Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

I thought Meredith had recommended this book to me but she says she hasn't read it yet so I'm not sure how it ended up on my book list.  It was good, though - a creepy mystery story.

The story is about Nick and Amy, an unhappily-married couple who live in Manhattan.  Shortly after moving to Missouri to care for Nick's ill mother, Amy disappears and Nick is accused of murdering her.  Through Nick's narration and Amy's journal, the first half of the book tells the story of their relationship leading up to the current state of affairs.  The second half the book, Nick and Amy alternate chapters, with Amy's part being in the present.

Neither Nick nor Amy is entirely honest with the reader, which is part of what makes this book so good.  I love unreliable narrators.  Whether he killed Amy is the least of what becomes interesting in the story.

Definitely enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down at times.  I didn't love the ending but I did like the book in its entirety.

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I associate Dennis Lehane with good thrillers, like Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone.  In this book, however, he takes a historical topic and turns it into a page-turning novel.

This book follows two men: Danny and Luther.  Danny is a white police office in Boston who father is the Chief of Police.  Seeking a detective badge, he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate several organizations accused of being anarchists.  However, he finds the labor union organized by the police in no way anti-government and begins to believe in what they are doing.  Meanwhile, Luther is a black man who falls in love with a woman and follows her to Ohio where she has family.  When he runs into some trouble down there, he ends up moving to Boston and working for Danny's family.
 
The book follows both of their lives and their decisions in Boston around 1917-1920, and gives a very colorful depiction of the city in those days.  The story's climax is during the multi-day Boston policeman's strike, which throws the city into chaos.  Intermixed throughout the entire book are short vignettes about Babe Ruth, during the height of his baseball fame. 

Lehane's great writing really kept my attention.  I was hoping for the characters to have things work out and I was interested in the politics in Boston.  The Ruth stories also helped describe the time and place outside of the two main characters.

The Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

I always like Sue Miller's books and this was no exception.  It is about a woman who loses her lover on 9/11 and has written a play about a man waiting to hear if he's lost his wife in a terrorist train incident.  The book begins when the lover's sister is on her way to see the play.  Throughout the book, the characters take turns telling their part of the story.  Among the characters are the playwright, her lover's sister, one of the actors in her play, and a man the sister is trying to set her up with. 

Miller did a great job of picking an interesting set of characters to act as the narrators.  She had them tell slightly different versions of the story which built their personalities quickly and strongly.  It reminded me of Irene Dos Santos in how the author used the different points of view to tell a particular story. 

Another thing I liked about the book is that it takes place in my neighborhood - Boston's South End - and included scenes in several restaurants and theaters that I go to regularly. 

The other book this brought to mind was Dubus' Garden of Last Days, because that was also about 9/11.    Also a 9/11 book, that one was a more frantic, more direct, novel about the hijackers.  This one, in contrast, commented on the Human Condition simply and expertly.

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

I received this book by agreeing to attend a dial-in book club discussion with the author. I like to think that this is the beginning of my semi-professional career in book reviews!

The Condition is about a family whose youngest child Gwen has a condition called Turner Syndrome; this condition means she does not physically age past early adolescence though mentally she keeps maturing. One section of the book takes place just before the family notices that Gwen has this condition, and the rest takes place twenty years later. There are several flashbacks as well, filling in much of the interim time.

I was not immediately drawn in by this book. I thought the first section contained several trite characters that were not well-developed and that relied on well-known stereotypes to establish their personalities. As the book progressed, however, I became more impressed by the writing and the character development. The book is really a series of vignettes about each of the characters, many of them unrelated, that loosely intertwine around a current crisis to form a narrative story. However, I was most swept up in the book during the back-history around each character, rather than during the current story.

At first I thought of Hamilton's When Madeline Was Young would be a good book to compare this one to, WMWY's addressing a family's coping with an adult who doesn't age mentally, but they turned out to have little in common. I did find some recent reads to compare it to though: lately I have come upon several books where I was fooled by who the protagonist is. If I remember my 7th grade literary terms correctly, the protagonist is the character who changes. In both The Gathering and The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, the protagonist was not who I expected it to be. What I liked most about this book was that, uniquely, the protagonist was the family unit, not any single individual character. While individual characters did change through the book, it was how the entire family operated that really transformed through the narrative.

I ended up really enjoying the book and I am looking forward to the discussion with Jennifer Haigh. My only regret is that I read it a week before a visit to Martha's Vineyard, not realizing ahead of time that its Cape Cod setting would have been a good choice while on the Island.

The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser

This book is subtitled, "The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft" and is about the robbery of millions of dollars worth of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The robbery took place on St. Patrick's Day in 1990, and the author was interviewed on NPR around the anniversary of the heist.

