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MY BOOK WORLD Stadler, Matthew. Allan Stein: A Novel. New York: Grove, 1999.
Since I read this novel the first time, I’ve also read Stadler’s The Sex Offender, and in some ways they deal with the same subject matter. Both books concern youngish male school teachers who are disgraced by having affairs with (underage) male pupils of theirs. Both books have the filthy protagonist flee to Europe or a European-like country (Sex Offender). In both books the older male finds a new young protégé over which to make a fool of himself. Stadler approaches this subject in both cases without judgment (except the judgment the protagonist bears against himself) and with great sensitivity. In Allan Stein, in order to take flight from his recent fling and disgrace, a young gay American travels to Paris assuming the name of a friend who wishes for him to do some business research on his behalf (he can “vacation” while “Herbert” is gone and also deduct the travel expense for his business). The “new” Herbert is to stay with long-distance friends who’ve never actually met the real Herbert. And . . . they happen to have a fifteen-year-old son who seems very seducible, and Herbert spends a great deal of time attempting to do just that. The real beauty of the novel (otherwise it might just be a salacious story) is the parallel pursuit he makes: 1) To locate some drawings of Allan Stein (Gertrude Stein’s nephew) on behalf of the real Herbert, an art dealer. 2) To try to gain the confidence of his host’s son, Stéphane. Does “Herbert” indeed seduce the winsome Stéphane? I’m not at liberty to say, but the ending in any case is a satisfying one. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Gina Gershon WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Yasunari Kawabata THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Frank FRI: My Book World | Lauren Groff, Florida [Stories]
MY BOOK WORLD Lethem, Jonathan. The Feral Detective. New York: HarperCollins, 2018.
Manhattanite Phoebe Siegler agrees to help find the missing daughter of friend. Arabella, being a freshman at Reed College on the west coast, has been missing for three months but now may be in southern California. Phoebe hires Charles Heist whom she right away calls the feral detective, mainly because he himself seems wild, part of the high desert milieu of Joshua Tree environs. His “profession,” if one wants to call it that, is to find missing children and youth, and Phoebe not only interests him in the case but in having rather bumbling sex with her as well. This book reads quickly mainly because many chapters are only a paragraph or a page long. Seems a waste of the publisher’s paper supply to leave entire pages blank. But anyway . . . Phoebe and Charles embark on a trip into the mountains in which they are indeed successful in locating Arabella and secreting her out of the community of Rabbits (women hippies) and Bears (not-gay hairy men) who seem to run roughshod over this desert-mountainous area. Phoebe escorts Arabella back to New York and her mother via commercial flight, but Phoebe now seems to become the feral detective because Charles is “lost,” and she must find him. His rescue is a wild and wooly affair, but Phoebe is successful, and the denouement of this novel is a soft landing compared to where it has been. Still, an enjoyable read. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Allen Ginsberg WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Westheimer THURS: A Writer's Wit | Bill Moyers FRI: My Book World | Matthew Stadler, Allan Stein: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD Alvarez, Julia. Afterlife: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2020.
A woman in her sixties loses her husband, and she turns to her three sisters, on whom she has depended since her childhood. Afterlife is more than a novel title here; it is a motif formed over and over again. The woman must now figure out how to live her afterlife: life without her husband, life with weird, bothersome neighbors, life with insistent and sometimes needy sisters. Yet because of these numerous eruptions of life going on around her, she must adjust. She must help others in the midst of her own grief. In the end, after aiding one sister as well as a stranger in need (an undocumented pregnant teenager), she is able to settle down to her singular life, and she has earned it. But one gets the feeling that if the story were to continue, the woman would still be interrupted by others in need and she would indeed help them. That’s who she is. That is her life, her afterlife. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Madeleine Albright WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Eoin Colfer THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lauren Myracle FRI: My Book World | Carol Burnett, Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story
MY BOOK WORLD Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2007.
