Recent Reviews
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
Review published in the San Francisco Examiner on July 22, 2018
http://www.sfexaminer.com/story-marriage-complex-layered-satisfying/
Many book lovers in the Bay Area will have read San Francisco-based writer Andrew Sean Greer’s novels. His stories provide a sense of place together with meditations on the passing of time and the nature of love. If you recently read Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less and you’re looking for another of his books to read, consider his 2008, The Story of a Marriage. I liked it even more than Less. Though not as well known, this older novel skillfully combines complex characters, a somber tone and a surprising plot as Greer unravels the complex dynamics of one marriage.
In 1943, Pearlie Ash and Holland Cook, both African-American teenagers, fall in love in their small Kentucky town. When Holland is drafted, Pearlie helps Holland’s mother hide him from the local draft board. Pearlie brings books, stories and especially hope.
But Holland is soon discovered and sent to war. The two women are derided as traitors. During the war, Holland’s plane is shot down and he is rescued from the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Pearlie seizes an opportunity to leave Kentucky for work in San Francisco.
After WWII, Pearlie and Holland encounter one another by chance along Ocean Beach. They resume their courtship and one day Holland whispers to Pearlie, “I need you to marry me”. Pearlie says, “He told me I didn’t really know his life. Yet, I married him. He was too beautiful a man to lose and I loved him.”
Four years into Pearlie and Holland’s marriage, a white man named Buzz Drumer appears at their home. Buzz tells Pearlie that he and Holland had been roommates at a military hospital while recovering from their war traumas. He also drops a bombshell: Holland and Buzz had been “together” for two years before Pearlie reappeared in Holland’s life. Pearlie is stunned: “The sensation I felt that evening – that I did not know my Holland, did not know myself, that it was perhaps impossible to know a single soul on earth-it was a fearful loneliness.”
Pearlie and Holland never really talk about what happened during or after the war. Holland compartmentalizes his feelings. He keeps his secrets and Pearlie harbors secrets too. Pearlie and Holland do love one another and their son Sonny. They enjoy the life they have created in their little house in the Sunset district of San Francisco. But because they don’t share their deepest feelings with one another, confusion reigns. Pearlie assumes that Holland might want to leave her. Holland assumes Pearlie is willing to start a new life when Buzz offers her money to leave. Both scenarios are possible. So when Buzz arrives to pull Holland away, Pearlie and Holland must confront what each really wants.
All three characters seek tranquility and connection after the chaos of war. Pearlie feels protective and passionate toward Holland. Holland is desperate for safety and stability. And Buzz is sentimental and sure of his love for Holland.
An older and wiser Pearlie Cook narrates the novel in a reflective voice looking back at her life’s twists and turns. She ruminates on the intricacies of her marriage and the choices that she and Holland made in the fateful months after Buzz knocks on her door.
“How could I possibly explain my marriage?” she asks. “Anyone watching a ship from land is no judge of its seaworthiness, for the vital part is underwater. It can’t be seen.”
With convincing dialogue and keen psychological portraits, Greer’s lyrical writing builds tension as loyalties shift and the book crescendos toward its climax. Greer’s story is one of love and loss. It is full of empathy for the human condition and the multiple layers that exist within every person.
We never understand another person completely. But due to Greer’s superb writing, by the end, we know more about what lies in these characters’ hearts.
The Trouble With Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon
“Mrs. Creasey disappeared on Monday” is not a surprising first line of a mystery novel. However, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon is only part mystery. It is also a coming-of-age story with religious and psychological themes. This gem of a novel set in 1976 with flashbacks to 1967 reveals more about the mysteries of people than the fate of Mrs. Creasy.
Soon after we learn of Mrs. Creasey’s disappearance in the sweltering summer of 1976, we hear this exchange between Grace and Tilly, two 10-year-old friends who live on the same Avenue in a suburb of London.
“Why do people blame everything on the heat?” said Tilly.
“It’s easier,” I said.
“Easier than what?”
“Easier than telling everyone the real reasons.”
Worried and confused about their neighbor’s disappearance, these innocent, yet precocious girls decide to spend their summer discovering what happened to Mrs. Creasey. With encouragement from the Vicar, they also search for God because “if they find God, everyone on the Avenue will be safe.” Their investigation begins when they slither into a neighbor’s funeral and hear from the 25th Chapter of Matthew, “All the nations will be gathered before him (Jesus). He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. (This passage makes me angry for its cruelty and simplicity.)