Boser does a fine job of describing many of the facets of the robbery. He covers all the facts from the night it happened and profiles many of the suspects and law enforcement officials involved in the case. He also discusses other significant art heists and provides a detailed personal history of Gardner herself and the origins and guiding principles of the museum. Many of these sections read like good spy or mafia novels - it was hard to remember this was nonfiction.

Later in the book, Boser becomes a central character, as his reporting on the heist turns into a consuming quest to solve the crime. We see the author's life put on hold as he travels around the world and meets with less-than-savory characters to try and solve the case. While his book claims to have made a major breakthrough in uncovering the identities of the art theives, what is more interesting is his obsession with the story and ultimate ability to walk away from the investigation.

Someone in the book comments that if (when) the art is finally returned, there will be a line from "here to downtown" to see the pieces. I will surely be on that line.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke

I noticed this book in the 'new arrivals' section of the library. The title caught my eye so I decided to try it.

This book is about a man who turns his life around after serving a jail sentence for accidentally setting fire to Emily Dickinson's house. Twenty years later, his history starts catching up to him as other writers' houses are burned down and he is the prime suspect. In figuring out how to defend himself, he reconciles with his estranged parents and learns more about their marriage and his childhood. The book was part mystery, part novel.

The narrator was likable enough as a character although I didn't think that he (or the other characters) were particularly well-developed. The story's quirky style held my attention, but I don't think this is a book I'll remember at the end of the year.

The Assist by Neil Swidey

I heard Neil Swidey interviewed on NPR when this book was published, and I think I had also read a few excerpts in the Boston Globe Magazine several months earlier.

This book started as a series of articles in the Globe about the coach of the Charlestown, MA high school basketball team. This coach took high-risk kids from all over Boston and made a state champion team several years in a row. While this was hardly a Michael Lewis level of writing, it was an interesting story about a dedicated coach and some inspirational students. The author painted a vivid picture including racial, educational, and class-based angles.

I was left dissatisfied with the end of the book, though. The book seemed to end at a certain date, rather than at a natural end of a story.

Run by Ann Patchett

I love love loved this book. Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, so when it came up on the library's hold queue, I was very excited - "like your birthday or something," said Jo. I didn't even realize until I brought it home that it was set in Boston, a block from my house.

The story is about an affluent white family who adopts two black boys. The main story takes place within two or three days surrounding a car accident, but Patchett spans several decades of the story by taking us back into the history of the adoptive family and of the boys' mother. She experiments with ideas around family, success, and identity, all with a cast of characters that I couldn't help but root for. The writing, too, was superb.

I tried to explain the entire plot to Webster on a walk to brunch the other day. In doing so, I realized how complex the story was, and how much I liked that about the book, although I didn't notice that while I was reading it. I did get a kick out of reading a well-researched story set in my own neighborhood.

Intuition by Allegra Goodman

Mer A. cornered me in a bookstore and told me I HAD to buy this book. Knowing that she and I don't always agree but feeling like treating myself to a book, I bought it. It was okay, not great, but held my interest well enough. I'd try something else by this author but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this particular book.

The story is interesting enough; a researcher at an institute in Cambridge makes a shockingly good discovery in a cancer-related rat experiment. The results become public, then publicly challenged. As the events unfold, there are life-changing consequences for him, his ex-girlfriend, and the two people who run the lab, one of whom is highly political the other of whom is a true scientist.

The best part of this book was not the story, although the plot was good. The best part of the book was undoubtedly the characters and character development. Close to ten characters were incredibly well-developed, their motives and fears believable and mistakes forgivable. It was almost the inevitability of the plot that made the characters shine. Since what was going to happen with the investigation was reasonably predictable, what became interesting about the book was how the characters reacted and more so what they were thinking and feeling.

The writing was not great. (In fact, I haven't read much lately that has had great writing although I've liked the plots of a lot of books lately.) There were, however, a few passages that were noteworthy. Goodman's ability to capture her characters' essence with small, efficient notes was the main reason I would try another book by her.

Of Cliff, the main researcher, she writes, "Gently he put the book down and threw away the cardboard wrapping. Wilde's tale of the beautiful young Dorian and his dissembling might have been the last stake through Cliff's heart, except that, fortunately, he was unfamiliar with the novel."

Of Robin, his ex-girlfriend, she writes, "Clutching her black pen tightly, she bent over her journal and wrote, He actually asked if I would stay and keep him company tonight to watch him work. Then when I said no, he was surprised. She might have written more. She could have ranted on, but for Robin that was a rant. She'd wrung those few sentences from her heart, and grieved every word."

I loved how you could learn so much about the characters from such short passages.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Over the past few years, I had seen sullen-looking college students all over Boston reading this book. Finally, after noticing it in the memoir section of Trident, I finally picked it up myself. It ended up being a great choice, full of wonderful writing and well-developed themes; also great because it has short chapters which are perfect for reading during a busy week.

