Recent Reviews
a land more kind than home by Wiley Cash
When Wiley Cash published his debut novel a land more kind than home in 2012, he received an abundance of praise. I can see why. Filled with Biblical themes of courage and faith - revenge and redemption, the novel is intelligent and immersive. Wiley’s beautifully writing shows his deep appreciation for North Carolina language and dialect. He transports us to the town of Marshall, a rural community in the western part of the state. Wiley’s characters are submerged in the area’s traditions and insulated from the wider world. It is a gripping and tragic tale about the power of nefarious religious leaders to influence ethical people into making horrifying choices.
Jess Hall is one of three narrators and the hero of the story. At nine-years-old, he is an observant and intelligent boy who loves his thirteen-year-old brother, Christopher. Jess feels protective of his mute brother, whom everyone calls Stump. His brother makes sense to him. It is the adults who are confusing and puzzling as Jess observes the dissonance between their words and their actions
The villain of the story is Carson Chambliss, the pastor of River Road Church of Christ on the outskirts of Marshall. With verbal dexterity, he convinces the hard-working congregants that it is safe to challenge the will of God. Using snakes and fire, he shames them into testing their faith. Many get burned and poisoned. But still, they return.
Miss Adelaide Lyle is a congregant, a mid-wife, and the second narrator. She knows of the evil that has occurred in the church and yet doesn’t go to the authorities. Instead, she teaches Sunday School far from the church building where Chambliss preaches. Clem Barefield is the third narrator and the sheriff of the county. He understands the people in this community well. Though he has his demons, he seeks to be a moral man.
Jess and Stump’s mom trusts Pastor Chambliss. One day Jess and Stump see something the adults don’t want them to see. The next day Stump is taken to a healing service when the “healing” gets out of hand, and Stump dies. The perspectives of Jess, Adelaide and Clem combine as we learn of the story of Stump’s death on the alter at Chambliss’s church. And the reason Stump was “chosen” has little to do with healing. The situation is more complicated than the townspeople know. Nonetheless, they follow this evil charlatan Chambless. As Adelaide tells us, “People out in these parts can take hold of religion like it’s a drug, and they don’t want to give it up once they’ve got hold of it. It’s like it feeds them, and when they’re on it, they’re likely to anything these little backwoods churches tell them to do.”
The novel’s well-developed characters and dramatic narration make it a compelling read. We learn about the back story and the carnage that occurs after Stump’s death. I only wish that Wiley Cash had given his disabled character, Stump, a voice. Though the book is critical of rogue religious figures, I also wanted Cash to be more condemning of manipulative evangelical churches. This uncritical loyalty Cash writes about can affect wealthy urban people as easily as poor rural people. People have hard lives, and faith can ameliorate pain. As Adeline says, “Lord knows that when people don’t get what they need, they take what they can find.”
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 13, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-house-a-powerful-drama-about-family-and-memory/
Ann Patchett’s remarkable new novel ‘The Dutch House’ dives deep into family dynamics, the amorphous nature of memory and the power of the past to shape the present. Patchett continues the theme of her superb book, ‘Commonwealth’: adult children sorting through the detritus of parents’ troubled lives. Patchett’s graceful prose is rich with references to fairy tales and parables. The result is a novel dense with human drama and layers of meaning.
After WWII, Cyril Conroy is a poor man. Due to one successful investment, he becomes wealthy and purchases an iconic house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “Be careful what you wish for” could be the novel’s subtitle; this acquisition is the beginning of the end of Cyril’s happy family and sizable fortune. The mansion, once owned by a Dutch family, is ornate, opulent and architecturally significant. Cyril is confident his new bride, Elna, will fall in love with its lavish beauty. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elna, who had considered becoming a nun, hates the ostentatious house. One day, she permanently leaves the Dutch House and her family, choosing instead to help the poor.
This abandonment creates trauma for her three-year-old son, Danny and most especially for her ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. Eventually, their father remarries. His new wife, Andrea, and her two daughters move into the Dutch house, dislodging Danny from his childhood and displacing Maeve from her bedroom. When Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly four years later, the stepmother, Andrea, cruelly throws Maeve and Danny out of the Dutch house that she now owns. Maeve becomes Danny’s guardian and protector.
