Category Archives: Reading . . .

****The Heavenly Table

Posted on by

Heavenly TableBy Donald Ray Pollock — In the early 20th century, the three Jewett brothers are under the thumb of their crazily religious, impoverished failure of a father. He’s working them practically to death in the swampy field they’re clearing near the Georgia-Alabama border. The wealthy landowner has promised that if they meet some impossible deadline, he will give them 10 laying hens. If so, maybe they will finally have something to eat. What the reader knows is he has no intention of keeping that promise.

A couple of states north, in southern Ohio, live the elderly farmer Ellsworth Fiddler and his wife Eula, also struggling. The previous year, Ells gave all the savings Eula had scraped together over the decades to a flim-flam man who stole the family’s pride and hope along with their cash.

The title of this literary crime novel reveals its theme. Early on, Pearl Jewett encounters a mysterious hobo with a long grizzled beard who tells him about the heavenly table. There, a man’s hungers will be satisfied, but only those who have suffered in life can sit there. God gives men the chance to suffer by bringing them troubles. Thereafter, Pearl actively pursues misery for himself and his boys, to ensure their place there.

When Pearl dies, the three boys fall into a life of crime, stealing guns and robbing stores and banks on their way north to Canada. They soon become wanted men, with a heavy price on their heads. They need to lie low for a while, which brings them to a brief sojourn on the farm of Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler near the small town of Meade.

Many other colorful characters weave in and out of the brothers’ lives, including Jasper Cone, the Meade “sanitarian,” whose job is to assess the functioning of the town’s hundreds of outhouses; Sugar, a black man whom the trio encounters and torments; Pollard, owner of the Blind Owl bar and a sadistic killer; and Lieutenant Bovard at the nearby army camp who dreams of dying in glory in France.

Reviewers of Pollock’s previous books, Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time, compared him to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor for his gothic southernness and unsettling storylines. This book reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, deemed a comic masterpiece. The Heavenly Table has its brief comic moments, though it’s mostly the darkest of Southern Noir.

Living in squalor, uneducated, making bad decisions, drinking too much, and succumbing to violence, few of the characters have any hope for redemption in this life or of reaching “the heavenly table” in the next. But as Jason Sheehan said for NPR, by the end of the book, it turns “a smart and complicated corner, asking (without ever really asking) who are the bad men and who are the good? And just how much blame for badness can be laid at the feet of those who know nothing and fear everything, who have no recourse to change but that it be met with furious violence?”

To read this book, you’ll need a strong stomach and may want a hot shower afterward, but you’ll never forget Pollock’s compelling characters and powerful writing.

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

****Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Posted on by
Mayflower

“Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor,” by William Halsall, 1882. Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Mass.

By Nathaniel Philbrick, narrated by George Guidall. Some 35 million Americans today are to some degree descendants of the Pilgrims who came to America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. Although the November sea voyage entailed hardships enough for the approximately 102 passengers and 30 crew members, these difficulties were nothing compared to what they encountered when they decided to go ashore in the relatively unpromising ground that became Plymouth Colony. This is their compelling story.

The Pilgrims’ greatest fear was the Natives, but their biggest foes turned out to be harsh climate and lack of food, which contributed to high rates of death from disease. Despite their early anxieties, the Mayflower Pilgrims developed a good and mutually beneficial relationship with the powerful Pokanoket chief Massasoit and some other tribes. Philbrick provides keen insight into what each leader was thinking when they made the choices they did.

Before long, other, less devout settlers arrived and mingled with the Pilgrims. In 1630, seventeen ships delivered approximately a thousand English men, women, and children to the vicinity of Boston, and soon the Massachusetts colony grew to include modern New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and the more religiously tolerant Rhode Island. Several of my ancestors arrived with prominent Puritans in 1634, settling in Boston, Salem, and New Haven. I wanted to read this book to find out more about what their lives were like.

