Recent Reviews
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
I enthusiastically recommend Elizabeth Strout’s stunning book Anything is Possible. In the nine interconnected stories about people from the fictitious town of Amgash, Illinois, Strout identifies the defining experience that shaped each character. She avoids linguistic ornamentation or exaggeration and simply writes raw, clear and honest prose. Just as I was feeling judgmental or frustrated about a character’s choice, Strout zeros in on the dramatic moment or life experience that shaped that character and my feeling changed to empathy and compassion. Strout isn’t heavy-handed, maudlin or didactic. These stories feel authentic and astute.
Lucy Barton, the protagonist from Strout’s previous book My Name is Lucy Barton, is mentioned in most the stories. Lucy manages to escape Amgash and becomes a famous novelist. In one story Lucy returns to Amgash to visit with brother Pete and sister Vicky. Sitting in the living room of the home where they were raised and where Pete still lives, the three siblings descend into their childhood dynamic. With both petty and wise recollections, the siblings discuss the pain, shame, and embarrassment of their youth. Being poor and abused by their parents and ostracized by their classmates made their early lives almost unbearable. Still stuck in their small lives in Amgash, Pete and Vicky resent Lucy’s abandonment and feel pride in her success. As they talk, Lucy feels catapulted back in time and has a panic attack. Her two siblings jump into action and drive Lucy back to Chicago. Through all their suffering and bitterness toward life and each other, it is clear that these siblings love one another, if only as survivors of the same upbringing.
Strout explores how the aftermath of specific events continues to reside within people and results in emotional paralysis. The poignant shame of poverty seeps into these stories even for those who are now well off. Part of Strout’s insight derives from viewing her characters lives over decades. Like a detective, she shows how the trajectory of a person’s life can be traced to a few key factors. There is a lot of unmet need and unfair judgments in these stories. Strout understands the complexity of motivation, fear, and desire and eloquently captures the ways people can demean with cruelty or soar with grace. Anything Is Possible inspires us to be empathetic and understanding because with empathy and understanding anything is possible.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
This engaging and sweeping novel by Jhumpa Lahiri spans decades and oceans as the story moves from India to Rhode Island and back to India again. On one level, the novel explores how the political turmoil of India in the 1960's changed the life of a 22-year-old man and the lives of those he loved. Yet the larger story illustrates the ways family obligations can shape our lives with or without our consent.
Subhash and Udayan Mishra are brothers born a year apart in Calcutta. Inseparable in their youth, they take different paths in their late teens. Subhash studies chemistry and is accepted into a Ph.D. program at the University of Rhode Island, while Udayan is swept into the Naxalite movement, a rebellion by young students to eradicate inequity and poverty. When the police murder Udayan for his revolutionary activities, his young wife, Gauri, is left living with her bereft and angry in-laws. To complicate matters, Gauri is pregnant
The novel explores the painful implications of these events in the life of each character and how after Udayan’s death his family members are left to pick up the pieces of his life. Family members blame each other for Udayan’s choices and they all experience loneliness, disconnection and confusion. Each surviving family member is left to suffer in his or her angst and seems incapable of moving on. Instead, they live on separate islands of guilt and shame. Subash, Gauri and Udayan’s mother and father shrivel to lesser versions of themselves and when the baby is born she absorbs the family’s sorrows.
Lahiri creates beautiful portraits of each character’s isolation and inner turmoil. As a reader, I wanted to tell each one of them to forgive themselves and talk with one other so that they might get on with their lives. But since each family member holds a shameful truth that derives from their relationship with Udayan, they hold their secrets close. Lahiri’s writing is lyrical. I just wish she had offered more dialogue between the characters so that I could have reached my own conclusions about their choices.
The Lowland gives insight into the power dynamics and traditions of an Indian family. The story also serves as a powerful reminder of how a series of small decisions can alter the course of a person’s life and the lives of his family. By the end of the novel, we feel empathy for all of the characters, as it seems they have little power to change how they feel or leave the tragedy they are living.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel Sing, Unburied, Sing begins as a quiet hum and ends as a soaring chorus. Ward lyrically captures the fluidity of time in the lives of her characters and brilliantly shows how the atrocities perpetrated by white Americans on African Americans still haunt families today. How could they not?
The book opens with River teaching his young grandson, JoJo, in gruesome detai,l the way to kill a goat, foreshadowing a greater horror to come. We soon meet Leonie, Rivers daughter, and the mother of JoJo and Kayla. Leonie has never recovered from her brother's murder by white kids and turns to drugs to ease her pain. Leonie and her best friend, Misty, are driving JoJo and Kayla to Parchman State Penitentiary in northern Mississippi to pick up, Michael, the father of Leonie’s children. Though Leonie neglects and abuses her children, Jojo and Kayla survive due to the love of their grandparents, a glimmer of hope in an otherwise grim novel.
On one level the book is about the car ride to and from the state prison, but the story is also about the ways in which African Americans are trapped in the white world, on a ride not of their choosing. On the way back from the prison, a ghost named Richie, sneaks into the car. Richie embodies all the horror and denigration experienced by African Americans from slavery to the present. Richie knew River when they were both unjustly imprisoned at Parchment Penitentiary. Since River’s release, he has been haunted by the compassionate “Sophie’s Choice” decision he made that involved Richie.
Singing is the opposite of what these folk’s lives are about. Their present lives seem to be dirges of drugs and poverty, pain, and prejudice. The knowledge of what their ancestors endured lingers and lives within them. River’s wife says, “Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” This makes sense to me. How could they forget the horrors that were inflicted on family members that came before them? They were burned, hung and skinned alive by mobs of white people. These atrocities defy comprehension and elicit horror and should haunt us all. To add insult to injury, African Americans were denied their humanity even in death, often denied the decency of a burial. It is no wonder that all the characters are “pulling the weight of history behind them.”
Jesmyn Ward’s novel is a tour de force. Her use of magical realism adds a wonderful dimension to the novel. Ward is able to capture the difficult day-to-day lives of her characters in the present while also capturing the dead relatives and unburied ancestors of their past. Her lyrical language, appreciation of nature and deep spirituality make this book a beautiful and heartbreaking read. At the end of the novel, Richie says, “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.” In our current milieu, this quote says it all.
