My last two reads of this summer were Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. For me, one was a hit, the other a miss.
I began The Book of Goose with enthusiasm; sadly, it dwindled as the book went on. It’s often hard to put my finger on exactly why I don’t like a novel (as opposed to why I don’t like a particular feature of a novel, as with the ghostly illogic that put me off Devotion). When it happens, I always wonder if more time and effort would turn things around—but when I’m reading just for myself, there’s no real incentive to go to that kind of trouble, and there are enough books that do work for me more or less immediately that I don’t worry too much that I’m somehow missing out. A lot of readers I respect think very highly of Yiyun Li (in response to my “meh” judgment on Twitter, Catherine Taylor, for one, commented that “She’s an amazing writer”—though the novel she highlighted was The Vagrants, which I haven’t read but she said is, in her opinion, “pretty much one of the best novels of the last 20 years”). I was very moved (both before and after Owen’s death) by Where Reasons End, but I have DNF’d Must I Go twice now. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign, but I heard part of a podcast interview with Li about The Book of Goose and it intrigued me, and the premise seemed promising.
Another warning sign should have been how many reviews (including some quoted in the pages of “Praise for The Book of Goose” that lead off my paperback edition) compare it to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I am cynical about these tendentious excerpts so I don’t pay very close attention to them when I’m making up my mind about what to read. Maybe I should change my habits! Because the Ferrante comparison occurred to me not too far into Li’s novel, and not for good reasons. (I’m not a fan.) Mostly it’s because of Fabienne, the strange, fierce, often cruel best friend of the narrator Agnès, who has the kind of willful wildness that Ferrante too seems to find, if not attractive, at least appealing, or compelling. I can’t imagine being friends with such a person in real life, and the recoil she caused made it equally hard to imagine why Agnès was so devoted to her in her world. Their friendship has a lot of the push-pull of Ferrante’s protagonists, and there are some similar themes about writing and identity and competition and contested narratives. (When people write about these books as if they reveal some essential truth about women’s friendships, I am baffled: is this really what their friendships are like?) For a while I was engaged enough in the graphic account of village life in post-war France, but the “game” of “let’s write a book” seemed forced to me, an awkward device to generate plot, conflict, and metafiction. Agnès’s time in England seemed similarly wooden to me; her correspondence with Fabienne and the fictional Jacques also seemed too much like a gimmick to stir up potential interpretation. Is The Book of Goose really a high concept novel, or is it trying (and failing) to be one? A lot of critics considered it the former, but I wasn’t convinced and (worst of all) before it was over I had lost interest in figuring it out.
Tom Lake was a much more enjoyable read, although like the other Patchett novels I have read recently, it didn’t seem to me to go particularly deep. Still, there was something really satisfying about it: I liked it a lot more than either Commonwealth or The Dutch House (though not as much as I remember liking Bel Canto). It has in common with The Book of Goose an interest in how we look back at the past and use what we remember to give shape and meaning to the present. It’s also, I think, about the roles we play and how they can either trap or liberate us, a theme it literalizes through its theatrical contexts and plotlines. How do we know who we really are, or who we might be? How do we navigate a world in which people, looking at us but not really knowing us, cast us in their own ongoing dramas? Patchett has too light a touch to lean hard into these kinds of thematic or (at their deepest) existential questions: mostly, she just tells a story about people with interesting but also somehow very ordinary lives. A story like this one, about choosing family and farming over fame and fortune, might have been told as shadowed with complications, perhaps regret about the road not traveled, or yearning for lost love, but Patchett’s version is airy and confident: the path taken is unequivocally the right one, which makes the notes of nostalgia unthreatening to present happiness. For a pandemic novel, it’s actually remarkably sunny: there’s really no hint of danger, certainly no sign of illness. Is that escapism? If so, is there something wrong with it? Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.
I was raised with the kind of faith that does not doubt. God had been as much a part of me as my own marrow, and when I discovered my bones to be empty, fluting music discordant to anything I had sung in church, my anguish was real . . . The understanding I have now, that the world spins on a deeper mystery than anything that might be set into language, was not with me then. Now I know that my mind is too small to hold the spirit. The spirit, I hope, holds me.