This may be one of those novels that you don’t want to continue after reading the first sentence: When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily”(3). But then then comes the next sentence: “Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it”(3). Interesting! you may think. Onward you go . . . and then you are hooked, as I was—queasy feelings subsiding. The middle-aged narrator, Helen, continues her story of caring for her mother for nearly three hundred pages, and honestly, you’re not sure what is going to happen. Will Helen leave the country, or at least the area of Pennsylvania where she lives? Will she off herself like her father did some years earlier? Will she tell her two young adult daughters she’s murdered their grandmother? Will her ex-husband (whom she tells first of the murder) help her cover it up or escape the police? Will she continue the affair she’s begun with the thirty-year-old son of her best friend? Whoa! You just can’t believe the behavior of this woman until the author skillfully wends readers through her family’s backstory. Then her life only becomes more complicated, and you may develop sympathy for her. It could happen to you! What will she do? you continue to think, until the very last pages. A true murder mystery—not one of those cozy contrived things. Only the “mystery” here may be why she really done it, and the author presents readers with a plausible and satisfying answer. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Eva Figes WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ustinov THURS: A Writer's Wit | Isak Dinesen FRI: My Book World | John McPhee, The Founding Fish
MY BOOK WORLD Taylor, Brandon. Real Life: A Novel. New York: Riverhead, 2020.
In this fairly recent title (a so-called campus novel), young Wallace leaves his home state of Alabama to pursue graduate school in biochemistry at a major university in the Midwest. In most respects the years-long experience does not go well. As a young black man, Wallace encounters subtle but resistant racism among his colleagues, even though, on the surface, things are cool. Compounding this problem is the fact that he’s out-and-proud gay. In one salty situation, he believes a woman has purposely ruined his experiment, putting him back months in his research. He just can’t prove it, and because of a lifetime of being put down, he doesn’t have the energy to pursue the justice of the matter. The major relationship he develops is with Miller, an ostensibly straight white man, a handsome man to whom Wallace is quite attracted. Author Taylor subtly but competently creates all the complications that such a relationship can have. Wallace, a bit insecure about his looks and build, feels weird about Miller’s attentions—causing him to send Miller mixed signals. In turn, Miller, rife with his own insecurities, doesn’t believe Wallace is sincere. Repeatedly, they send and receive communications that don’t make clear who they are or what their intentions are. These conflicts lead to a couple of dramatic scenes. One, after sharing the sordid stories of their past, Wallace leaves Miller’s bed in the middle of the night, angering Miller. Second, the two men engage in a fist fight that Wallace loses against the more muscular Miller. They seem to semi-settle their differences, but they certainly do not live together happily ever after. In fact, the denouement of the novel seems to occur when the author returns the cast of characters to the first day they arrive on campus—when everyone’s, including Wallace’s, expectations are high. It seems to be a subtle way the author establishes what real life is all about. The term is tossed about throughout the novel, but in this particular conclusion, readers understand that university life is real life, not just that period that is to follow commencement exercises. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Margaret Ayer Barnes WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Charles Baudelaire THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Lamott FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD  Benedict, Marie. The Queens of Crime: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 2025.
I sometimes think that wish fulfillment may be a driving force in writing fiction. The writer is able to bring to life a scenario by way of fiction that was impossible for its time in real life. Perhaps that is the case for Ms. Benedict, who takes five of the most celebrated female mystery writers of the 1930s and places them as characters in the same novel setting of London: Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy. The women essentially crash the local Detection Club, which is male dominated in every way. The women plan to solve a local murder not only to show the men in the club that they can but also the local police who otherwise treat them with disdain. The case they tackle involves a young English nurse who makes what is to be a short excursion to France (the ferry provides a day trip). She never returns alive, as her body is discovered in a wooded area. The five queens of crime set about working together to solve the murder. Though they have their squabbles, they see that cooperation is quite useful. I don’t usually read mysteries, but my curiosity, for some reason, was piqued by this one. I’m not sorry I read it. It’s a page-turner, all right, but an intelligent one! Perhaps I shall read more of the genre. Up Next: TUES APR 1: A Writer's Wit | Jesmyn Ward WEDS APR 2: A Writer's Wit | Hans Christian Andersen THURS APR 3: A Writer's Wit | Jane Goodall FRI APR 4: My Book World | Brandon Taylor, Real Life: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep: A Novel. New York: Random, 2005.