Narrated from Danny’s point of view, the novel follows Maeve and Danny as they attempt to make sense of the events that led to their eviction. Though they obtain college degrees, secure jobs, and in Danny’s case, marry and have kids, Maeve and Danny are bonded to one another and trapped in the past. For decades they keep returning to the Dutch House as if a magnetic force is pulling them toward it. While parked across the street, they sit in Maeve’s car and gaze at their old home. With anger, sadness and humor, they examine their past. Maeve shares memories of their mother with Danny. Together, they analyze their enigmatic father and resent their mean stepmother. Danny’s wife says, “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”
Their mother’s painful abandonment, their father’s careless choices and their stepmother’s petty vindictiveness alter the trajectories of their lives. As the single remnant of their childhoods, the Dutch House becomes a kind of museum of their memories. Then one morning, when Maeve is forty-nine and Danny forty-two, an unexpected event occurs and they decide to stop parking across the street. Twenty-seven years have passed since their expulsion. They realize, “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”
Yet the story is far from over. The Dutch House’s grip on their lives lessens but does not vanish. They must once again broaden their perspective of their past and open themselves to an unforeseen present.
Ann Patchett is like an archeologist excavating an emotional ruin. Her two main characters ask questions, analyze facts and arrive at hypotheses that morph with time and greater understanding. Danny and Maeve acknowledge that their memories might be unreliable and shaped to align with the narrative they created. But isn’t that the nature of recollection?
The surprise ending is moving without being maudlin. Acceptance, forgiveness and healing occur in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett’s talents as a writer are evident on every page. As one character says, “Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.” With empathy, Ann Patchett shows us why that is easier said than done.
Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane
Alert: This review has spoilers.
In this transcendent novel, Mary Beth Keane’s talent for describing people’s inner lives appears on every page. Nuanced and insightful, the characters in Ask Again, Yes feel authentic and alive. The novel explores the emotional fallout of a tragedy that involves two families. Is forgiveness possible? What do we owe our families amid a calamity?
The year is 1973. Both Frankie Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are New York City rookie cops. When they each begin to start the families, they each move to the suburbs and coincidently land next door to each other. Francis and Lena soon have three daughters: the youngest named Kate. Anne and Brian Stanhope have one son whose name is Peter. The adults don’t interact with each other. Francis tells his daughter Kate to stay away from Peter’s mother, “Something’s not right.” When Peter and Kate enter school, they become close friends. Then a mental illness induced tragedy strikes when Kate and Peter are fourteen. Peter’s mother shoots Kate’s father. The repercussions from this shocking event will entangle the Gleasons and the Sandhopes in perpetuity.
Keane’s keen knowledge of the human condition allows the characters’ inner thoughts to propel the plot rather than external events. Yes, life moves on after the shooting. Everyone lives, though in a state of emotional and physical pain. There are graduations and job promotions, weddings and funerals, but Keane’s focus is on these characters’ internal reflections. Like a kaleidoscope, she shifts the narration, so readers learn the thoughts of Kate and Peter, Francis and Lena and Brian and Anne.
Kate and Peter’s love story dominates. The book’s cover made this plot seem sensational: the enigmatic title certainly added to that impression. Yet in Keane’s skilled hands, the notion that Kate and Peter would want to be with each other seems entirely believable. People who experience trauma together often gravitate toward one another. The fall out from the shooting dominates Kate and Peter’s inner lives. How could it not? They each experience grief, guilt and anguish for their parents and themselves. In the uproar and upheaval that follows, Peter moves to another town to live with an uncle. Kate’s father lingers in the hospital. As they move through their teens and into their twenties, Peter and Kate can think of nothing but each other. All four parents are living with pain and exhort Kate and Peter not to find each other. But they do - and all the family members must now navigate the complex maze of emotional dynamics and begin to understand the heartbreak of mental illness. As a psychiatrist tells Peter’s mother, “You repeat what you do not repair.”
Ask Again, Yes is a thoughtful rumination on how people navigate complicated feelings. She explores the passing of time, the randomness of life’s big choices, the need for understanding, the persistent ignorance around mental health issues, and the importance of forgiveness. The ending moved me in its simplicity and beauty. There is healing and mercy, compassion and empathy. Ask Again, Yes, is one of the most satisfying novels I have read this year. Thanks to the DJKKS Book Club.