Posing as Brownie guides, Grace and Tilly travel from house to house (Colombo style) interviewing and eavesdropping on their Avenue neighbors. In #6 they encounter Eric Lamb, who is obsessed with his garden but is really just grieving the death of his wife. In #10, they encounter Mrs. Roper who appears lazy and lethargic, but is actually mourning the car crash that killed her husband, but not the woman with whom he was having an affair. The girls even visit Walter Bishop who lives in #11 and was falsely accused in 1967 of kidnapping and returning a baby from the Avenue.
As a psychiatrist, Cannon understands that the Avenue’s residents are projecting their own fears and inadequacies onto Walter Bishop. They coalesce around harassing Walter Bishop because he is different. Now they blame him for Margaret Creasey’s disappearance. His persecution reminds me of Boo Ridley’s harassment in To Kill A Mockingbird.
I won’t divulge what happened to Mrs. Creasey. However, it is clear that before she disappeared, she acted like a psychologist to her neighbors. She listened to their fears and worries and helped them manage their shame and stress. Since they have all shared secrets with her, her neighbors worry that she has disclosed their personal struggles and their organized harassment of Walter Bishop to the police.
Joanna Carson’s wonderful novel exposes the deeper reasons for the neighbors’ behaviors. She focuses on the wide gap between what people surmise is happening in their neighbor’s lives and the reality. Cannon’s novel is trying to tell us that we are all goats and all sheep. All people have pain and suffering in their lives. The “suspects” that the girls encounter are mostly good but have their own secret struggles: Alcoholism, bankruptcy, OCD, bullying, death, anxiety and betrayal. The avenue is like a microcosm of the larger world. People put on their public face to mask their underlying pain. Cannon keeps the tone light, but her message is heavier. This book made me recall another biblical passage that sums up Cannon’s novel “Let he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The First Desire by Nancy Reisman
Goldie Cohen is missing from her family’s home in Buffalo, New York. We learn this fact in the first few pages of Nancy Reisman’s absorbing and compelling novel, The First Desire. The year is 1929 and Goldie’s disappearance has thrown the Cohen family into turmoil. In her late twenties and the oldest of five adult children, Goldie directs the household after the recent death of their mother Rebecca. Has Goldie been kidnapped, has she fallen victim to a tragic accident or has she simply left?
Sister Sadie posts signs and notifies the police. After just a couple of weeks and deaf to the pleas of his grown children, Goldie’s father, Abe Cohen, decides that the family will sit Shiva. With this public pronouncement that “Goldie is dead to him", we learn that Goldie’s father believes Goldie has left the family. Abe Cohen’s patriarchal decision-making process gives us our first glance at his stubbornness, inflexibility and the emotional impact on his family.
Abe and Rebecca Cohen were born and raised in Poland where family traditions were rigid and choices few. The reliable routines of the Cohen’s family life in Buffalo provide both an oasis and a prison for the family. Except for Sadie, who lives with her husband Bill and their two daughters across town, the other four siblings live and work with their widowed father in the family jewelry store. Though the Cohen family members’ lives are intertwined, they each live on their own emotional island. They need each other and they resent each other. Their freedom is constrained by money, societal norms, and the customs of their Jewish faith.
However living in Buffalo, not Poland, has allowed these five adult siblings to consider their own needs. So though they remain diligent and dutiful to the family, they feel stifled and suffocated. By our modern sensibilities, they should enjoy the family camaraderie. Instead, the siblings feel oppressed by their roles and responsibilities. They experience the sweetness of being known by their family while seeking anonymity. The freedom to reinvent oneself or seek a new direction seems impossible. These adult siblings feel frozen in time; their maturation stunted. In addition, as the years pass, the shadow of anti-Semitism in the United States and the horrors in Europe hover in the Buffalo air.
Reisman’s novel explores the family interactions to offer an explanation of WHY Goldie did what she did. By probing into each of the character’s perspective (including Goldie), Reisman strengthens our understanding of their needs and longings. Their desires seem to center around autonomy and sexual fulfillment. Reisman describes her character’s daily thoughts and deeper aspirations with empathy and compassion.
I loved the aching humanity of this novel. I wish Reisman had delved into the details of these siblings’ early years, as it would have given readers a greater understanding of the dynamics between the family members in their adulthood. Yet, Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire beautifully illustrates how family love can both comfort and smother.