I’m not sure why, but I’m drawn to so-called campus novels—perhaps it is something against which I can hold up my own experiences of adolescence. This one takes place at a prep school, Ault, in Massachusetts. Prep, at least this school, is a cross between an all AP-class high school and a small college occupied by smartasses. Sittenfeld, given that she is about thirty as she publishes this novel, is perhaps the proper age to recreate such a world, about a half a life ago. The memory is still sharp concerning details she uses: aromas of freshly pubescent boys and girls, smells of institutional food, smells arising amidst the chalk dust and musty books and papers of a long-established institution. She recreates the emotions of that age, yet instead of going home to your parents each night, you’re returning to a dorm to eke out a life with someone you either hate or someone you adore (maybe the sophomore year onward). Lee Fiora, a fourteen-year-old frosh, is bright enough to be on scholarship, and yet she feels insecure much of the time. At her middle school in South Bend, Indiana, she was a genius, but at Ault she is just one among many—many who seem to be far more ambitious than she is, as well. They seem not to have holes in their education as she does in the field of math. Not only that, but most of the students hail from rich families from the Northeast, and even though some of them befriend her, she never feels quite at home with such people. One might be jealous of Sittenfeld for writing such an engaging, successful novel the first time around if it weren’t such an enjoyable piece of literature to read. It isn’t just about a bunch of teenagers but it is about those teenagers’ education: academic, personal, literary, social, and cultural. In this novel, they seem to learn it all—in four short and quick years. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Wilfred Owen WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Garth Greenwell THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lois Lowry FRI: My Book World | Marie Benedict, The Queens of Crime: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD Burroughs, William S. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.
I first read this book before I started keeping records of my reading history, and that 1985 reading reflects not a single annotation—assuming I perused it entirely for pleasure. Not long ago, my partner and I watched the recent film of Queer starring Daniel Craig, and my interest in Burroughs’s novel was rekindled. Bars and hotels play a great role in this short novel. The primary bar related to Mexico City where forty-something American, William Lee, is now living is the Ship Ahoy (the real name of the bar upon which it is based)—which seems particularly significant. Lee uses the bar as one might use a vessel, to search out sexual partners. In that sense he is a predator, particularly when he first sights Gene Allerton, a young American: “His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips” (25). Burroughs painstakingly portrays the exhaustion caused by Lee’s desires for Allerton: “In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals . . . Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocating of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes” (36). All Lee and his bar friends seem to do, with the singlemindedness of the amoeba, is drink, eat, and fuck. Burroughs’s economic use of words is admirable: “He must have slept. Mary and Allerton were gone. Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning” (62). The ellipsis between leaving his friend’s apartment and landing in his own bed is understood. Burroughs does this all throughout, and it is a good lesson for writers of fiction. You need to show (rather than tell) the important things, yes, but not necessarily that which is easily understood or taken for granted. Lee convinces Allerton to take a trip deeper into South America in search of Yage (Ayahuasca), a psychoactive drug used by certain tribes in the region. The recent film departs severely from the book in that it makes this search a more exciting climax than in the book, where it seems to be just one more of Lee’s (and Allerton’s) endless scavenging for that great drug high. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | James Ellroy WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Rosa Luxemburg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Barrett Browning FRI: My Book World | Eric Haseltine, The Spy in Moscow Station: A Counterspy's Hunt for a Deadly Cold War Threat
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MY BOOK WORLD Sebold, Alice. The Lovely Bones: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2002.
