Recent Reviews
The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer
Published in 2002, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer is a rich exploration of the emotional dynamics of a young couple, their families, and their group of childhood friends after a traumatic accident. Packer creates characters for which I feel great empathy as they attempt to deal with a tragic situation. Her book reminds us that impulsive actions can change a person’s life.
Mike Mayer and Carrie Bell have lived in Madison their entire lives. They met at 15 and have been dating through high school and then four years at the university. Both are kind and conscientious. Their relationship has been one of thoughtfulness and tenderness. Now engaged, Carrie deflects and delays each time Mike asks about selecting a date. Not without inner conflict, she says, “I was hating myself because none of it felt right anymore. For so long I had thought of him as necessary ballast that would keep me safe. Now that ballast was holding me down, holding me back. I wanted lightness, freedom.” She also explains the stifling feeling she carries about their life in Madison, “We might work at banks and libraries and car dealerships but somehow the trappings of adulthood were merely that for us, merely trappings: the truth about us seemed to lie in the fact that we were still closest to the people we’d known since childhood." Feeling constrained by the confines of her hometown, Carrie imagines a wider world filled with stimulation and unpredictability. She has been emotionally distancing herself from the people she loves.
Mike feels Carrie’s love ebbing. On a picnic with their friends, Mike attempts to get Carrie’s attention by making an uncharacteristically spontaneous dive into a familiar lake. The water level is low and tragedy strikes. Mike becomes paralyzed.
The novel explores how people respond to their responsibilities in a time of crisis and chaos. As Mike deals with his physical paralysis, Carries becomes emotionally paralyzed. Everyone in her life tells her to be strong for Mike. A few months after the accident and burdened by constant hospital visits, Carrie feels the weight of Mike’s accident crushing her and she impulsively leaves Madison for New York. Though young, impetuous, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of her heart, she needs to get away from the shrinking world of Madison to sort her feelings. Carrie loves Mike and she wants to support him. Yet, should she be disloyal to her own desires and simply marry him? Except for her mom, few people in her tight circle knew of her diminished feelings toward Mike. They think she simply left Mike in his time of need.
Carrie doesn’t offer the insights of an older, wiser woman. Yet, I admire that she seeks to understand herself and reflect on the choices she made and why she thinks she made them. She struggles to imagine if it would be harder to stay with her quadriplegic fiancé or harder to abandon him when he needs her most. And she berates herself for even thinking about leaving him. She wonders how, prior to the accident, Mike could have felt so content with the predictability of their planned lives. She reviews her own father’s abandonment of her mother when Carrie was three.
Carrie has experienced a different kind of trauma. She is only 23 years old. But rather than shrink from pain and conflict, she attempts to search her soul and determine what she should do next. Packer doesn’t offer us a simple happy ending. But like the rest of the book, it is satisfying to watch Carrie wrestle with the complexity of her commitments, her conflicts, and her emerging consciousness.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
Paulette Jiles' impressive novel, News of the World, was a 2016 National Book Award finalist and I can see why. Set in 1870 in North Texas, Jiles’ precise prose captivated me with her tale of emotional endurance and human connection. Captain Jefferson Kidd of Georgia is a veteran of two wars. He travels town to town to read the news of the world to assembled crowds. It is a meager living, but in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Captain lost both his print shop and his faith in humanity. He has witnessed both the noble and savage impulses of his fellow human beings and he now hopes, “If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place."
In Wichita Falls, Texas, he is offered a fifty-dollar gold piece to return a ten-year-old girl to her relatives 400 miles south in San Antonio. The Kiowa tribe raised the girl, named Johanna Leonberger, after they murdered her parents and sister. She now embodies the culture and language of the tribe. Yet four years later, to the dismay of her adopted Kiowa mother, the tribe returns Johanna to the US Army. She has been abandoned twice now and has learned to behave with courage and resiliency. Jiles bases this piece of the story on first hand accounts of children captured and raised by Native American tribes. She specifically notes Scott Zesch’s book, Captured.
The Captain and Johanna embark on a grueling and emotional journey. They initially view each other with alarm and caution. Captain Kidd is no child psychologist, but he is a kind and honest man who seeks to comprehend this young girl whose only language is Kiowa. As they travel together, the weary old man and the wary young girl endure outlaws, hostile tribes, and a corrupt Reconstructionist government. And they begin to communicate and appreciate one another. Toward the end of the novel Jiles writes, “The Captain never did understand what had caused such a total change in a little girl from a German household and adopted into a Kiowa one. In a mere four years she completely forgot her birth language and her parents, her people, her religion, her alphabet. She forgot how to use a knife and a fork and how to sing in European scales. And once she was returned to her own people, nothing came back. She remained at heart a Kiowa to the end of her days.”
Though Captain Kidd may not understand Johanna, he accepts her and attempts to put himself in her shoes. Johanna refuses to be “civilized” into the customs and habits of the white world, though on occasion acquiesces in deference to the Captain. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say it is gratifying. Given our country’s current callousness and cruelty toward those who are different, I thoroughly enjoyed being with Captain Jefferson Kidd. Though he could have taken advantage of the anarchy and chaos around him, he lived his days with compassion, decency, and honor.
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
Throughout his life, my beloved Uncle Warren reflected on the factors and events that contributed to the choices he made. And with each passing year, his understanding of those choices expanded in scope and depth. Reading this 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Peter Taylor reminded me of my uncle Warren who passed away in 2012.
Phillip Carver is forty-nine years old and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his much younger girlfriend, Holly Kaplan. It is the early 1970’s. Phillip’s two older unmarried sisters, Betsy and Jo, have summoned him back to Memphis (the town of his adolescence) to dissuade their 80-year-old father, George Carver, from remarrying.
By today’s standards, not much happens when Phillip return to Memphis. There is no murder or mayhem, no adultery, no affairs. His sisters have simply scared away their father’s octogenarian bride. There will be no wedding. But, the trip is dramatic because Phillip begins to acquire a new perspective on the family dynamics that resulted in so many incidents of passive aggressive rage. Beneath the saccharin show of Southern manners, George Carver’s four grown children and deceased wife have suffered under George’s single-minded narcissism.
Phillip’s older brother volunteered and died in WWII. And neither Phillip nor his sisters have married or had children. When each of the three surviving siblings falls in love, their father intervenes to stop them from marrying. It is after Phillip receives his summons to Memphis that he understands the actions his father took to sabotage Phillip’s love affair when Phillip was in his early twenties. It is as if a bank of fog blocked Phillip’s view of what transpired and Phillip never wanted to see what was on the other side.
After the initial summons, Phillip Carver returns to Memphis for another visit. He says, “I was discovering that all I cared about now was how I had been treated by my family in the long-ago affair of Clara Prince.” And yet, even as Phillip puts the pieces together of his father’s sabotage, he resolves, “Forgetting the injustices and seeming injustices which one suffered from one’s parents during childhood and youth must be the major part of any maturing process."
Phillip Carver has not forgotten the injustices of his youth, but he arrives at a clearer understanding of the dysfunction of his family and how the rigid Southern social structures reinforced the oppression he and his siblings experienced. Unfortunately, Phillip’s two sisters never forgive their father even as their lives continue to revolve around him. As he ages, they love him while simultaneously seeking revenge, all the while their emotional growth is stunted and they are unable to mature. Phillip escapes, but his sisters are trapped in a world of convivial conversations and inauthentic relationships.
At its core, A Summons to Memphis is Phillip Carver’s understated and methodical reflection on the factors that shaped and stalled his life. With the evolved understanding he acquires by the end of the novel, I hope he is able to live his last thirty years without the ghosts of Memphis tormenting him.