This rapid influx created an almost unquenchable demand for Indian lands, and the settlers made the lives of Natives increasingly difficult. The children and grandchildren of the Pilgrims cared little for the aid their forefathers had received from the Natives. You can feel the rising tension and frustrations. In 1675, Massasoit’s grandson Philip had enough. He launched what became known as King Philip’s war—a bloody, three-year conflict, in which Colonial towns and Native camps were burned, and the area economy devastated.

In the sixty or so years covered by this book, a number of remarkable personalities emerge—among them Miles Standish, Josiah Winslow, Massasoit, William Bradford, Roger Williams, and America’s first Indian fighter, Benjamin Church. Philbrick’s descriptions of these men and their personalities makes them come alive on the page and lets you understand their motivations. The military leader Benjamin Church is a good example. Unlike some of his colleagues, Church’s first thought was not wholesale slaughter of the Native population, but rather he tried “to bring him around” to the Colonists’ way of thinking. This approach, Philbrick believes, became a precursor for the Founding Fathers a century later, as Church “shows us how the nightmare of wilderness warfare might one day give rise to a society that promises liberty and justice for all.”

If you are one of the 35 million noted above, you may find this book especially fascinating, as Philbrick recounts surprisingly detailed personal histories of a great many Mayflower passengers.

Guidall is a frequent narrator of thrillers and many other types of books. He does a fine, job here with a straight narration.

***Between You and Me

Posted on by

Mary Norris, punctuationBy Mary Norris – This book—part history of language, part grammarians’ bible, part punctilious punctuation-snob puncturer—by a veteran New Yorker copy editor attempts to explain why writers in English, particularly those whose work appears in The New Yorker, make the choices they do. Form, not content, is her subject. While that publication is notoriously picky about copy matters, Norris’s anecdote-rich text suggests how much elasticity actually exists within its seemingly constricting rules.

Particularly entertaining are the early sections that include a review of her checkered, pre-New Yorker work experience. (You can’t really call a stint as a milk-truck driver and costume shop clerk a career for a person who did graduate work in English.)

Norris took her title from the common grammar mistake people make in using “I” when “me” is required. I yell at the radio when I hear the awful “between you and I” or “He invited Tom and I . . .” I suspect Norris does too.

Several chapters cover the ongoing punctuation wars. No surprise, as the subtitle of the book is Confessions of a Comma Queen. In the comma skirmish, I find I fight on the side of “playing by ear,” dropping in a comma where I sense a pause. And in hyphen disputes, her emphasis on clarity of meaning seems a useful approach. Thus the hyphen in milk-truck driver above.

Some of the text on verbs got away from me and her suggestion for how to tell whether a sentence needs “who” or “whom” (for the straggling soldiers in that lost battle), her system was overly complex or not explained clearly. I’ll stick with mine.

pencils

photo: Vladimer Shioshvili, creative commons license

The very best chapter was devoted to Norris’s love of pencils. Extra-soft No.1 pencils, in fact. The kind of pencil that has also kindled a love of pencil sharpeners. (I’ve served time in innumerable meeting rooms over the years and can tell you that The Ford Foundation’s black pencils, embossed with its name, and the round ones of the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., which come in easter egg pastels, are the best. Whenever I attended meetings there, I stocked up.)

Reading anyone’s description of something they are both passionate and deeply knowledgeable about—making wine, say, or 1950s automobiles—is always interesting, and you learn as much about the person as about their particular interest. I don’t ever have to read about pencils again, but I’m glad I did.

****Our Souls at Night

Posted on by
Our Souls at Night

photo: Mitchell Diatz, creative commons license

By Kent Haruf – My book club selected this short novel, 192 pages, a gentle story about aging and that difficult transition between when parents think they know what’s best for their children (and usually tell them so) and children come to think they know what’s best for their parents (and do tell them so).

Addie, a widow, and Louis, a widower, are neighbors in small-town Holt, Colorado, in the eastern, high plains portion of the state. In the book’s first chapter, Addie pays a call on Louis and proposes that he visit her at night, lie in bed with her, and have a companionable conversation. Sex isn’t exactly off the agenda, but it’s not at the top and rather beside the point. This unusual arrangement begins, and before long the whole town knows about it. Soon thereafter word spreads to Addie and Louis’s far-flung and scandalized children, who want it to stop.