Author Sebold adopts an odd and unconventional point of view by narrating the book by way of a murdered fourteen-year-old girl. The most astounding aspect of the author’s bold move is that she so totally buys into this POV that it seems quite believable to readers. Young Susie Salmon is on her way home (swimming upstream? obvious catch?) from school when she is enticed by an across-the-street neighbor, Mr. Harvey, to visit his “den” in the middle of a cornfield. The rather intelligent girl knows better, but, as I said, she is ensnared by a master seducer. Mr. Harvey has murdered multiple females, mostly young girls like Susie, usually after he has violated them sexually. How he has gotten away with it for so long is probably a tribute to his wiliness: his obsequious way with other adults, his “shy” act in front of children, girls specifically. Susie’s father right away suspects Mr. Harvey, but he has no proof, and, after a few weeks Mt. Harvey disappears from the neighborhood. Yet, because of Susie’s omniscient view of things (anyone going to heaven has this POV), she knows exactly where everyone in her life is at any given time and what they are thinking. Nice device. No other writer will ever be able to use it again! In an ordinary novel, the comeuppance of the murderer might be paramount in the minds of most readers. What happens to the dastardly Mr. Harvey? I’ll tell you. In a very short scene near the end, readers witness Mr. Harvey attempting to pick up a young woman as they both smoke cigarettes out back of a store. She stalks away, calling him a creep, and surely as an act of God, an icicle drops from the eave of the building and does away with Mr. Harvey. It is all he deserves by way of attention in this novel. Someone else will have to tell his story, if anyone would want to. More miraculous is the ending in which, by way of a bit of magical realism, Susie has one more meeting with a boy she had kissed just before she died. Of course, now, he is twenty-one, which makes things different, but Sebold handles this problem very deftly. In all, a very satisfying novel that investigates a number of issues in modern life besides the perennial problem of creeps picking up and murdering children. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Betty Friedan WEDS: A Writer's Wit | William S. Burroughs THURS: A Writer's Wit | Annie Bethel Spencer FRI: My Book World | Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon
MY BOOK WORLD King, Dave. The Ha-Ha: A Novel. New York: Back Bay, 2005.
Nothing like holding a book on your shelves for twenty years before reading it! But it has been worth the wait. A young Howard Kapostash serves sixteen days in Vietnam before he is severely injured—so injured that even with therapy he cannot speak or write any longer. Think about it, a fairly good looking young man is so injured he emerges looking like Quasimodo—even into his forties. Though he does carry a card informing strangers he is of normal intelligence, his life is full of difficulties. Oh, he does all right with the people he deals with every day: the nuns at the convent where he keeps the grounds mowed and neat, the woman living with him who tends his books and in return is allowed to use his kitchen to maintain her soup business. Sylvia, a former girlfriend from high school, who now asks (demands) a big favor of him. Sylvia is checking herself into a drug rehab place, and she needs a place to leave her nine-year-old son. Pronto. Yes, for an undetermined amount of time, little Ryan will come to live with Howard and the rest of his housemates: Nit and Nat, two hippie types who manage to pay their rent, but barely. Howie and Ryan develop an interesting relationship. Through his usual pantomime, Howard is able to communicate with Ryan and even teaches him a few things about baseball and life. After eight weeks, the two become close, Howard being like a father Ryan has never had in his life, and because Ryan has taught Howard a few things, as well. This becomes the time when Sylvia is well enough to leave rehab. Instead of this reunion of mother and son being a happy time, however, Sylvia sets up a cause-and-effect situation by which Howard is victimized once again. I won’t spoil the ending because it is well worth reading for yourself to find out what it is. No wonder the novel was bestseller in its time! Yes, about the title. At first I thought this book must be about a stand-up comic. But a ha-ha is “a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier (particularly on one side) while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side. The name comes from viewers’ surprise when seeing the construction.” (Wikipedia). A photograph or diagram can expand this description if you can locate one. There is a ha-ha at the convent where Howard works, and it becomes a major point in the plot as well as providing a metaphor for Howard’s life. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Nien Cheng WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anton Chekhov THURS: A Writer's Wit | Shirley Hazzard FRI: My Book World | Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
MY BOOK WORLD Patchett, Ann. The Magician’s Assistant. Orlando: Harcourt, 1997.
