Eventide by Ken Haruf

I had been saving this sequel to Plainsong for as long as I could, but in need of a pick-me-up book this weekend I finally succumbed. Eventide was good not only of its own accord but also because it reminded me how much I liked Plainsong.

This book is a continuation of the story begun in Plainsong. The book also uses many of the same literary affectations as its predecessor: conversations without quotation marks and local grammar in non-conversation descriptions. "First they set to cleaning it, as people do when they move into a new house." This made the book immediately familiar to me, despite having read probably 40+ books since Plainsong.

One of the best things about Plainsong was the surprising connections between seemingly disparate characters within the story. Prepared for this, I kept trying to figure out who would end up living with or helping out whom in Eventide, but to no avail. Thankfully, Haruf made similarly clever connections between the characters that surprised me at every turn of the page. The characters were interesting to follow, well-developed, and appropriately likable or hate-able. Their tragedies and mistakes felt like my own.

Towards the end of this book, I noticed that I was reconsidering my superiority as a capuccino-drinking therapy-going, Tivo-using blue-stater. The characters in this book (no doubt based on people Haruf has come across in his native Colorad0) are at least as good as my contemporaries are in solving problems and comforting each other. I yearned, briefly, for a simpler life in a small town.

Perhaps my only disappointment with this book was that it was exactly as good as Plainsong, for all the same reasons.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

I had a hard time putting this book down. On Saturday, I was trying not to read it too fast, so I would read a chapter, then look something historical up in Wikipedia and force myself to spend 10 minutes learning before going to the next chapter. It is the first book taking place in a foreign country that I've read in a while, and I loved that feeling of being transported.

This book is about a woman who (as a small child) is left by her British-born bohemian parents at a Sufi shrine in Morocco for a long weekend. They die that weekend, and she ends up converting to Islam and making a pilgrimage to Ethiopia as a young woman. The political unrest in Ethiopia sends her to London, and the bulk of the book alternates between these two locations and times in her life.

The book's main theme was identity. As a British-born woman in an Islamic society, Lilly did not fit in; nor did she fit in returning to London after that experience. She is a strong, independent woman, but as the book continues and the places where she finds comfort are threatened, she hardens on the outside. Lilly is a very likable character, but one who seems distant; I believe that distance is purposeful, not an indication of bad writing.

I learned a lot about Ethiopian history and culture, as well as Islam, neither of which I was expecting. For me, Ethiopia was always a country that (a) also used to comprise Eritrea, (b) spawned some good restaurants in the States where you ate without your hands, and (c) had a famine that prompted the original We Are the World or something. I am much better educated now, although I didn't find any of those things to be untrue.

If I have any criticism of this book, it's that in what I perceive to be an effort to describe Islam as having incarnations that are kind and joyful (not terrorist fodder), Gibb gets a little preachy and long-winded through Lilly. I think it's great that the literary community is trying to support a wider worldview of, among other things, Islam, and that's one of the reasons I love reading so much. But, a few of Lilly's comments about Islam were less about telling a story or developing a character and more about defending it to its critics.

That aside, there was some excellent writing in the book. At a social gathering, Lilly notices she is being spoken to in English, not the native language: "It's okay, I wanted to tell them, I even dream in Harari now. And Harari dreams are not like Arabic or English dreams: there are always a great many more people involved."

And Gibb makes some larger points through Lilly as well: "Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made."

Definitely recommended, this book will open your mind.

When Madeline was Young by Jane Hamilton

This book had a particularly unusual premise, and Hamilton did a superb job writing a complete story around it. The story is about a family comprising a man, his mentally challenged first wife, his second wife, and the two children from his second marriage. It is told from the point of view of the man's son, and spans about forty years of the family's saga.

Madeline, the title character and first wife, was involved in an accident during their first year of marriage, and subsequently lives as a perpetual eight-year-old. When her ex-husband remarries, she remains in their life, and becomes like a third child in their family. His second wife is unusually accepting of Madeline, calling her "lamb", rarely scolding her, and even allowing her to join them -- chastely -- in the marital bed, as one would a young child.

