February 2026 – Novel Readings

Three by Elizabeth Strout

February 24, 2026Rohan Maitzen16 Comments

As I’m going to be reviewing Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit some of her earlier fiction, so I went to the library and signed out a stack. I remembered not having altogether liked My Name is Lucy Barton when I read it before, but you never know: it might have just been the wrong time. I honestly could not remember if I’d read Oh William! or Lucy by the Sea–and in fact I am still not sure. They did both seem familiar in spots, but I have no record of reading them here on the blog. That is not as definitive, as there have been gaps in both my posting and my memory over the past few years! Maybe I started and abandoned them, or read them in such a desultory spirit that they didn’t stick.

I still didn’t love My Name is Lucy Barton. There are things about it I liked the first time and still liked, but the flatly intrusive narrative voice irritated me, and this continued to be my reaction through both Oh William! and Lucy By the Sea. Our response to this series relies heavily on our reactions to Lucy herself, I expect, and for me her character remained too elusive, too remote, despite being the one doing all the talking. After three novels, I feel I know a lot of details about her life and about her verbal (narrative) tics, but I still have little sense of her as a person. At one point her ex-husband William describes her as “joyful” and I was surprised: I had no such impression of her. How can a first-person narrator be so vaporous? It is surely deliberate (Olive Kitteredge, by comparison, is a conspicuously forceful presence), but to what end?

Lucy By the Sea made both the best and the worst impression on me this time. I appreciated (though I didn’t really enjoy) its evocation of the surreal qualities of lockdown, its reminders of the distancing protocols and other precautions we adopted and adapted and (mostly) eventually have abandoned. (Many stores here still have markers on their floors asking people to keep 6 feet apart; they are worn and faded and, of course, completely ignored now.) I remember very well the overwhelming proximity of two people always together in the same house, the development of new routines to vary the monotonous days, the wariness of having or being visitors, the anxieties of getting groceries–it all feels so close and so far away at the same time. But Lucy’s narrative interruptions–not quite metafictional, never at all revelatory–kept pulling me away. Then the novel’s conclusion–that “we are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all”–felt forced to me. Let us get there on our own, was my reaction. I think we would have, just as I think I would have liked all three novels a lot more if Strout had made Lucy less self-conscious.

I have Tell Me Everything out as well now and I’m not really that motivated to read it, although it does bring Lucy together with Olive, which might give it more energy than the others. Strout’s new book is a stand-alone novel, so my ambivalence about the Lucy books doesn’t (necessarily) foretell my reaction to it!

Two By Alison Espach

February 8, 2026February 8, 2026Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I had been in what felt like a reading slump until Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent perked me up. Then a friend lent me Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, and it too was a book that drew me back to it each chance I got, instead of malingering on my side table while I watched yet more TV.

I don’t know exactly what it was exactly about The Wedding People that worked so well for me. My friend cautioned me that the plot turns on someone who begins the novel planning her own death: her situation and also the whole tone of the novel set that so far apart from my own experiences that while it was certainly dark, it wasn’t off-putting or personally upsetting. In fact one thing I appreciated throughout The Wedding People was that Espach manages to sustain the novel’s comedy without losing trivializing her protagonist’s feelings, her sense of having had enough, of being ready. The way she is drawn back into life through accidentally crashing an elaborate ‘destination wedding’ was equal parts farcical and poignant. Somehow, she just can’t seem to extricate herself, and as she gets more and more involved with the wedding people she finds herself less and less tired of living.

I read The Wedding People pretty briskly and was enjoying the momentum so much that I didn’t pause to put in any post-its flagging key scenes or quotable moments–plus its appeal (for me, anyway) lay more in the accumulation of incidents and the gradual elaboration of its characters and their entanglements. So I won’t lay out more details here! But more evidence of how much I enjoyed it is that when I was done, I promptly went looking for Espach’s other novels, and her earlier Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance turned out to be on the shelf at the Central Library.

This one turned out to be harder and sadder–imagine, harder and sadder than one that opens with a suicide attempt! It centers on Sally, whose older sister Kathy is killed in an accident while her boyfriend Billy is driving with the two sisters in the car. Sally’s family is of course devastated; her mother especially is utterly grief stricken and broken. Meanwhile Billy has to live with his guilt and Sally with her trauma; the two of them have a bond born of their terrible experience, and the novel follows the ways their lives overlap over the years following Kathy’s death.

Sally, who narrates, has a sharp eye and a wry voice: though unlike The Wedding People this novel is never comic, it is certainly funny at times. I think I am getting too old to feel terribly invested in ‘coming of age’ novels unless they are Jane Eyre (or, I guess, Great Expectations, which I am currently rereading for class and loving as always). I liked Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance and was often moved by it, but I actually found Espach’s acknowledgments, which suggest that she lost a brother, the most touching part: “Thank you to my parents,” she says, “for always encouraging me to write about the hard things and for never shying away from the reality of our grief.”

January Reading

February 3, 2026Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

January was an OK reading month overall—not great, but with some highlights.

I started with two of the books I picked up at Bookmark’s Boxing Day sale: Vincent van Gogh’s For Life and For Art, which is one of those sweet little Penguin Archive editions. It fell a bit flat for me. I chose it because I was curious to get some insights into van Gogh’s creative process, and there are certainly some interesting passages. One example:

The work is going fairly well. I’m struggling with a canvas I started a few days before my illness—a reaper. The study is all yellow, extremely thickly painted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. For I see in this reaper—a vague figure toiling for all he’s worth in the midst of the heat to finish his task—I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sower which I tried to do before. But there is no sadness in this death, this one takes place in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.