The conversations between Addie and Louis are low-key and unsentimental. They talk about their marriages and the deaths of their spouses, about their children, about many things. Author Haruf’s unadorned writing style (not even decorated with quotation marks) gives their interactions a deceptive simplicity. For example In speaking about Addie’s son Gene, who is losing his store and has to start a new career, Louis asks:

What is it he wants to do?

He’s always been in sales of some kind.

That doesn’t seem to fit him, as I remember him.

No. He’s not the salesman type. I think he’s afraid now. He won’t say so.

But this could be a chance for him to break out. Break the pattern. Like his mother has. Like you’ve done.

He won’t, though. He’s got his life all screwed down tight.

Both of them find in their late-night conversations a closeness, a connection they never achieved with their spouses. Addie asks, “Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all.” Except these lucky two, who at least know what they want. Says Louis, “I just want to live simply and pay attention to what’s happening each day. And come sleep with you at night.”

This restrained style works perfectly well in a novel about the places and people that are Haruf’s subjects, in this book and his others. It is a lean diet, stripped of fat and garnish. Yet the meat of Our Souls, the struggle against pettiness and small-mindedness, is worthy of consumption.

People seem to like this book. All seven copies in the Mercer County Library System were out, so I had to snag the large-print version. I’ve since learned this was Haruf’s last book, the sixth in a series set in Holt, finished a few days before he died in 2014.

****The Bitter Season

Posted on by
Samurai

photo: David Pursehouse, creative commons license

By Tami Hoag – The Bitter Season is Hoag’s latest crime thriller featuring the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based team of police detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska. This time, the pair is split up, because Liska has joined a new Cold Case unit, hoping for more regular working hours that will let her spend time with her teenage sons.

The first case she’s assigned is the 25-year-old murder of a fellow detective, Ted Duffy, a star in the department’s sex crimes division, was shot to death in his back yard. The man’s family is less than enthusiastic about dredging up the details of the crime again. Repeated investigations over the years have plowed the same unpromising ground, unearthing nothing more than painful memories.

Meanwhile, Kovac has a new partner, newbie Michael Taylor, who is not only easy to look at, but actually knows a few useful things. An adolescence spent watching martial arts movies comes in handy when Kovac and Taylor are assigned to a brutal new murder case. Lucien Chamberlain, a University of Minnesota faculty member in the running for the chair of the East Asia studies department and his wealthy, socially connected, alcoholic wife Sondra have been viciously murdered in their home. They were slashed and stabbed with items from the professor’s collection of martial arts paraphernalia—a collection that is, the medical examiner’s investigator says, “a homicidal maniac’s wet dream.”

Out of the woodwork comes a parade of victims. Or are they suspects?

Despite working on separate cases, Kovac and Liska interact fairly often, and the banter between them and their teams’ other detectives is lively. They’re experts at bringing in a spot of erudition, too. “Shakespeare would have had a freaking field day with these people,” Kovac says, and another detective responds, “ʻThou hast spoken right, ʼtis true. The wheel is come full circle . . .’”

But are Kovac’s and Liska’s cases truly separate? Through fast-moving chapters written from alternating perspectives, you see these skilled detectives work their way through to the core of their respective cases, culminating in a surprising confrontation that demonstrates how skillfully Hoag has laid out her clues.

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

*****Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel

Posted on by
Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet

By A.J. Hartley and David Hewson, narrated by Richard Armitage – Ok, Ok, before you say “been there, done that Hamlet thing—five times, maybe ten!” this is another Hamlet animal altogether. As an inveterate audiobook fan, I will say that the Hartley/Hewson Macbeth, narrated by Alan Cumming (be still, my heart) was one of the best audio books I’ve ever “read.” So, I was eagerly anticipating listening to the their Hamlet.