The book addresses some of the ethical and logistical issues around the care of the mentally ill. There is discussion on long-term care for Madeline, the decision to provide her with an eight-year-old's fantasy bedroom and toys, concern around her relationship with men, and other similar difficulties. However, more central than any of that was about placing the situations and concerns faced by this family into familiar territory. It's a story about a family, not about a family with a mentally ill child.

More specifically, it might be a story about the son, the narrator, more than about anyone else. Several portions of the book focus on the son's life growing into an adult, and how his childhood circumstances informed his own marriage. He makes many remarks about his own life and his impressions of the world, and it is clear to the reader how certain individual incidents as a young adult shaped his worldview. Significant portions of the book discuss his history with his wife, his daughters, and growing into being a man. Some of his most memorable comments relate to how women always reach out to other women, and how his daughters (predictably) despised his wife during their adolescence.

The one weakness in the book was the narrator's daughter Tessa. Tessa was bright, tough, and clearly his favorite daughter. Of her, he writes, "When she looks at you, it is best to clear your mind of insincerity...Tessa is a predator when she listens, the girl taking your full measure." Unfortunately, neither his favoritism of her over his other daughters nor her virtuous irreverence seemed realistic. More likely, Tessa is Hamilton's ideal self or child incarnate and poorly hidden.

That aside, I remain a huge fan of Jane Hamilton's. She has a way of making the mundane stand out as unique and the weird seem reasonably normal, which served her well in this book. At the end of the book, she describes a scene between the husband and Madeline, after his second wife has died, "He gave her a quick pat before he helped himself to an indeterminate kind of sandwich, turkey or ham or egg salad, whatever was most oozing mayonnaise."

I looked forward to picking up this book each night, and I think you will too.

The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits

This book was unusual, and I'm not sure if I liked it or not. It is about a woman named Mary who returns to her hometown when her mother dies and grapples with some difficult decisions she made while in high school. The book alternated between the present and Mary's high school years. There are also some excerpts from a fictional book written about her interwoven with these sections.

There was a strong backdrop of Freudian psychotherapy throughout the book. Mary sees a therapist (actually two) while in high school, and much of her present-day life is about closure on her relationships with them. Mary also has a questionable encounter with an older man that is "unpacked" throughout the book.

One thing the author was very good at was providing concise but complete descriptions of Mary's relationships with her family members.

She writes of Mary, "She and Gaby, she'd believed, had a sibling closeness based on the unspoken agreement that they would never be close; this shared understanding of the limits of their relationship made it the easiest relationship Mary shared with anyone in her family."

And in describing her difficulties with her mother, Mary says in therapy, "I sprinkled red food coloring on my underwear and left it in the hamper where my mother would find it. That afternoon I found a box of pads on my bed and a pair of cameo earrings. This is how we communicate, my mother and I."

I'd say that anyone with a strong interest in psychotherapy or analysis should definitely read this, otherwise it's a coin toss on whether you'll like it.

Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox

The cover art and title of this book made it seem like it would be chick-lit, but I thought it was better than that. This story follows a woman named Emily in her early thirties who is doubting her relationship with her husband and contemplating an affair with a man she meets.

Emily was immediately likable and familiar. As I read, I thought of Emily as, if not myself in a different situation, at least as someone I would be friends with. For example, she writes, "I have always fallen for guys the way smart girls do, the way not-beautiful girls do, with my brain." Even her relationship with her mother was familiar: " 'Erica Marchese had twins,' she says by way of greeting, giving first me, then Kevin a perfumey kiss on the cheek...I went to grade school with Erica Marchese, although I haven't seen her in about twenty years. But my mother keeps her finger on the pulse of her thriving, procreating suburban community."

The majority of the book describes Emily's descent into a relationship with a man who isn't her husband and the ensuing exhilaration, guilt, and confusion surrounding this decision. The reason I didn't consider this book pure chick-lit is the intelligence with which Emily (actually, Lauren Fox) comments on the situations she's in. "Later, in bed, it occurs to me that maybe a lie is composed not of the substance of what you tell someone, and not even of its intention, but of the amount of stress is causes you to tell it." These comments are included in the book not as Carrie-Bradshaw-esque interludes, but as continual reflection.