Magician Parsifal dies suddenly in Los Angeles, and his assistant wife, Sabine, is instantly burdened with a visit from Parsifal’s family of Alliance, Nebraska. The two members who fly to LA for the service are Parsifal’s mother, Dot, and the magician’s younger sister, Bertie. Sabine is in no mood, especially when they keep calling her husband Guy, a name he gave up long before for adopting his stage name, Parsifal. But Sabine suffers the visitors quietly, taking them to places familiar to Guy/Parsifal, including the rug factory he owns and runs. Oh, and readers learn early that Parsifal is gay and has acquired a lover/partner, Phan. Parsifal marries Sabine largely to protect their financial interests. Readers also learn that most magicians don’t make a living from the work; they have to have a day job, too. Sabine herself is employed by an architecture firm, creating exquisite models for structures the firm is designing. During the short visit, Sabine becomes close to Parsifal’s family members and promises to make a trip to Nebraska soon. In the middle of January Sabine lands, after a shaky flight, in Scottsbluff. She is greeted by Dot and Bertie. Later she meets Kitty, Guy’s older sister, who looks a lot like him. So do her teenage sons, one of whom is also named Guy. At first Sabine is ill at ease but after some long visits with Dot and Kitty, she learns more about her late husband, Guy/Parsifal, mainly that he had a major tussle with the law when young, and the law won. Because he was underage, he spent his time in a reformatory, not in a prison for adults. After serving his sentence, he headed for LA to begin his career as a magician. Back in his heyday, he and Sabine had appeared on the Johnny Carson Show, and someone had made a VHS tape of their appearance. In fact, the family watches it almost daily. They insist that Sabine see it, too. She’s never viewed a recording of their work before, so it is novel to her. Patchett does a masterful job of carefully threading together all the strands of this novel, and I won’t say more because there would have to be some spoilers, and I don’t want to do that, I just don’t. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | M. K. Hobson WEDS: A Writer's Wit |August Strindberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anya Seton FRI: My Book World | Dave King, The Ha-Ha: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD Stone, Nic. Dear Martin: A Novel. New York: Penguin Random, 2017.
A Black teenage boy about to matriculate at an Ivy League school faces a number of lifechanging challenges. Not only does Justyce have deep feelings for a white Jewish girl who also likes him but he becomes involved in two escalating events with police officers in his city. During one of these incidents, he and his best friend are shot by an officer. To deal with his trials and tribulations, Justyce writes letters to the late Martin Luther King as if he is a living mentor. The author handles with depth and sensitivity all that Justyce must go through to grow as a person. I like how Stone uses “news bulletins” from local TV stations to bring readers up to date on events, as well as an interesting font to distinguish Justyce’s letters to MLK. In dialogue, Stone utilizes a playscript format, eliminating the need for quite so many “they said” situations. Not only a very moving book but a stylishly presented one, as well. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Edward St. Aubyn WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jenny Nimmo THURS: A Writer's Wit | William Kennedy FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant
MY BOOK WORLD Maupin, Armistead. Michael Tolliver Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
This is a pleasant bookend to the seven-book (I think) series. Michael Tolliver, now in his mid-fifties, is married to a man twenty years his junior. The novel comes full circle, chronicling Michael’s mother’s death (and their prior reconciliation) and the near-death of Anna Madrigal, who Michael considers more his mother than the woman in Florida dying of cancer. Loose ends are also tied up with Mary Ann, who flies in to see Anna in her hospital bed. If you’re really into the series, this book may seem a bit bland, but I do believe it brings a suitable finality to the series’ characters who for so long have inhabited 28 Barbary Lane and environs in San Francisco, the City. TUES DEC 3: A Writer's Wit | Michael Musto WEDS DEC 4: A Writer's Wit |Barbara Amiel THURS DEC 5: A Writer's Wit | Joan Didion FRI DEC 6: A Writer's Wit | Jason Reynolds HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
MY BOOK WORLD Cunningham, Michael. Day: A Novel. New York: Random, 2024 (2023).
The novel revolves around one day, yet the same date, in 2019, 2020, and 2021: April 5. Right away one might recognize these years as the before, during, and after of the COVID pandemic and US lockdown. But, of course, the novel is more complex and more flexible than that (the disease serving more as wallpaper than plot substance). Cunningham fluidly explores the dynamics of two couples and their families. Dan and Isabel live with their two children, Nathan and Violet, and Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, age thirty. Only not for long, because Robbie is off to Iceland to live by himself in an (understandably) cold little cabin. The other family is comprised of Garth (brother to Dan) and Chess, and their son—not quite a family because Garth does not live with his wife and child (who now acknowledge that Garth is the son’s father). Both families seem to be coming apart but readers aren’t sure why (perhaps, in part, it is because of the pandemic, invisible but insidious). Cunningham explores their dynamics quietly and assuredly so that by the end readers have a good idea of what has gone on in their lives, before during and after the pandemic. The last few chapters are each mere paragraphs long, providing a soft-landing denouement. Cunningham is the best. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Ruth Sepetys WEDS: A Writer's Wit | President Joe Biden THURS: A Writer's Wit | Andrew Sean Greer FRI: My Book World | Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives
 Alvarez, Julia. The Cemetery of Untold Stories: A Novel. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2024.