If you’re a friend of mine on social media, it won’t surprise you that Hernan Diaz’s Trust is the first one. It is an inarguably ingenious novel, but I thought (and the other members of my book club agreed) that the payoff for its ingenuity in the second half wasn’t enough to make up for the extraordinary, if self-conscious, dullness of the first half. Even a novel that can only really light up on a second reading can (and, arguably, should) generate some excitement the first time through. For me, a case in point would be 
I picked up Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier because I’m writing up his latest novel, North Woods, for the TLS and it’s good enough that I wanted to read more by him. The Winter Soldier is quite unlike North Woods, mostly in ways that favor the newer novel—which suggests Mason is getting better at his craft! The Winter Soldier (2018) is a good old-fashioned historical novel. It is packed with concrete details that make the time and place of its action vivid in the way I want historical fiction to be vivid. It takes place mostly in a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains during WWI; its protagonist, Lucius Krzelewski, is a medical student rapidly converted to a doctor to serve the desperate needs of the Austro-Hungarian army. His time at the hospital is full of harrowing incidents; through them runs his growing interest in an illness that eludes physical diagnosis and treatment—what today we would call PTSD. There are chaotic battle scenes and idyllic interludes; there’s a love story as well. It’s good! It really immerses you in its world, and (unlike Trust!) makes you care about its characters. I ended it not really sure it was about anything more than that. Novels don’t need to be, of course, though the best ones are. Still, I liked it enough that I will probably also look up Mason’s other novels, starting with The Piano Tuner. North Woods is a lot smarter and more subtle, though. (I am not sure it’s entirely successful: in my review, I will say more about that, when I figure out how to!)
And then there’s Claudia Piñeiro’s Betty Boo, which I found a really satisfying combination of smart plotting, thoughtful storytelling, and ideas that matter. In some ways it is less ambitious than the other two novels: it is structured more or less conventionally as a crime novel, and there aren’t really any narrative tricks to it, unless you count the sections that are ostensibly written by the protagonist, Nurit Iscar, about its central murder case. Iscar is a crime novelist who has had a professional setback (a crushing review of her foray into romantic fiction) and is currently getting by as a ghost writer. A contact at a major newspaper asks her to write some articles about a murder from a less journalistic and more contemplative perspective; in aid of this mission, she moves into the gated community where the victim lived and died. She ends up collaborating with the reporters on the crime beat as they investigate the death and discover that it is a part of a larger and more sinister operation—about which, of course, I will not give you any details here! Betty Boo is an unusual book: it doesn’t read quite like a “genre” mystery, as it is at least as interested in Nurit’s life and especially her relationships, with her close women friends and her lovers, as it is in its crime story. Also, Betty Boo is about crime, reporting, and fiction as themes, though its attention to these issues is integrated into the storytelling so that it never really feels metafictional—unlike Trust, which is all gimmick and so no substance, Betty Boo seems committed to the value and possibility of substance, even as Piñeiro provokes us to think about the obstacles we face in achieving it, in writing or in life, especially now that the news as a vehicle for both information and storytelling has become so degraded. I appreciated how original Betty Boo felt, and how genuinely interesting it was: I haven’t read another writer who does quite what Piñeiro does, in it or, for that matter, in Elena Knows. Of the three novels I read recently, this is the one I’m most likely to recommend to others, and I’m definitely going to read more of Piñeiro’s fiction, probably starting with A Little Luck, when I can get my hands on it.
I’m running a bit behind on writing I need to get done sooner rather than later, but I don’t want to let Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen go unmentioned, so I thought I’d say at least little bit about it while it’s still fresh in my mind.
And all of a sudden with the last mug in her hand, a message comes through loud and clear from her psyche: this is an accident. There is no need for her life to have worked out like this at all. So many other possibilities . . . How can this be her life, how can that be her love, if it rests on such accidents? Surely her real life is still waiting to happen . . . Surely the real thing has yet to come along.
Is it just me, or is there something there reminiscent of the third-person narrator in Bleak House, who also likes to rise above the landscape, giving an almost cinematic effect, and whose voice also rises in such moments into a visionary or prophetic tone? “Come, other future,” exclaims Spufford’s narrator; “Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light”; “Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this!” exclaims Dickens’s. (I also heard a strong echo of Middlemarch in a passage about everyone finding themselves “the protagonist of the story. Every single one the centre of the world, around whom others revolve and events assemble.”)
Help me say what can’t be said, you ask me.