The book was a bit scary, too, in its possibility. Here was a story about a young well-educated woman who married a nice, steady guy, and suddenly felt trapped at a young ago. A little too close to home for me? Probably not. But it was the first book about adultery that I have read in which the main perpetrator was of my demographic. Her description of her husband was sweetly familiar, which was scary: "Poking out of a pocket of Kevin's suitcase, I notice, is the book he brought to read during his free time: Sound Investments for the Careful Planner. I feel a familiar pang of love for my steady, staid husband."

A pretty good book.

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress by Sarah Jane Gilman

Mer A strikes again. Woe is me when I've gone through the pile she gave me. This was a memoir about a girl who grows up in a mixed-race neighborhood in New York City during the 1970s with hippie parents. It follows her from some of her earliest memories until her marriage in her early thirties. Disclosure: she went to Brown, like me, so I'm predisposed to like her. See also Caroline Knapp.

As she says in the preface, "I've written this book...because so many of the stories women are currently telling are all about getting a man...while a few stories do involve a boy, a bra, and a booty call, mostly their focus is elsewhere--on other passions and delusions that we all experience in one form or another."

And she succeeds at this. Her stories about growing up are about her interactions with her surroundings, and about the often-hilarious mishaps and misunderstandings that pepper everyone's childhood. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the tone changes from quaint growing-up stories to more of an adult style, which tells the reader about her progression into adulthood. I was never too impressed with her writing style, but I was interested to find out what was going to happen to her; it was more like reading a friend's email than a proper book, but with good grammar and punctuation.

I probably related the most to her description of her expectations around a high school dance. She writes about the iconic story of an unpopular girl with a chance to become well-liked:

"But then, we see montage shots of the dork in training--jogging, sweating, getting a makeover, holding up outfits in front of a department store mirrors while a bevy of salesclerks frown and shake their heads, then nod approvingly--until the Big Night. Inevitably, some school bully or bitch tries to sabotage her plans. And inevitably, last-minute obstacles pop up, theatening to jettison the whole evening. Maybe her limo breaks down. Maybe her father has a pulmonary embolism...[once she succeeds] her nemesis, meanwhile, ends up tearing her hair out in jealousy in the parking lot while a car veers past and platters mud all over her taffeta bubble dress.

The moral of these stories was never lost on me: namely that, with the right makeover, it was possible to reverse years of social ostracism in a single evening."

As an adult, her honesty and commentary on herself is no less present. She says of moving to Europe with her husband, "No doubt, plenty of Swiss citizens would be happy to engage me in lengthy discussions about "Totour and Tristan, the two wooden soldiers" who I'd studied ad nauseum in grade school, then listen raptly as I informed them that "whenever Pierra and Simone go to the market, they purchase a pair of shoes, a cauliflower and a small brown monkey, ... For all my schooling, I hadn't the foggiest idea how to say such basic things as "lightbulb," "extension cord," and "Can you please help me? My husband is stuck in the bathroom."

All told I enjoyed reading this book. The writing is nothing spectacular (although it is funny), but Gilman's honesty and ability to look critically at herself generally make up for that.

Saturday by Ian McEwan

I am still working my way through Mer A's pile of books, and I really liked this one. I thought Atonement by McEwan was pretty good, and I'd rate this one similarly. Like Atonement, it was a little slow in some places but not so slow that I lost interest. Unlike Atonement, it took place in the course of one day, a Saturday.

The main character is a neurosurgeon who is planning to cook dinner for his family that evening and thinks the day will be just another Saturday. Instead, he witnesses something early in the morning that changes his mood, then is involved in an altercation later in the day that has an unusual outcome. My father-in-law-to-be's being a neurosurgeon made it immediately intriguing.