I loved the author’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. It was quite poignant and enlightening to learn about the culture of the Dominican Republic. In this recent work, readers deepen their knowledge of the DR. Noted author, Alma Cruz inherits a questionable piece of property in her homeland (she selects the sorriest of four plots, her three sisters fighting over the “better” properties). There she encloses the land and forms a cemetery, not for bodies, but for her manuscripts of untold stories—primarily for the characters, whom she feels are as deserving of an eternal home as humans. The characters come alive from DR history, one being dictator Trujillo’s wife, Bienvenida. But there are lesser ones whose lives are just as interesting: Pepito, Manuel, Filomena, and more. It is a book of some complexity, so I know I shall return to it again to gain full advantage of its treasures. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Naomi Wolf WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Whoopi Goldberg THURS: A Writer's Wit | Roland Martin FRI: My Book World | Michael Cunningham, Day: A Novel
MY BOOK WORLD Strout, Elizabeth. Olive, Again: A Novel. New York: Random, 2019.
I love Elizabeth Strout’s writing. It reads so simply; the pages just fly by. But one must not mistake this ease of reading for a lack of complexity. Her characters only seem to step out of real life and onto the page with little effort. I fell in love with Olive in Olive Kitteridge: She blurts out what she thinks, no matter whom it may offend or hurt. Even so, she’s had two loving husbands, both of whom have died on her. In Olive, Again I fall in love all over again. “Olive” and I are now in the same age range. Strout writes effectively in a charming way about being old. (As I say to my friends, “I didn’t mind getting old, but I hate being old.”) As a retired school teacher from the region (Maine), Olive continually runs into (grown) people who were once her pupils. Some of them she doesn’t like and vice versa. Others she has a soft spot for. After Olive experiences a heart attack, her son arranges for her to receive home healthcare until she can manage by herself. One of the helpers is a former student who has, to Olive, an offensive bumper sticker on her car—one promoting an oranged-hair man who becomes president. Yet, in the end, she asks this woman to tell Olive her story, and once again, in her own gruff manner, she accepts this woman, political views and all. Olive’s son has been thoughtful enough to put her name on a wait list at a local facility featuring a variety of settings for seniors, so she doesn’t have long to wait when she makes the decision to move there. She abhors the idea but realizes she can no longer manage the house she shared with her second husband (besides, it was formerly his house and she’s never felt at home there). At the facility, Olive finds herself alone in most situations; she just has no patience for people who don’t think like her, and she often tells them so in one way or another. After some time, however, she does make friends with someone she names Mousy Pants. Mousy Pants turns out to be an Isabelle, who shares her life story with Olive, and they realize they have a great deal in common: adult children who care for them but live at some distance, for one. They go so far, after a health scare, to exchange door keys. On alternating nights, one stops by to wave good night and see that everything is all right. Olive is relieved to find out that she’s not the only resident using what she calls poopy pants (adult diapers). On the next to the last page, eighty-five-year-old Olive comes to this realization: She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before. But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go (288). Strout’s novels are all award winners in one way or another; it is not hard to see why. And Olive, Again is no exception! Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Debbie Macomber WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Arvavind Adiga THURS: A Writer's Wit | Gabrielle Zevin FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris, The Best of Me
MY BOOK WORLD Patchett, Ann. Tom Lake: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.