This is a memoir written by a poet who grows up without knowing his father, only to meet him as an young adult while working at one of Boston's Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. His father suffers from mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and ends up homeless in Boston. Flynn charts both his own trajectory into young adulthood with no direction as well as his father's life story, at least as much as he can piece together.

I definitely enjoyed this book more than I otherwise would have because of its being set in Boston. The Pine Street Inn is near the edge of my neighborhood and I recognized many of the locations he mentioned. I've also read several books touching on the Irish in Boston and this fit that genre well. In Flynn's case, his association with his Irish roots and friends from childhood was sadly plagued with alcoholism. He writes of one of his friends,

"When he got off the school bus he could see his father sprawled out. His mother said, I give up, handed my friend the address and the keys. My friend wasn't old enough to drive, but he learned. He tells the story now as if he were speaking of raking the leaves."

Aside from the descriptions of Boston, I also liked this book for its description of his troubled relationship with his father. When he meets his father for the first time, he is 27 and struggling with his own ability to grow into adulthood. Flynn writes,

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."

This book does a great job of "showing not telling" (as a great writing teacher once taught me) the complexities of this relationship. Flynn wrestles with inevitability and fate and responsibility, using an effective combination of vignettes, conversations, and letters.

And last, but by no means least, Flynn is a poet. Thus, his writing is superb and unique. He has a style that transcends standard literary devices such as metaphor or hyperbole. In describing a homeless man that he knows, Flynn writes,

"Brian wears three army blankets over his head like layered ponchos, a hole cut in the middle of each, making his slow way up, stopping at a barrel to poke for half a sandwich, half a beer, stopping at each payphone, checking the change slot, knowing that the phones release dimes secretly."

This would have been a good book had it described a difficult relationship between father and son, or a young man's first few years working at a homeless shelter, or covered any topic with equal skill. Lucky for us readers, it does all three.

Vows by Peter Manseau

This book is scandalously subtitled, "The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and their Son. " Given that, it is the not-too-scandalous story of a priest and nun who each leave their order, fall in love, get married and have a family, and spend their lives trying to reform the Catholic church. Mer A. reminded me of it; it had been on my booklist for a while.

This book is written as a memoir by the son of the former priest and nun. I enjoyed reading this book, at least partially because it was set in Boston. It was interesting for me to get some of the history of all the Catholicism in Boston, and learn about the history of so many of the buildings and institutions I've read about in the paper. The book also gave me a better understanding of many of the emotions and practices behind Catholicism.

The first half of the book talks about the Catholic community starting in the 1960's. This description of the women who became nuns after high school is a good example of the complexity in the Church that the author does a good job in depicting:

"Each girl arriving at Bethany that day had her own tale of how she got there, of course. Climbing up toward the novitiate were eighty stories of beneficiaries or victims, depending on how you view the outcome, of the circumstances that could send a teenage girl into the convent. Some had sisters in the order; some had alcoholic fathers and a reason to leave home; some wanted to further their education and saw no other way. A few felt called by God."

The relationship between the author's parents was not as central a storyline in the book as I expected. Instead, Manseau used their relationship to highlight some of the aspects of the Church that he saw in most need of reform. He comments on his parents' desire for reform more than his own; many of the people in the book (and in his childhood-life) are other former priests and nuns who were struggling with the same dichotomies his parents were. I was most struck by the difficulty of reforming an institution such as the Catholic church, and the willingness that people involved in such reform had to holding on to the pieces of it they found meaningful in the face of injustices.

It was hard to tell in some parts of the book how much Manseau was reporting on his parents' feelings about something versus stating his own opinions. For example, when commenting on the different jobs new nuns got at the novitiate, he writes,

"Every slight you received was a cross to bear, and wasn't it the cross they were there for? Some crosses weighted more than others, though, and who got which cross seemed a matter as predetermined as the stain of original sin."

As the book progresses, Manseau makes increasingly more frequent references to the recent sexual abuse scandal, culminating in several chapters on how it impacted his family and people he knew. This is when his discussion of the church changes from criticism to a scathing rejection.

"Much has been written about celibacy's role in the abuse scandal, but very little has been said about the possible effects of this symptom of celibate culture: the seminar's attitude toward basic relationships, the distrust of which might have been just as damaging to those who persevered at St. John's as the denial of their sexual impulses. In the name of preventing particular friendships, the seminary system seems to have done its best to create a clerical class filled with men who never learned that other people are more than objects from which something may be obtained."

I think this book was written at a good time. The sexual abuse incidents have publicized an important discussion about the need for reform in the Catholic church, and this book depicts just how hard that reform will be to achieve, and just how long some people have already been fighting for it.