splitting.

A real place, the Synge Street CBS has a long history, and this movie takes place in a time of pupil loss and relatively low achievement (a line in the credits mentions that the school is “not the same place” it was in the 1980s, when the film is set). The first scene of Conor in his new classroom shows the elderly priest who is their teacher, hearing aid dangling, writing on the blackboard with his back to the pupils who are creating holy hell. The principal steps inside and the students stand to attention. The principal glances at the board and points out to the teacher that in this class he is to teach French, not Latin. Teacher: “French. How modern.”

The school’s Latin motto “Viriliter Age” (“Act Manly”), is translated by Conor’s older brother as “Rape your students.” In short, the school is chaos. Conor channels his creativity toward writing songs and creating the band, Sing Street.

These musical ambitions have a lofty goal: impressing the older teen girl, Raphina, who stands near the school every day and claims to be a model. If she is a model, and if he has a band, she can star in his music videos! Simple. The fact that he mostly carries it off is wondrous, resulting in a feel-good movie about a collection of near-misfits who make music work for them.

The band’s songs are by Gary Clark, lead of the 1980s British band Danny Wilson, and it’s good. We don’t know how Conor hears it, but what he sees in terms of music video potential is the pole star he’s determined to follow—and take Raphina with him.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating, 97%; audiences, 96%.

Broadchurch

Posted on by
David Tennant, Olivia Colman, Broadchurch

David Tennant & Olivia Colman

The engaging ITV crime drama Broadchurch (trailer) (available on Netflix) has run for two eight-episode seasons, released in 2013 and 2015, with a third season filming this summer for release in 2017. It follows the investigation of the mysterious death of an 11-year-old boy in his small seaside town. Soon all the residents are looking differently at people they’ve known for decades. Secrets emerge; journalists are sleazy; people want revenge; and the coppers make mistakes.

The action in Broadchurch takes place in Dorset, in Southwest England, and the investigation is led by police detectives Alec Hardy (played by David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman). Colman is all over screens big and small this year (The Night Manager, The Lobster). A prize to you if you can catch everything Tennant says, between his character’s thick accent and habit of swallowing his words.

A Cast That Really Supports

All the acting is first-rate, especially that of the detectives and the dead boy’s parents, played by Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan. The story keeps you guessing as to the culprit, revealed at the end of season one. Season two is the trial and introduces some additional fine acting, notably Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the defense attorney. You may remember her as Viv in the U.S. tv series, Without a Trace. She has a severe new hairstyle that gives her a different look, but the voice is unmistakable. Also in season two is Charlotte Rampling as the prosecuting attorney and James D’Arcy as a possible badguy in a previous case that haunts DI Hardy. I remember him fondly as 1st Lt. Tom Pullings in Master and Commander, way back in 2003.

Special mention should be made of the haunting Broadchurch music from Ólafur Arnalds (soundclip), an Icelandic composer and musician, which adds immeasurably to the atmosphere.

U.S. Version Fails

Fox TV created a U.S. version of the series, set in the Pacific Northwest, in a similar seaside town. Called Gracepoint, the series’s most interesting aspect is that David Tennant crossed the Atlantic and the North American continent to reprise his role as the lead detective. In this version he is called Det. Emmett Carver. I wasted no time finding a clip from the show to hear him speak American. He inhabits the other role so completely, the effect was startling! Nick Nolte also appears, as does Michael Peña (The Martian). Alas, the Fox version didn’t measure up and was cancelled after one season of low ratings.

Awards

Broadchurch won many accolades from critics as well as a number of awards. In series one, Olivia Colman won a Best Actress award from the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) and the program received seven BAFTA nominations altogether, including one for Best Original Television Music.

Broadchurch enjoyed a huge audience in the U.K., but not in the United States when it played on BBC America or via streaming. Chances are then that you haven’t seen it, and if you like a compelling crime drama (minus Hollywood’s excessive gore), you might enjoy it!

Awaiting series 3.