My favorite thing about this book is that it taught me that other people's thoughts are as dense as mine; that I'm not the only person who lives a seemingly successful life but has a crowded narrative running in my head all the time. For example, this paragraph describes his making dinner:

"Into the biggest colander he pours the rest of the mussles and scrubs them with a vegetable brush at the sink under running water. The pale greenish clams on the other hand look dainty and pure, and he merely rinses them. One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling. As he pushes it back down with a wooden spatula, the vertebral column breaks, right below T3. Last summer he operated on a teenage girl who broker her back at C5 and T2 falling out of a tree at a pop festival, trying to get a better view of Radiohead. She'd just finished school and wanted to study Russian at Leeds. Now, after eight months' rehab she's doing fine. But he dismisses the memory. He isn't thinking about work; he wants to cook. From the fridge he takes a quarter-full bottle of white wine, a sancere red, and tips it over the tomato mix."

The relationships that he has with his family are also a highlight of the book. His poet daughter and grunge rock son are both well-developed characters, and his love for his wife is clearly described throughout the book, "This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer--a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight."

And finally, I thought the plot and composition of the book were great. All too often I find myself complaining about the ending of a book; in reality, that is probably a complaint about the composition of the book entirely. In this case, no complaints here.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I was supposed to really like this book but I didn't. Arguably I hated it although I read the entire thing. I should have liked it because it was about a young woman who graduated from Brown and her relationships with her friends, family, and fiance. Additionally, she was struggling with her career in her late twenties. She was living in New York City. All that, coupled with its being on several booklists, and I was excited to read it.

What I found was a book that was hard to read about an unlikeable group of characters. The prose was complex with an insane number of words I did not recognize. The characters were whiny and unrealistic. And the storyline, including the climax and ending, were disappointingly predictable. The characters existed in what was supposed to be an erudite, cultured, shallow-but-complex world, but I wasn't buying it. The main character didn't seem to have conflicts any more complicated than Marjorie Morningstar's, and I expect more than that from fiction in 2006, supposedly about my generation.

As usual, I noted down a few passages that I enjoyed, and interestingly I noticed that they were all about one particular character, the only character I liked. Below, she is describing the changes she made in her apartment after starting an affair with an older man. (Incidentally, the fact that the only character I liked is one who has an affair says a lot about the low quality of the other characters.)

"She now kept a bottle of Lagavulin in the cupboard over the fridge and behind it, hidden, a symbolic, as yet unopened, carton of Marlboros. She kept on hand packets of heavily salted pretzels, which she was beginning herself to appreciate, and Altoids, for which he had a weakness. She felt simultaneously proud and ashamed of these accommodations."

I suppose the other bright part of the book was the omniscient third person narration. I did enjoy seeing the story unfold from polarly different points of view. In most cases, unfortunately, the writing style overshadowed this.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

This was a great book, and my reading it solidified my identity as a HUGE Michael Lewis fan. When I was in high school and freaking out about what to pursue in college, my guidance counselor pointed me to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth as an example of an author marrying his love of writing with his lifelong interest in the Middle Ages. Michael Lewis, similarly, matches his love of sports with an acute acumen for economics.

Unlike just about any review I've written before, this one won't have any quotations in it. In the spirit of other other books I've loved, it has just about every page dog-earred with a comment or passage to share in the blog. Overwhelmed with this volume of comments coupled with my handwritten notes, I'll stick to a description of the book and let you trust that it is well-written.

This book is about sabremetrics, baseball statistics. It tells the story of Billy Beane, a mediocre baseball player who takes over the Oakland A's as GM, and turns the team around in a few short seasons with an incredibly low payroll. Beane does this (with the help of several statistically-minded folks, most notably Paul DePodesto) by examining what contributes to a baseball team's record and figuring out how to get those talents at below-market prices.

The book traces a history of certain players as well as of the scouting methodologies used by most teams. It also contains a large discussion of baseball economics and salaries. I most enjoyed reading about some of the unlikely heroes Beane created who were too fat, old, or unskilled in the field to play for other teams. The most hilarious scenes in the book were about Beane's tactics during the draft and trading season to get what he wanted.

