Recent Reviews
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Most people can recall the range of emotions connected to the most vivid or transformative moments of their lives. Falling in love, having a child, overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: these sacred moments seem to be stored in a different part of our brains. Occasionally, we retrieve these memories that transcend time and space to appreciate their significance in our lives.
In J. L. Carr’s quiet and powerful novel, A Month in the Country (1980 Booker Prize-Shortlist), we meet Tom Birkin, a young WWI veteran, who experiences his own transformative experience when he spends a month in the English countryside. Birkin’s psyche is damaged from his wartime experience. He stammers and stutters and the left side of his face twitches. His wife has left him for another man and he has no family with whom he can live. Rattled and traumatized by his role as a signal runner in the war, he takes a job restoring a 500-year old mural in a church in the little village of Oxgodby in northern England. Whatever religiosity he might have possessed has been obliterated by his wartime experience. Yet, he welcomes this opportunity to commune with art and pursue a paid professional project.
So in the summer of 1920, Tom arrives in Oxgodby where he feels grateful and reverent for the sounds, sights and smells of the countryside. Sensing his skittishness, the village people show him hospitality and respect, a stark contrast to the church authorities that provide him little warmth and the barest of accommodations. Tom’s daily routine is slow and steady like the novel itself. He works methodically scrubbing away the layers of paint on the mural while tending to the layers of his pain. Each morning, the sun pours down on the fields adjacent to the church and Carr’s descriptions make you feel as if you have been transported to the slow routines of this village.
Though this transformative time was both fragile and fleeting, Tom’s month restoring the historic mural etched itself deep into his psyche. The particulars of Tom’s current life we do not know. What we do know is that the experience gave him hope and confidence to keep on. And five decades later, Tom reflects with melancholy on his decision to leave Oxgodby. He says, “If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”
This story is Birkin’s elegy and eulogy to the month in 1920 that healed his damaged soul. If we are lucky, we all have a time or place or a moment that we remember with a sense of sacredness. Carr’s book is beautifully written and inspiring to read in the relative quiet and peace of summertime. In our frenetic fast paced world, A Month in the Country is a perfect book for immersing oneself in a slower time and witnessing the possibilities of healing and transformation.
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.”