I’ve never before read a novel whose existence depended almost entirely on another work of literature for its structure, its heart—but this one would seem to win all the awards for such a category. In the author’s note Patchett says: “I thank Thornton Wilder, who wrote the play that has been an enduring comfort, guide, and inspiration throughout my life. If this novel has a goal, it is to turn the reader back to Our Town, and to all of Wilder’s work. Therein lies the joy” (311). Her love and admiration palpitate throughout, far from utilizing the play as a gimmick but giving the work its sole purpose: how one actor relates to Our Town for her entire life. In high school Lara plays the role of Emily in Wilder’s play. (I’ll assume that everyone here at one time has read, read for, played a part in, or witnessed a production and is familiar with all its characters.) Thus begins Lara’s career as an actor. Yet her career is not a typical one. Yes, she acquires an agent who gets her into Hollywood. She even auditions for some plays on Broadway. But in a summer stock production (staged at Tom Lake) in Traverse City, Michigan, she wins the part of Emily, as well as the female lead in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, a role for which she is not suited. Peter Duke, a man not much older than Lara, plays Emily’s father onstage. He, too, is headed for stardom, but he is more serious than Lara. He keeps detailed notebooks on the characters he plays, reviewing his scribbles up to the minute before speaking his first line. Lara depends on the fact that in some sense she is Emily. She bunks with Duke and falls for the handsome, charming actor. He will marry three times and end up in rehab for alcohol addiction. Patchett weaves all of Lara’s career within the fabric of her own adult family life. She has married a man she met during that run of summer stock but not until years later. They now have three adult daughters, one of whom is named Emily. The family owns and operates a cherry orchard farm, and it takes all of them to bring in the crop each year. As they toil, the daughters beg mom, Lara, to tell them all about her time with Peter Duke, her time in film. He is by now so famous that Emily, the eldest, believes somehow that Duke could be her father (which time will tell he is not). This tightly knit novel is a joy to read aloud (which I did for my partner). When I taught tenth-grade pre-AP English, my pupils seemed to enjoy reading Wilder’s play aloud each year; thus, I studied it ten years straight years, having it engrained into my being. Patchett recalling the lines (Where’s my girl? Where’s my birthday girl?) causes them to echo throughout more than the halls of the school where I taught. They resound throughout our country’s schools. I once scoffed that the play was perfect for high schoolers, but what it is perfect for is to remind every adult that Our Town is quintessential America. It is the essence of the play’s universality. One character receives a letter addressed this way: United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the mind of God” (45). Each of us could be that addressee! Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Italo Calvino WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Joseph Bruchac THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elinor Lipman FRI: My Book World | Elizabeth Strout, Olive Again
MY BOOK WORLDNewman, Paul. The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir. Based on interviews and oral histories conducted by Stewart Stern. Compiled by David Rosenthal. With a foreword by Melissa Newman and an afterword by Clea Newman Soderlund. New York: Knopf, 2022.
I'm a big fan of this sensational actor, but the book leaves a lot to be desired. The man tells you over and over again that he is separated from his own feelings, and that emotional distance is evident in his very own words. He hardly says anything about his wife, actor Joanne Woodward, and, even though he mentions going through therapy (finally), he doesn’t reveal much about the process or how it might transform his life from curmudgeon to kind philanthropist. The compilers cover only a fraction of his films. All in all, disappointing. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Jimmy Carter (100th birthday) WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Maria Ressa THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thomas Wolfe FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett, Tom Lake
MY BOOK WORLD Tan, Amy. Saving Fish from Drowning. New York: Random, 2005.
I love Amy Tan’s writing, and this book is no exception. From her memoir, readers may know that she made a trip to Asia at one time, and I believe this book could have been inspired by what she witnessed there. The plot: A woman in San Francisco dies, and her ghost (yes!) begins to tell the story of how she was to have accompanied twelve other people on a trip to Myanmar (formerly Burma). The group decides to go in spite of her death, and she “accompanies” them (otherwise how would she relate their experiences, right?)—unbeknownst to them. And their adventures are great. One couple fall in love. Other members quarrel. But the biggest event is that they are duped into taking a trip deep into the jungle and there become captives of a certain tribe. This isn’t as bad as it sounds. They are treated very kindly by the tribe, but when the group members believe it is time to leave, the tribe has other plans. Seems that they believe one of their members (a young man) is the reincarnation of a former leader. The novel has all the Dickensian intricacies. And the denouement by which all the loose ends are tied together is not to be missed. I read this aloud to my partner, and we both enjoyed it immensely. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | William Least Heat-Moon WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Marguerite Young THURS: A Writer's Wit | Karen Hesse FRI: My Book World | Glenway Wescott, Apartment in Athens
 Robison, Mary. Why Did I Ever: A Novel. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2001.