Perhaps this Hamlet doesn’t quite reach the stratospheric genius of Macbeth, but it gives the listener plenty to chew on. I think Hartley (a Shakespeare scholar) and Hewson (a mystery/thriller writer, interviewed here)—an inspired pairing if there ever was one—have truly done it again. They fill in the leaps and gaps in the Bard’s plot, they provide background information that heightens appreciation of the stakes and therefore the tension, they infuse the text with modern psychological insights. In short, they have made Hamlet more real than perhaps you have ever felt him before.

No need to dwell on plot. We all know it. But what they have done in novelizing Shakespeare’s text is brilliant. First, they’re fleshed out some (potential) action scenes. The play’s glancing reference to pirates receives a full treatment here, which shows Hamlet to be more a man of action than the black-garbed, skull-staring  brooder we have come to associate with the Danish prince. Ophelia’s death also has a much more robust development than the usual wan, flower-strewn suicide.

Perhaps Hartley and Hewson’s cleverest stroke was in creating a son of Yorick to be Hamlet’s constant friend and goad, to share and prompt him with the lines of the famous soliloquies. I was so taken with this creation that I didn’t fully appreciate its subtle origins and intent until the story’s conclusion. Listening to the interviews with Hartley and Hewson that follow the novel explains how and why they arrived at this fictional device.

Purists, take note. There is nothing here that is not fully suggested or believable in the context of the play. Before you get your doublet in a knot, recall that the play itself was not created out of cloth entire, but built on folk tales and previous works. The authors are merely taking the creative armamentarium of Shakespeare himself and aiming it at 21st century sensibilities.

Hamlet is a ghost story; it is a murder story; it is a tale of guilt and revenge; it is about treachery and lust. Everything that makes a good crime thriller!

Richard Armitage is well suited to take on the narrative challenge. He has appeared in numerous television and film roles and played John Proctor in The Old Vic’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, where he earned an Olivier Award nomination. He won the 2014 Best Audiobook of the Year Award for this rendering of Hamlet. While it’s also available for the Kindle, let Armitage tell you the story.

This review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Glimmer Train – Spring/Summer 2016

Posted on by
Glimmer Train, literary magazines

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

Literary magazines that publish short stories are an easy way to get a taste of a new writer’s work without committing to an entire novel. As a person who still actually pays for books–authors need to eat, too!–I know reading is a commitment of both time and money.

I’ve subscribed to Glimmer Train since (I think) its first issue and, four times a year, it brings me first-rate fiction, mostly by authors previously unknown to me. Quite a few of the stories in the current issue were by authors from other cultures, emigres, exploring dislocation, distance, fitting in, or not. Nine of the 16 stories are written in the first person. This does not mean they are memoir. Their authors used the first-person device to get to the heart of the story, closer and quicker, not having a novel’s 85,000 additional words to do so.

Here are just three stories I particularly enjoyed in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue:

  • Eric Thompson’s “The King of India” is a man simultaneously obsessed with Elvis and the fate of his new son. (Do South Asians have a particular affinity for Elvis, I wonder, recalling the recurrent image in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things? Or is it that “The King” is universal?) Poignant and funny.
  • “Waterside” by Marni Berger, captivated me with its opening epigram from Anne of Green Gables. It’s about an adolescent friendship between a boy and girl, how the world is seen through the friend’s eyes, and the shell of not-caring adolescents affect. It’s about what matters. The narrator, who buries herself in books, says: “Stories are shelters to hide inside, and you can hide inside someone else’s story to escape your own.” Which of us hasn’t been there?
  • The story “The Tune” by Siamak Vossoughi humorously probes issues of connection through the tale of an American who calls her Iranian friend in San Francisco and hands the phone to the Iranian cab driver she’s just met in Chicago. Surely, they will have things to talk about, she believes. Life, for instance. What the two strangers don’t say to each other is as revealing as what they do. Vossoughi’s book Better Than War won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

And, I learned a new word: scordatura. It means tuning a stringed instrument (a lute, a violin) a little differently, in order to produce a particular effect. Christa Romanosky used it in her story “Every Shape That the Moon Makes” in this nice sentence: “Moods come and go as quickly as rock falls, as a scordatura, moods your ring cannot discern.”