In other places he talks quite a bit about how he uses paint, something to which (to be honest) I have paid a lot more attention since I started doing jigsaw puzzles, which often require minute scrutiny to colour and texture. Much of the book, though, which is all letters (mostly to his brother Theo) are about pretty mundane stuff, like art supplies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But van Gogh’s paintings are so strange and extraordinary that I expected the same here.

Then I read Kathy Page’s In This Faulty Machine, which is a memoir about her diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease. Again it fell a bit flat, which feels like a terrible thing to say about a book that is so personal and also recounts such a profoundly difficult experience. In this case too there are passages that made me pause with appreciation, such as this one about find words for what she is going through:

In times of great loss, meaning flows back into apt but outworn expressions and they seem true again. So it’s possible, even likely, that as my difficulties become more acute, I will find that plain ordinary words; roughly fitting, well-used phrases; and even squirm-inducing metaphors are good enough—perhaps at times better—than nuanced and original phrasings that draw attention to themselves. After all, sweating, terrified, I’m unlikely to waste my time gazing at the approaching forest fire while I struggle for alternatives to ‘wall of flames’ or choose an original way to convey the ghastly, devouring sound it makes. Since I want to communicate, somehow, anyhow, whatever it takes, I may perhaps be glad of whatever first comes to mind.

Perhaps. Maybe. Meanwhile, I have good reasons for being very passionate about words, and I am not on any kind of journey.

A lot of this book is about Parkinson’s – the symptoms, the treatments, the challenges. Near the end Page says that she wants “my account of these five years to be of use to others,” and I think that intention may be why there’s a fair amount in it that is quite literal, not a how-to guide or instruction manual but, in spirit, a bit of an ‘introduction to.’ Page is a good writer: I was interested in the book in the first place because I really admired her novel Dear Evelyn, which I reviewed for Quill & Quire when it came out. And This Faulty Machine is fine, especially when she meditates on illness and its effects on self and identity and creativity. I’ve just read some memoirs recently that really lit me up—I’m thinking of both Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolfand Claire Cameron’s How to Survive a Bear Attack—and I just did not feel the same about this one.

I bought one more book at that sale, Maria Reva’s Endling, which I had been excited about reading ever since hearing her interviewed about it on Bookends. I am sorry to say that at this point this one is a DNF for me, though I hope I will try it again some day. The metafictional turn it took (which I knew was coming, so I did go into this with my eyes open) quenched my already faltering engagement. YMMV.

I followed up on a recommendation on Bluesky and read Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House. This one was high on the “readability” scale and also felt unhappily topical, as all books about resisting fascism do at this point. I didn’t feel compelled to read it at all closely, though, and in fact at times I skimmed along because I was more driven by curiosity about what would happen than I was taking pleasure in its language. It has already gone back to the library, so I can’t quote from it.

A friend leant me Antonia White’s Frost in May, which I have had on my mental TBR for probably decades, given its status as the first-ever Virago Classic. I quite enjoyed this one (although again it has been returned, so I can’t quote from it—such are the hazards of not blogging each book properly as I finish reading it!). My friend commented, and I agree, that it is perhaps a bit too detailed about the religious aspects, but Nanda is a very appealing protagonist to follow along with during her ‘coming of age,’ and I liked White’s prose a lot.

Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker would have been a DNF if I hadn’t been reading it for my book club, and as it was I petulantly turned every page after about the first 150, rather than diligently reading it all. As with Endling I have mostly myself to blame for getting into this one: we read Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know last, and decided we’d like something with some similar themes (e.g. environmentalism, climate change, investigation) but with a more plotty plot, a bit more excitement. Venomous Lumpsucker was one of the books I put on a menu of options and it sure sounded like it would be all kinds of madcap fun. Nope. For me, anyway, Beauman just spent waaaaay too much time filling in all the details required by his concept. It dragged soooooo much. I’ll be quite curious to know how my book club friends got on with it.

I finished Volume 3 of Woolf’s diaries: this is a case in which I have too many passages flagged to do this reading experience justice in this quick recap. She’s working on The Waves for much of the last part of this volume and it is really fascinating watching her think it through. One thing that really comes through in the diaries is that she was never content to sit in one place as a novelist: she was always asking what else she could do, or how better she could create fiction that reflected the ideas and experiences she wanted to convey. I have started Volume 4 and fully intend to do better at posting about it regularly (she says boldly).

Finally, I had heard good things about Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent so I grabbed it up when I happened upon it on the ‘rapid reads’ shelf at the library. It is also very readable, and also smart and subtle and touching. Its epistolary approach made me think of Jane Gardam’s Queen of the Tambourine, although it has been so long since I read that one that I don’t know how much beyond their form they have in common. I pulled the Gardam off myself and added it to my actual TBR pile: I enjoyed it a lot when I read it back in (checks blog archive) 2011. 2011! That’s a long time ago.

And now it’s February, a new month, a short month, a (probably) pretty busy month. One reason I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been so tired after the work stuff is done: it has been a dreary time at work administratively, with budget cuts and internecine wrangling and lots of doom and gloom ‘what if’ conversations, fiscal as well as curricular. Honestly I’m surprised I even read this much (which isn’t that much, by some standards) in January. I’m enjoying my actual classes, though, and I hope the students are too—although if the current forecast holds we may have our third Monday in a row cancelled for snow. Did I mention I’ve been tired?! Still, we are working through the final part of The Mill on the Floss in the George Eliot seminar and that, of course, is genuinely great reading, and Friday’s class in the Brit Lit survey was on “Goblin Market”—what larks! (We start Great Expectations soon, too!)

This post is a re-done version of my previous January 2026 update to correct a number of odd things that happened when I tried to use the latest incarnation of the ‘classic’ editor. Time to learn how to use blocks, I guess–which is what I did here.