Recent Reviews
The Train to Warsaw by Gwen Edelman
Gwen Edelman’s 2014 novel The Train to Warsaw is a compelling story about a couple who physically escaped the horrors of the Holocaust but still carry the trauma of being imprisoned in the Jewish Ghetto. The novel is an elegy to Warsaw, their once beloved city. A city whose citizens inexplicably betrayed their Jewish neighbors.
Jascha and Lilka are returning to Warsaw forty years after the end of WWII. It is December, the dead of winter. Jascha has been invited to speak about his acclaimed wartime novel, The Way Down. He mocks the invitation, “First, they want me dead. Now I’m a native son, an esteemed Polish writer.” His lover, Lilka, pleads with him to accept the invitation. She wants to return to the beloved Warsaw of her childhood. As Jascha predicted, they arrive in a Warsaw that no longer resembles the pre-War city from which they escaped. The War ravaged the town, and the Communists are now in charge.
The novel takes place over three days. When they arrive in Warsaw, they are on edge. They flinch when they see a dog. They recoil when they see the police. They wince when people ask them their background. They can’t forget the savagery perpetrated against Jews after Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939. While in the ghetto, Jascha and Lilka had begun a romance. In the chaos, they each escaped separately by taking on non-Jewish identities. Seven years after the War, they reunite by chance in London. And though they find each other, they are hardened, distant and damaged. Why wouldn’t they be? They lost so much and feel guilty for surviving.
During their brief stay in Warsaw, they share previously unshared stories about their lives before the War and the gruesome tales of their parents’ deaths. At the literary event when Jascha begins reading from his novel, something surprising occurs. It seems the Poles do not want to hear about their disloyalty to their Jewish neighbors.
Gwen Edelman’s sparse and haunting prose powers this novel. Through the use of compelling dialogue, she captures the complicated nuances of memory, betrayal and the complexity of moving forward after trauma. Her gripping novel succinctly depicts the confusion, rage and existential pain that Jascha and Lilka felt upon their return to Warsaw. And due to Edelman’s impressive skills, we feel that anguish as well.
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.