Some books you just have to read as if you were boarding a rollercoaster. You can’t figure it out necessarily; you just get on and ride until the thing comes to an end. Told in over 530 mini-chapters (even those are divided into short paragraphs or sentences), the novel is narrated by a woman who writes/doctors Hollywood scripts. In the meantime, she deals with a daughter trying (mostly not) to get off methadone. There is the Deaf Lady. There is Hollis, a male friend. First husband, second husband. A cat. It seems that this narrator really doesn’t have it together, mentally, but she does her best. And if I’m right about the narrator’s mental state, the author knocks this one out of the park. TUES: A Writer's Wit | Barbara Cooney WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Betsy Byars THURS: A Writer's Wit | Randy Shilts FRI: My Book World | Russell Freedman, Lincoln: A Photobiography
MY BOOK WORLD Freudenberger, Nell. The Limits. New York: Knopf, 2024.
This novel of some scope develops several strands. Nathalie, a French biologist working in the South Pacific, sends her daughter off to New York City to live with her father and stepmother. The teen Pia does not like anyone, it seems: her mother, her father, and most assuredly her pregnant stepmother, a high school English teacher named Kate. All of whom do flip-flops to communicate with her. The only person she seems to connect with is a girl named Athyna (pronounced like the Greek figure, go figure)—a student of Kate’s with whom she has a nurturing relationship. To complicate things Pia is “in love with” Raffi, a thirty-year-old Tahitian who serves as Nathalie’s fixer. Of course, it is more of an inappropriate crush, and her affections have not been returned in kind. Still, she believes something is there. The narrative profiles the physical limits of the natural world but also explores the limits of human relationships. I enjoyed the author’s first book, Lucky Girls, much more. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | Coventry Patmore WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Junichiro Tanizaki THURS: A Writer's Wit | Robyn Carr FRI: My Book World | Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times
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FRI: My Book World | Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel TUES: A Writer's Wit | Medgar Evers WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Dorothy Kilgallen THURS: A Writer's Wit | Calvin Coolidge
MY BOOK WORLD McDermott, Alice. Absolution. New York: Farrar, 2023.
This is a woman’s book, which is in no way meant to denigrate it. In fact, I find myself reading mostly women novelists these days. This novel, set in early 1960s Vietnam, is told from the viewpoint of a “wife,” not a military wife, but close to it. Her fresh, new husband is a civilian worker for the US military. Still, the narrator, Patricia, must hobnob with all the other wives. Her story seems to be the dawning of women’s awareness of their “place” in society at the time: a wife is a support system for her husband. Full stop. McDermott structures the novel in a fascinating and engrossing manner. It doesn’t take long to realize that Patricia is addressing someone, a “you” (a child, a daughter of a friend) even if it took me some pages to figure out. In Part III, the daughter takes over the narration as an adult. At the very end, Patricia adds sort of a coda to the entire story. The novel seems epistolary in nature even if it is not written in the form of letters because Patricia addresses the entire story to this other person, and vice versa in Part III. It might be puzzling if it weren’t for the fine clues that McDermott leaves for readers. You simply must pay attention. Her subtlety in creating difficult scenes is magnificent. At the very end, Patricia who has experienced multiple miscarriages is “given” a small beautiful Vietnamese girl with but one scarring birthmark on her face. Patricia is overwhelmed but takes the girl to her Saigon home, to wait for her husband whom she has not told. By the same token, she has learned from a friend that they’re going back to America soon; her husband has failed to keep her in the loop about it, so she feels she has a leg up on him, something to balance the power between them. Then a really odd thing transpires. I won’t spoil the scene, but the author manages to take readers completely off guard by what happens next, though it may be the most logical—and the best answer for all concerned. Up Next: TUES: A Writer's Wit | George Orwell WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Aubrey Plaza THURS: A Writer's Wit | Alice McDermott FRI: My Book World | Julie Satow, The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
May 2025
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