Recent Reviews
Family History by Dani Shapiro
A friend recommended that I add Dani Shapiro’s new book Inheritance to my reading list. The publication date is January of 2019. Since I had not read any of Shapiro’s prior works, I picked up her 2003 novel Family History and finished it in two days. This sad story took hold of me and didn’t let me go until the very last page. It is clear that Shapiro understands both the strength and vulnerability of family dynamics and knows how to convey that complexity in her writing.
From the first paragraph, we know something is not right. Rachel Jensen is in her bed watching old family videos in the middle of the day with the shades drawn. Her husband, Ned, has moved out, her teenage daughter Kate boards at a therapeutic school and her 2-year-old son, Josh, has some unspecified issue.
Rachel and Ned fell in love in their 20’s when they were both struggling artists in Greenwich Village. When Rachel becomes pregnant with Kate, they marry and move to the fictional town of Hawthorne, Massachusetts to live in a “fixer upper” near Ned’s parents. Using her art history degree, Rachel feels fulfilled restoring art for wealthy patrons and an occasional museum. Her family is her first commitment and the routines of their life make her feel peaceful and content. Ned enjoys teaching at the local private school and pursues his art when time allows. The family videos and memories show Kate as a happy young girl embraced by the love of her parents. It seems the Jensens have been enthusiastic and engaged parents delighting in Kate’s school activities and developmental milestones.
At 13, Kate goes to sleep away camp for the first time. She returns home with a tattoo, a belly piercing and an angry attitude. “We had missed her so much after all, and how here she was a strange sullen creature.” Rachel and Ned attribute this radical change in her personality to teenage angst. But Kate’s surly behavior escalates. She skips school and is caught shoplifting. As is often the case, she finds a new riskier friend group eager to push the boundaries. Compounding this tough time for Kate, Rachel becomes pregnant and Kate’s mood swings increase. When her baby brother Josh is born, Kate keeps her distance and becomes more sullen.
Soon Kate and Josh are involved in an accident that injures infant Josh. The family spirals out of control. Each family member feels fear, anger and sadness: a malignant dynamic emerges. Kate is scared and confused about her role in the accident and cuts herself. Rachel says, “She was a robot, systematically destroying herself and everyone around her.” The cascading series of events traumatizes everyone in the family and the solidity of the family structure crumbles.
If you’re interested in psychology and family dynamics "Family History" is a page-turner. Shapiro offers no conclusions as to what happened to Kate at camp, the night of the accident or what the trajectory of the Jensen family will be. It is up to the reader to discern. I wish there had been more clues of Kate’s impending implosion. But sometimes mental illness can just appear after dormancy in a child’s youth. It is hard to know when an adolescent rebellion has shifted into a mental health concern. Life can be heartbreaking and tragic. One can only hope that the Jensens’ receive the help they need to repair the damage and heal their emotional wounds.
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.