The Year’s Best Crime Fiction: 2016

Posted on by
police car

photo: P.V.O.A., creative commons license

Why deal with poorly executed [!], formulaic, airport quality crime fiction, when there’s Best Crime? Booklist’s longtime crime fiction reviewer Bill Ott has combed reviews of the amazing spectrum of books in this genre—from “crime caper novels, psychological thrillers, and history-mystery blends,” to police procedurals, and every kind of crime, white collar to noir, to come up with his top 10 crime novels of the year, 5/1/15-4/15/16.

An end-of-year summary of Best Crime/Mystery/Thriller fiction of 2016, is here.

And, the 2017 update of Ott’s list is here.

Every time the award-granting groups publish their nominees for the year’s top books in this genre, I’ve usually not read (and often not even heard of) any of them. This, despite reading some 70 books a year, heavily weighted toward the new and the criminal.

Booklist’s Top Picks

Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

I was delighted, therefore, to see at the very top of Booklist’s review two novels I not only read and reviewed, but found absolutely spectacular—Don Winslow’s The Cartel, a cri de coeur for greater understanding of the clueless U.S. War on Drugs, its spectacular failures, and its deadly impact on the people of Mexico.

The other is Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, a terrific debut novel about a young black man growing up in Los Angeles, how race and crime affect his worldview, and so much more. While I’m not usually a fan of coming-of-age novels, this one will knock your socks off. Says Ott, Beverly’s characters “all live, breathe, and bleed.”

These two books are beautifully written, with convincing characters and engaging plots, and I wish that all the thrillers I read had the same moral significance. The other eight on Ott’s list—which I now want to read to see whether they meet the standard set by Winslow and Beverly—are:

  • Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry—says Ott, “irresistible” comic capering
  • House of the Rising Sun, by James Lee Burke—“a quest of Arthurian proportions” and, since it’s based in Texas, a must-read for me—hey, those are my kinfolk
  • Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?, by Stephen Dobyns – uproarious, says Ott, who invokes my favorites Elmore Leonard (in his comic vein) and Donald E. Westlake; “loosen the reins of realism,” he advises
  • Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye – “Reader, I murdered him.” Jane Eyre devotees need know no more
  • King Maybe, by Timothy Hallinan – “one of the best in a sinfully entertaining series” involving crooks in LA, their perfect setting
  • Little Pretty Things, by Lori Rader-Day – A Mary Higgins Clark award-winner, atmospheric and suspenseful
  • The Passenger, by Lisa Lutz – a dark psychological thriller about a woman fleeing the consequences of her husband’s death (What, no sticking around for the insurance?)
  • The Whispering City, by Sara Moliner – an evocative historical, set in Barcelona in the early 1950’s, where General Franco’s security police are everywhere and a newspaper reporter is investigating a death best left alone.

Edgar Winners 2016

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that the Mystery Writers of American recently announced its 2016 Edgar winners. None of the nominees for “best novel” were in the list above, with the winner Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (“a hybrid of mystery, coming-of-age and Southern gothic,” says the LA Times). MWA’s award for “best first novel” went to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (a cerebral spy thriller about the Vietnam War and winner of the Pulitzer Prize).

Be sure to check out the “Reading . . .” tab above to find more book reviews, many in the crime/mystery/thriller genre.

Stuck in the Past? Writers’ Resources

Posted on by
newspaper

photo: Sirkku, creative commons license

Does the past haunt you? Do you want it to? Feed your need to know what happened years ago by perusing newspapers from the time. It’s no longer necessary to visit distant archives or incite an attack from your dust allergies, digitization has come to your rescue!

Because of my genealogy researches, I’m deeply interested in certain past events that are only dimly remembered—if at all—in family lore. You may be interested in the history of your neighborhood, your church, or some historical episode, large or small.

A Novelist’s Quest

Author Laura Town reviewed some of these digital newspaper archives in Word, a publication of  the American Society of Journalists and Authors. For her historical novel The Renegade Queen, about the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency, she wanted both facts about certain episodes and “feel.” What was on the minds of people in the period she was writing about? How did they speak?

Her novel included notable characters from real-life—Victoria Woodhull and Susan B. Anthony. There are biographies of them, of course, but Town discovered these biographies contradicted each other. That made it especially important to find out what people said about them at the time and led her to explore the newspapers of the period.