His strategy, wildly successful, is based on several decades of statistical work (starting with Bill James) that has gone on quietly beside the old-school conventional wisdom of generations of sportswriters, scouts, and managers. Throughout the book these groups of people turned their noses up to Beane's approach, and many still dispute his strategy despite both his success. In 2002, for example, the A's were at the top of their division and had won more games than any other MLB team other than the Yankees, despite the A's having the lowest payroll in baseball.

Those naysayers are also up against several teams who have since begun to follow the methodology, including Toronto and Boston. The afterward of the book has some great anecdotes about people's misconceptions of the strategies employed by Beane, along with Michael Lewis' commentary on this lack of acceptance by baseball's old guard.

Some of the strategies employed by Beane are quite clever, ranging to downright amusing. For one, he would trade for a sub-par pitcher on the cheap, turn him into a closer, let him accumulate some saves to pump up his statistics, then trade him for a higher-value player. He also took advantage of the low salaries paid to newer players who contractually did not have salaries on the open market until the sixth year of their employment. Once they reached their sixth year, he would trade them for first-round draft picks which were of more value to him.

As a reasonably new baseball fan --and as a mathematician-- I was able to embrace Beane's beliefs and enjoy the David and Goliath story. The most interesting assertions on the book, some of which am still fighting with my fellow sports fans about:

-On Base Percentage (OBP) and slugging are better indicators of a player or team's ability to score runs than averages are.

-It is not worth trading outs for anything.

-Slugging and ability to draw walks stay with aging players, which ability to hit home runs does not.

-To make a difference in a team's record, base-stealers must steal bases with 70% accuracy.

-The connection between the count a batter faces and their ability to get on base is not statistically significant until the second pitch.

-Fielding is just 5% of the team's success.

To sum it up, this book was great fun. I suggest you read it during baseball season so you can "play along" with the hypotheses.

The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Mer A. recommended this book to me, after I mentioned Didion as an author on my reading list. Wow. Fabulous. Mer's recommendation mentioned some oddities with Didion's style, which I'll address below.

The book takes place in a fictional Latin American country, and is narrated by the matriarch of a family who controls much of the business and politics in the country. The narrator was born in the United States, but moves to this country as a young adult. She claims early on in the book that the story is not about her, it's about a woman named Charlotte who flees to this country as an adult when her life in the U.S. starts to fall apart. However, it is clear to the reader (well, at least to this reader) that her telling of the story is as much about her as about Charlotte.

Early in the book she characterizes Charlotte as a norteamericano, a classification in her world that determines how Charlotte is treated and how she integrates with the local community. The following passage well illustrates the mirror the narrator looks into in her telling of the story:

"As the child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers, the child Charlotte routinely asked that "it" turn out all right, "it" being unspecified and all-inclusive, that she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that "it" might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States, she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and the general upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericano."

Didion has a very rhythmic writing style, which I enjoyed. That passage above is of a style common in this book: sentences that would be considered "run-on" anywhere else, coupled with a strong ability to capture a particular theme quickly. In some cases, Didion was more likely to break her rhythm onto separate lines, connecting them by using the same words in a different way. This style definitely brought me into the book and into the narrator's head:

"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."

It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.

Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.

If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.

Thematically, the book was largely about Charlotte's relationship with her daughter, who disappeared as part of a radical political organization. I think there were ways in which I would have connected with the book even more if I had children. That said, I may have appreciated themes in the book I would have otherwise missed had I been more focused on the mother-daughter narrative.

For example, avoidance. Charlotte's move to Latin America is the most extreme example of her propensity to avoid the things in her life she doesn't like. She refuses to acknowledge her daughter's defection initially:

"Marin...was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard's Barcelona chairs, even as te fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard's porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte's head at the 10' by 16' silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley. Or so Charlotte tried to tell the FBI man."

Finally, ideas around separation were common in this book. Charlotte is norteamericano, thus treated differently. She also expects to live by different rules as her counterparts. The dialectic of how she acts and how she is treated through her life reinforces this. The narrator's comment on this is extreme:

"Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the "separateness."

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life."

This book takes more patience than most books. It nudged me through the story rather than ushering me. I enjoyed that about it, but not everyone will.