Explore the riches Glimmer Train and other literary publications offer. Find them in your big box book store’s magazine section, library, or online. Feel free to tell me and our readers what you discover!

***Charleston

Posted on by
Longwood, Christmas, poinsettias

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

By Margaret Bradham Thornton – There’s something about a man who’s “too perfect.” The feeling that something will go wrong hangs over your head as you turn the pages, waiting . . .

In this debut novel, Eliza Poinsett is the daughter of an old Charleston family. (Supposedly, she’s a descendant of  diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Charlestonian who introduced the flower that became the ubiquitous Christmas plant.) Educated at Princeton and Columbia, Eliza decamped to England after the love of her life, Henry Heyward, told her he was marrying someone else. His wife-to-be Issie was pregnant, and the marriage lasted not much longer than it took for her to produce young Lawton. Henry sued for custody and got it, and Issie departed for less socially correct climes.

At the start of the book, Eliza has established herself in England with a job, a pending fellowship, and Jamie, her proper English boyfriend. Then she runs into Henry at a wedding. He’s available, Jamie doesn’t really move her, and she’s on the verge of her first return trip to Charleston in years, to attend her step-sister’s coming out party.

She waffles about going, but of course she does, straight into the snares Henry quite cheerfully admits he’s setting for her. At one point, she tells now nine-year-old Lawton that she prefers tennis to sailing, because “I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.” Ah, but the reader can.

Nevertheless, Eliza dithers half-heartedly, weighing the pain of missed opportunities in England against the hope of second chances. Since the book is written from Eliza’s point of view, it would have been helpful to explore more deeply what underlies her ambivalence.

The author does a wonderful job of evoking Charleston—its geography, weather, history, architecture, and most of all, culture. That part of the book I enjoyed a lot. In other areas, the text signals “research!” or some obvious error plants a seed of doubt about the whole enterprise. For example, she refers to a pastel portrait as a “painting” or to a watercolor “canvas.” Those are slip-ups a good editor should have helped her avoid and they would have mattered less if Eliza weren’t an art historian, supposedly up on such basics.

For my taste, the book is too much of a soap opera romance, moving at a soap opera pace, with only its admirable atmospherics to sustain it. The ending, which I won’t reveal, shouldn’t burst out of the blue as it does; it needed some careful foreshadowing. Again, an editor should have helped with that.

I was puzzled about the naming of the principal characters Henry H. and Eliza, since the parallel with the more famous duo stops with the names. The explanation is in an author interview with Adam Parker in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. Thornton said,

“When we restored our house, we found on the original paint layer of a door jamb the names and heights of the Heyward children who had lived in the house in the 1830s. I liked the idea of taking the name of one of the children for one of the main characters. In Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion,’ Henry Higgins brings Eliza Doolittle into the mannered world of aristocratic London. In ‘Charleston,’ Henry goes in the opposite direction and brings Eliza into the untamed world of Lowcountry swamps.”

OK, but without that explanation, and perhaps with it, it’s a confusing choice.

I wish there were perfect men like Henry in the world waiting to sweep us gals off our feet, but, meanwhile, we have the fascinating city of Charleston. As New York Times reviewer Meghan Daum says, in this book, “the real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds ‘like a slow kind of applause.’” The story takes place around 1991, and I wonder how much Charleston—whose ways and mores here seem set in amber—has changed in the interim.

***Cold Blood, Hot Sea

Posted on by
Maine, lobstermen, boat

David Nicholls, creative commons license

By Charlene D’Avanzo – This story, billed as “A Mara Tusconi Mystery,” introduces Mara, age 31, whose work at the Maine Oceanographic Institute (MOI) centers on the timely subject of climate change. D’Avanzo deserves credit for taking on the difficult task of making a science topic accessible to a general audience and taking advantage of the possibilities for drama inherent in this contentious field.