Digital Newspaper Resources

Although some of the resources below have a cost, bear in mind that public and college libraries may subscribe to these services, enabling community residents to use them for free. Read the subscription terms carefully; sometimes these subscriptions are hard to cancel and can be costly!

  • Chronicling America – a free site hosted by the Library of Congress, covering the periods 1836 to 1922. Although it contains thousands of newspapers, it doesn’t have them all. Still, it’s a place to start. I found the search function a little clunky.
  • New York “Times Machine” – Get your questions in order before you sign up, because it costs $8.75 per week. However, it contains every issue of the paper of record since its inception more than 160 years ago up to today, since access to it comes with a digital or print subscription to the paper.
  • com – the basic subscription ($7.95 per month) includes papers from around the world going back to the 1700s and is included in a membership with Ancestry.com. Searching for an individual within Ancestry can bring up genealogical and vital records information, as well as any newspaper article in which the person appears. For more years and more newspapers, the “Extra” subscription is $19.90 per month. Many public libraries have a membership in Ancestry, although I’m not sure whether the library version—slightly different than the home version—includes the newspapers.com.
  • com – again, if your questions are in order, you can take advantage of this site’s 14-day free trial. It includes newspapers from many countries back as far as 1607 for some. If the website indicates the price after the trial period, I did not find it.

Town mentions several other, specialized and international sources in her article. If digitized sources cannot help with your questions, she also suggests the state archives for the locale in which the newspaper was published. Historical societies may have microfilmed newspapers, and if you have a narrow date range, such as seeking a birth announcement or obituary, they may be a useful resource.

Related articles

Where’s the Happy?

Posted on by
Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen

Kate Winslet (Marianne Dashwood) & Alan Rickman (Col. Brandon) in Sense & Sensibility

Novelist Carrie Brown, in an essay in the Glimmer Train bulletin this month, advocates a reassessment of the components of conflict that writers incorporate in their work. Too often, she believes, less experienced writers, especially, lean too heavily on catastrophe. They include “too much dark and not enough light,” believing only the bad stuff is dramatic.

Bad stuff happening is the meat and potatoes of the genre I read most often—mysteries and thrillers. Yet even there, excess abounds. Authors feel compelled to pile up ever more bodies, to make the manner of death ever more grisly, to include female characters who might offer a hope of happiness only to put them out of reach, often because they’re dead, to give their protagonists’ souls so many dark places to hide that after a while, I wonder, “why does this character get out of bed in the morning?” When I start rolling my eyes, the author has lost me.

Brown believes “the mystery of people inclined toward charity or kindness has a drama as compelling as a story of decline and despair.” These positive forces are as powerful and as complicated as the impulses that propel other people toward evil. Jane Austen knew this. So did Dickens.

The key to presenting happiness well, she says, is to capture its complexity and contradictions. She uses an example “weeping with happiness.” Think of Emma Thompson in the movie Sense and Sensibility, crying with great, gasping sobs (see the clip!) when she realizes that Edward Ferrars is in fact not married. We are infinitely more moved by her happy tears than if she’d simply grinned delightedly.

It is not easy for people to be happy, and it is especially not easy for them to be happy when they have been beset by all the other fictional difficulties authors throw at them. But, Brown might argue, these characters can—and should—be happy for that precise reason. She says happiness depends “on the nearby presence of unhappiness to be felt most acutely. By necessity, it seems, the happiest man will also be the man most aware of unhappiness.” Going back to Sense and Sensibility, that would be lovely Colonel Brandon.

An example from Brown’s own work is her 2013 novel The Last First Day, in which a long-married couple—the headmaster of the Derry School for Boys and his wife—must face the declining health that forces his retirement. Said Reeve Lindbergh in her review of the book for The Washington Post, “Terrible things happen and have happened. These people struggle and are hurt. . . . Nevertheless, [the author shows] one can see with clarity and with appreciation for certain glimpsed miracles in every day, whatever else the day brings.” One is capable of a kind of happiness.