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Mer A. recommended this book to me as she handed me a nearly hip-high pile of her castoffs. I was not a huge fan, despite Mer's verbal recommendation and Ann Patchett's quotation on the cover.

This story follows a family through four generations of dysfunction and secrets. The book kept my attention, but the writing was nothing special and the story was implausible. This is the first book I've read all year that I did not dog-ear any pages for the purposes of remembering a special line or quotation. I would have forgiven the uninspired writing (or at least questioned if it were just subtle and not uninspired) had the plot been more plausible. However, the story involved so many unlikely romantic trysts, and so many moments where the characters could have saved themselves forty or fifty pages of heartache, that I could not get past that.

The praise on the front and back cover suggest that this book masterfully captures a family through several decades of life. However, by the end of the book I was disgusted by the sexual pairings, bored waiting for the members of each generation to grow up, and tired of the third person omniscient narrator's omniscience.

Given all the praise for this book, coupled with a soft spot I have for first-time novelists, I'd be open to reading the sequel, but it's not high up on my list.

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.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

I saw this book at the Trident Bookseller Cafe waiting for Mer W., requested it from the library, picked it up and read it on the train going home for Passover, all in four days. It was a great read, the kind of book I found myself daydreaming about reading when I was doing other things.

The book follows parallel stories, one in the present and one in the past. In the present, a family is convening in a beach town for a wedding; in the past, the matriarch of the family is a young woman in Leningrad during WWII who works in the art museum. It was a very carefully written book, scarcely wasting a single word. Like A Fine Balance, it was a book that I could watch happening in my head, as if it were a movie. One of the strangest things about the book for me was that it was about a non-Jewish family during WWII. It is interesting to have read Suite Francaise within a few months of this to see how far-reaching WWII was across Europe.

In some ways, the story occurring in the past was a standard war love story. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy goes off to war, girl is sad, boy and girl reunite. But the main character's life while her husband is at war is fascinating, as she and her family survive in a shelter and she continues to work in the art museum as all the art is crated and shipped off.

The writing about love in the book is sublime, "She has been in his life for so long," the author writes, "that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twinning so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her."

It is no mystery why I found myself cradling the book at times as I was reading.

The modern-day story has some interesting themes, too. The most striking was the questions surrounding care for elder relatives. Also prominent were the dichotomies between someone's life story and how they are perceived as a senior, best captured in this passage:

"...a battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents' dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen's actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not the one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet's. She didn't think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her."

Perhaps most interesting is that this is a short book to cover all this ground. Just 250 pages or so, with big margins.

The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner

I have enjoyed Weiner's novels for several years. However, this book of short stories was uneven and disappointing. The first three stories shared the same characters, which made me think that the book was going to be a set of vignettes about this family. However, the rest of the stories were about all different groups of people, including (indulgently) some characters from her other books.

Many stories shared a theme around swimming, or characters who swam, but other than that, I found no ideas or themes that were shared through the book. I admit that I am not always a fan of short stories, but I'll pick up a Hemingway or Munro book now and then and don't feel this way about those.

One story is about a woman who transforms her job helping kids write college essays into helping someone write a personal ad. That she misjudges one of the applicants (who ends up having a disabled brother) and falls in love with her "ad" client is reasonably predictable. The highlight of that story is her client's description of himself, "Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?"

In another story, she seems to struggle with ideas around teenage pregnancy and parenthood, and child abuse. It too is predictable. Like in the story described above, though, the writing is as good as the theme is boring:

"How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a Master's degree and a mortgage and a husband, who'd insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable, brat?"

The title story was about a woman whose interference with her ex-boyfriend's wedding registry actually changes history in a sci-fi Back-to-the-Future way. Kind of a cool idea, except in the afterward, she mentions that it is being developed into a movie script. How those thirteen pages can turn into an hour and a half worth $10.75 I'll look forward to seeing.

The one highlight of the book for me was the afterword, where she describes how each story came to her, and under what circumstances she wrote it. Like Suite Francaise, it was a neat opportunity to understand how writers think. She mentions in the afterword that the stories were told in the order of the characters' ages, which I did not notice but thought was cool.

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.