Like Elena Knows, A Little Luck is a small book that packs a powerful punch. Now that the first impact of reading it has passed, I do find myself wondering: did it earn its effect? Is that even a fair question? But Elena Knows is about so much: so much is at stake in it. A Little Luck, in contrast, strikes me (though only after the fact, after the immersive experience of reading it) as founded on something slighter, something that maybe can’t quite hold up the weight Piñeiro brings to bear on it. But there’s no denying what an intense and gripping novel it is in the moment.
A Little Luck is about an accident. After the fact, again, I think the way Piñeiro spools out information about it is a bit too manipulative. We return over and over to the moment it happens, each time gaining a bit more information. On the other hand, that’s how traumatic memory works, and the strategy does force the reader into questions, not just about what happened, but about the role of the narrator, first introduced to us as Mary Lohan—about the way she is haunted by it, and the price she pays for it, which it also takes a while for Piñeiro to fully reveal.
Like Elena Knows, A Little Luck turns out to be about motherhood, and (also like Elena Knows) about ways it can go awry and lead to pain on both sides. “Most mothers,” Mary reflects,
never have to go through such terrible circumstances to prove they can be a mother. But life decided to test me, and I, in so many ways, failed.
Did she fail? I think that is one of the novel’s central questions, and Mary’s own answer changes over its course. Arguably, she passed the test with flying colors by unequivocally putting what she believed to be the best interests of her son Federico first by, paradoxically, abandoning him: “I knew I was hurting my child by leaving,” she says, “but by staying I might hurt him even more.” Was it the right decision? Was it the wrong decision? Or was it, like so many decisions we make, the only decision she could make in that moment, under those circumstances? “Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed,” Mary observes;
If the circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would’ve ever known who I could become.
Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test.
I only have a little luck.
Mary—or Marilé, to give her back the name she gave up along with Federico—made an innocuous-seeming decision, one she had made often before and that others also make just moments before she does, with no bad outcomes. The difference is a bit of bad luck, a series of small but incredibly unfortunate events, and thus a massive, irreparable catastrophe. One life is lost, other lives are ruined, and Marilé gives her own life up, which is the closest thing she can imagine to making some kind of restitution:
Not being there, that was the kind of suffering I deserved. To keep on living, without him. Much worse that suicide, without a doubt. An endless, bottomless pain. The agony of never being able to hug him again.
Piñeiro is really brilliant at immersing us in both moral uncertainty and psychic pain. The suspense of the novel comes eventually from wondering if Marilé has any chance at genuine redemption, but the overall emotional effect of it comes from inhabiting her tormented mind, or really her relentless grieving conscience. Happiness has come to her since she abandoned Federico and Marilé to become Mary—the storyline around this is kind of thin and relies heavily on complete coincidence or, to keep within the novel’s terms of reference, an enormous stroke of good luck. What she really wants, though, remains off limits, or so she assumes until she returns to the place she used to live, dreading recognition.
It’s recognition that brings about reconciliation, though, and I found myself wondering if I had been taken in a bit by Mary’s insistent attention to all the efforts she has gone to not to be known. Surely she is actually hoping for just such an outcome, even though she wouldn’t dare admit it to herself? As for the novel’s resolution, again the set-up itself is a bit thin or overelaborate, but it felt so true, and I was glad, given how agonized so much of the novel is, that it ended with a moment of happiness.
I’ve always loved these lines from Tennyson’s The Princess:
Actually, thinking about it now, maybe there are more moving parts than there used to be. Once upon a time we didn’t use an LMS, for example, and while there’s no doubt that Brightspace (formerly Blackboard formerly Web CT formerly DIY websites) is a useful back-up system for in-person courses—a storage facility available to your students 24/7 so they can never not locate their syllabus!—it’s also the case that expectations have gone up considerably around our use of them (and students’ reliance on them). Now I post my PPT slides on Brightspace after class, for example, something that requires multiple additional steps, assuming I remember to do it in the first place. (I never used to use PowerPoint, either, and I blame it and Brightspace, which both require incessant mousing, for my now chronic shoulder pain.) I used to give quizzes and midterms in class; now, they are all taken in Brightspace—but that too means many more steps than devising the questions and making copies, setting up all the many features just right and entering the questions in the optimal way. When we were all online, I posted weekly announcements for my classes: it turns out students really appreciated these, so I’ve kept doing them, but they take me (no kidding) hours to compose, both to make sure they are optimally clear and useful and because heaven forbid there’s a mistake in one, like a wrong deadline, that gets fixed in their minds or calendars in spite of any subsequent efforts to correct it! Recently, too, in a departmental discussion around class size and workload, one of my colleagues pointed out ruefully that “there didn’t used to be email” and that is such a good point, especially as our class sizes have gone up even as we became not just teachers but customer service representatives! (And yet somehow, without an LMS and without Outlook and without PowerPoint, we managed to do our jobs. Imagine that. Did we do a worse job? Maybe in some respects—accessibility seems like a key point here—but I really do wonder how much all of this apparatus actually helps, rather than hinders, us in our core mission.)
How are things going otherwise in my classes? So far 19th-Century Fiction seems great (I hope it’s not just me who thinks so!). It’s the Austen to Dickens version this term, and I took the risk of assigning Pride and Prejudice, which as regular readers will know 
My other class this term is a section of intro, once again the prosaically-named “Literature: How It Works.” But this time it’s in person, because I was so disheartened by the end of 
It used to be a ritual for me to post a recap of 
Like everyone else I know, I was really impressed by Elena Knows; it was a treat to find that Piniero’s 
Devotion or Semi-Detached (or, in parts, North Woods)—that otherwise deal in wholly human or natural problems. De Gregorio doesn’t resort to wish-fulfillment or fantasy and that is both the pain and the strength of her treatment of love and loss.
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.
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. (
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 
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”:
Novel Readings 