The story holds several key points of friction. First, between Mara and an aquaculture startup corporation up the Maine coast a short distance, which she believes may be fudging its data—anathema for any reputable scientist. And, second, between her fellow climate researchers and an apparently well funded cadre of climate change deniers who increasingly resort to spying, sabotage, and threats of physical violence. She has her personal issues as well: she gets seasick easily and she’s a behind-the-scenes player, deathly afraid of public speaking. At the same time, she’s trying to persuade Maine lobstermen that her research isn’t the threat, but the underlying changes in sea temperatures that could jeopardize their livelihoods.

As the novel begins, Mara and other MOI researchers head out to sea on their ship Intrepid to launch huge data-gathering buoys that will reveal ocean temperature trends. The buoy of her friend and colleague Harvey (a woman) goes into the water without incident. Because Mara is seasick, she turns the launch of her buoy over to Peter Riley, a young MOI PhD. Something goes disastrously wrong with the winch, the buoy slips, and fatally injures Peter.

An old MOI hand advises Mara to investigate Peter’s death on her own, secretly. She says the organization’s administrators may try to cover up any problems, in order not to scare off potential funders. Thus amateur sleuth Mara starts on a bit of a whirlwind of plot-driven activity.

D’Avanzo gives Mara a large cast of potential allies and antagonists, almost too many to flesh out in sufficient detail. Partly because the novel is told strictly from Mara’s point of view, we don’t get to know these other characters in very well. Stronger characters would create more unpredictability in the outcome and make me more invested in it.

When the opportunity arises for Mara to play a more prominent role in the climate change debate, she must weigh the risks of harassment along with the opportunities to make a vital contribution, and her personal strengths against her fears.

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

*****The Far Empty

Posted on by
Chisos Mountains, West Texas

photo: Robert Dees, creative commons license

Written by J. Todd Scott – It’s hard to believe this well-crafted crime thriller is a debut novel. The author’s experience as a DEA agent lends authority to his prose, and his meticulous rendering of the Big Bend country south and east of El Paso, Texas, and its fictional town, Murfee, takes you to that dusty back-of-beyond. Outlaw country.

The two key voices in this multiple point-of-view novel are those of 17-year-old Caleb Ross, son of Big Bend County’s despotic sheriff, who’s called “the Judge,” and new deputy Chris Cherry, once a local high school football star. Caleb’s mother disappeared 13 months before the novel begins, and he’s convinced his father killed her, which colors their every interaction. Cherry lost any hope of a football career when he blew out a knee and still isn’t sure where his new future lies.

Caleb and Cherry are lost souls, floating under the brilliant West Texas stars, staying out of the deadly orbit of the sheriff, and trying to find out what kind of men they will be. Scott does not give them an easy path, and you’ll hold your breath as they are repeatedly tested.

These two narrators are joined by another deputy, Duane Dupree—a living, violence-addicted, coked-up example of why it’s best to steer clear of the Judge’s snares. You also hear from the Judge himself. One way or another, he knows everyone’s secrets.

Not only are these male characters convincingly portrayed, but Scott does a good job with his women too. You get part of the story from the perspectives of Caleb’s friend America, his teacher Anne, and Cherry’s live-in girlfriend Melissa. Their problems are believable and compelling enough for the characters to take the actions they do.

You have to root for Deputy Cherry, who has a bad habit of actually trying to investigate stuff. Early on, he responds to a call from a rancher who’s found a dessicated corpse and, while the Judge’s other deputies would gladly assume the deceased was “just another beaner” who died in the desert, Cherry isn’t sure. Because of the extent of the sheriff’s corruption as well as his confidence in his absolute authority, he reacts to Cherry’s probes like a horse responds to flies. They warrant a twitch, maybe, but no more.

The chili really starts bubbling when a gunshot couple is found in a burning SUV, far from anything.

Scott keeps his plot threads alive and moving at a clip. I never lost interest for a moment and even forgive a little deus ex Máximo at the end. (Not a typo. Trust me.) Readers who enjoyed The Cartel, which appears on many lists of the best thrillers of last year, will appreciate this sharp view from the northern side of the border.

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