“It must be said,” Irina says to Concita, “that losing a child is the touchstone of grief, the gold standard of pain. The benchmark.” This is uncomfortable territory: it doesn’t seem right to weigh one grief against another. “Never would I compare my state with that of, say, a widow’s,” Denise Riley says in Time Lived, Without Its Flow”; “never would I lay claim to ‘the worst grief of all.'” Yet Riley, whose adult son died suddenly of a previously undetected heart defect, goes on to make other comparisons:
She thought of all the girls she had known—some too fat, some too thin, some plain and bespectacled like Nancy, some stupid, some dishonest, some mean, some cruel: all given, at times, to giggling, sniggering, sniffling, smelling of their under-arm smell—and yet, somehow, they were all transmuted by Tom’s admiration into unearthly creatures, silver-white doves, delicate, diaphanous, lovely as female gods.
The novel is populated with many other women, young and old: that Ellie’s is not by any means the worst of their fates suggests the novel as a whole is grappling with the challenges faced by women in the 1950s, a time of rigid expectations but also some loosening constraints—a combination that brings a lot of risks, social as well as psychological. All around them are signs that it is now possible for women to rely on more than their looks for success and security, but women like Petta, the depressed wife of Ellie’s first, much older, lover, have not learned how—or maybe it is more accurate to say that they have not (or she has not, at any rate) learned to trust that they can get by on other terms. There’s a particularly poignant moment when Petta, feeling momentarily enlivened and confident, suddenly sees herself in a mirror among a crowd of younger women:
Ellie could have been set up as a clear foil for Petta, but she isn’t sure enough of her own value (or values) to play that part. Again, Manning doesn’t set her up for success: her artistic ambitions are not matched (as far as anyone else thinks, anyway) by either talent or drive, and she spends a lot of the novel moping about. The real contrast turns out to be Petta’s daughter Flora, who appears only very briefly late in the novel. “I want to study medicine,” she calmly tells her long-absent mother, and Petta is struck with “acute envy”:
There are moments in School for Love when it is possible to sympathize with Miss Bohun, mostly because we see her primarily through Felix’s eyes. Grieving, lonely, and naïve, he accepts Miss Bohun’s account of herself and others for a long time and enjoying his occasional role as her confidant. She does take people in, after all; she has taken him in when he was otherwise unwanted and at a loss, although the terms of her “kindness” (as we see much more clearly than Felix) are anything but generous. It is a sad part of Felix’s maturation that he has to give up believing the best about people, an attitude nurtured in him by his mother. He is helped along in this shift towards realism (or, perhaps, cynicism) by the arrival of the refreshingly frank widow Mrs. Ellis, who becomes the subject of his first intense crush and, through her resistance to Miss Bohun’s pretenses, an agent of his “developing attitude to life”: “Venturing into reality,” Felix thinks, “Mrs. Ellis was the guide for him. Almost every time he was with her some incident widened his understanding of life, or of himself.”
This is a gentler conclusion, both about Miss Bohun and for the novel, than I expected from 
There were definitely things about Drifts I did like. I liked learning about Rilke (I would have liked, better, a unified essay about Rilke); I enjoyed May Sarton’s scattered presence (I would have liked, better, an essay focused on Zambreno’s interest in Sarton). I liked the sense of what it might be like to be in Zambreno’s head—until I got tired of it, since it’s not a particularly restful or happy or illuminating place and being in my own head is hard enough these days, thank you very much. I got tired of the insistence on how hard it is to write, to be a writer, to write a novel. It started to seem unbearably self-absorbed, self-indulgent, solipsistic, all this moping around and lamenting and oversharing. “Think of Trollope!” I wanted to say. “Get out of your head and just tell us a story!” But of course that is not the kind of novel Zambreno is interested in.
I’m just back from a long-awaited, oft-postponed visit to Vancouver. I came back with more books than I left with: no surprise there! A couple of them are ones I claimed from my mother’s ‘donate’ pile (one of my undertakings was to help her sort her many – many! – books so that the ones she wants most to read and reread are actually on shelves and the others eventually make their way into the hands of other readers); a couple of others were just too good to pass up when I spotted them on the bargain books shelves at the UBC bookstore; and one, Bach’s Sonic Tapestry, is by and inscribed by an old family friend.
Novel Readings 