They belonged here. Of course. It was obvious. They belonged here and they should be here. Why not? Why on earth not? Why should she and Polly leave the Point to a land trust rather than to the people who had loved it the longest? Her heart pounded. It had taken her her whole life to see it, but now that she did, nothing could be as clear. The simple truths are always hidden in plain sight, only veiled by the complications of the human mind.
I read almost all of Fellowship Point‘s 575 pages in a single day, which is a testament to how engrossing I found it. That said, by the time I finished it I was disappointed in it: although it is admirably smart and ambitious and encompasses a lot of people, events, and themes, there’s a central plot “resolution” that I found very artificial, not satisfying in any way except as a planned revelation to pull things too neatly together. Furthermore, the final resolution about the future of the land known as Fellowship Point, while the right answer in probably every way, nonetheless felt awkwardly didactic as it actually played out. (Note that I avoid saying exactly what that plot point is or what happens to the land: this is partly because I consider it a courtesy to avoid spoilers here, but also because if you do go on to read the novel itself, I don’t want my stamp of disapproval to mark these elements too prominently. My guess is that you’ll recognize them in any case, but you may well respond to them differently!)
Fellowship Point is like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel if it were written by Elizabeth Strout: it’s a family saga that sprawls across generations, and it’s a close-up study of two idiosyncratic older women, Agnes and Polly, long-time best friends, whose lives are intimately connected to their neighboring family properties on the coast of Maine. These two women are the best part of the book, and since they are a big part of it, that’s a good thing! Agnes is the most Strout-like of the two, acerbic, independent, uncompromising, unmarried—a grouch with a heart of gold. Polly is kinder, gentler, easier, more accommodating. She is married to a Casaubon-like scholar, a retired philosophy professor struggling to sustain his self-esteem and sense of purpose now that he’s cut off from formal academic life. I had to laugh at his response to Polly’s helpful suggestion that “until his next book came out he write a weblog to express his opinions”:
“Are you serious?” He frowned. “A weblog, on the computer? I’d be laughed out of the profession. . . . ” He’d adopted blog as a catchphrase rather than an activity. “Time to work on my blog,” he’d say for all kinds of transitions—when he repaired to the bathroom, for example.
OK, fair enough! But Polly’s ideas aren’t in fact foolish ones, in this case or in other circumstances, and much of the novel is about her learning to trust herself and her judgment, to stand up against his and then her sons’ tendency to belittle or dismiss her, often in the condescending guise of loving concern.
Agnes, in contrast, has to get out of her own way, to stop guarding her secrets and make space in her life for love and forgiveness. This means reckoning with a traumatic incident from her past, which we learn about through the device of a long series of letters she wrote to her dead sister, which she eventually decides to share with the novel’s third protagonist, Maud Silver, an ambitious young editor eager to convince Agnes to write a full and frank memoir.
For me, it was the letters that began to sap the energy of the novel. They felt like a device, for one thing, an answer to “how do we get this backstory in?” Agnes as shown through the third-person narration is a more vivid and engaging character than Agnes in their first-person voice, too. And the backstory itself took way too long to unspool. I was curious about it, but after a while I was tempted to skim through the letters so I could just find out what the big deal was. Once I knew and I began to suspect how the other pieces fit together, I got somewhat irritable about it all, even though I liked Agnes and Polly enough to want to know how it all turned out.
Thematically, the most substantial issue in the novel is people’s relationship to the land they live on: how ideas about ownership or stewardship, about belonging or sharing or developing or loving the land, affect how it is treated and reflect other, broader, values about how we live in the world. In her acknowledgements, Dark says
As a child I learned that I lived on land where indigenous peoples had lived for hundreds of years. I never stopped thinking about this and wondering what to do about it. The question found its way into this novel. I hope we all find a just answer.
I think the novel does offer “a just answer” to its own specific scenario, but it comes across as pat, rather than as artistically satisfying. It’s true that clues about what that answer might or should be are present from early in Fellowship Point, and maybe if I reread it I would find that this thread (political, ethical, and thematic) is interwoven more richly than I noticed. Maybe, too, it’s thematically appropriate to keep the better alternative to the two options that are more overtly the novel’s central conflict out of sight until nearly the end: it makes sense, I suppose, that the third option wouldn’t even occur to Agnes, loving Fellowship Point and its family history as she does, until quite late—indeed, almost too late. Maybe this answer was meant to feel disruptive of our expectations, especially given the novel’s otherwise familiar genre. All I can say is that I wasn’t convinced by it, however just and right it is in principle, as the right ending for Fellowship Point or, to look at it the other way around, Fellowship Point didn’t read to me like the right novel for that ending. There’s just too much else going on in it that doesn’t really tie in to it.
I also wasn’t in love with Maud’s plot, and I really didn’t like the Big Reveal about it . . . but enough criticism. Really, it’s strange that I have so many complaints about the novel, considering how immersed I was in it in the moment. It is very readable, clearly. I don’t mean that as damning it with faint praise: it’s a lot! Many novels don’t achieve even that much. I appreciated, too, the obvious ambition of the novel, even if, in my judgment, its ambition is not matched by its achievement. Before I read it, I was surprised that my local independent bookstore has it filed under “fiction,” rather than “literature.” I’m always amused by their confident distinction between these two categories and I’m often tempted to challenge them both on the concepts and on their choices about what goes where. Now I think that in this case, they got it right—which isn’t to say it isn’t a good novel, but I am not at all convinced that it’s a great one.
It was a strange teaching term, at times hard, awkward, and demoralizing, but also at times invigorating, engaging, even restorative. This is true of every term, I suppose, but I really felt this emotional ebb and flow this time, probably because I am still grappling with what it means to carry on with my “normal” life after Owen’s death: I can’t really take any aspect of it for granted, and the more normal things seem in the moment the more 
I have always worried that students who attend irregularly are missing out on that broader learning experience, and also that sporadic attendance can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you just show up occasionally, you might not recognize the value of what we are doing or know how to join in to get the most out of it. The most obvious policy response is to require attendance, and I do believe in a version of “if you build it, they will come”—if you mandate it, they will (maybe, eventually, hopefully!) start to see the value of it. Mandatory attendance creates its own problems, though, from the administrative burden of recording it (especially with large classes) to the difficulty of having and applying fair policies that take accessibility and other issues into account and don’t lead to constant wrangling over what counts as a “legitimate” absence. For many years now I have not required or graded attendance, though I do always take attendance, so that I have some sense of who is or isn’t showing up and can reach out to anyone who seems like they might be in trouble. Before COVID, I also experimented with a range of different in-class exercises for credit, using them both for low-stakes practice at key course objectives and to “incentivize” being present. I think this is the approach I will go back to next year.
Another reason to return to more in-class work is the relentless encroachment of AI. Other people have written well about what it means for those of us whose life’s work is helping students learn to read, think, and write better, and about what we can and can’t, should and shouldn’t, do in response. (See 
Actually, I kind of love the idea that the novel’s narrator “would rather have tea than everything else in the world” (me too!)—but of course this is absolutely not a passage from the novel; it’s just a jumble of nonsense. Students are already willing to put in a remarkable (to me) amount of effort “hiding” or “fixing” material they have copied from other sources, to conceal their reliance on it, but I doubt most of them are up to the task of getting crap like this into passable form. Mind you, to know it’s crap, they would need at least some familiarity with the novel: what shocked me with the ChatGPT cases I had this term was that they included quotations that were simply not in the actual assigned text, and the students didn’t even notice. As students get more familiar with the bot’s limitations, they may (may!) find it is actually less work (and less risk) to just do the reading and assignment themselves.
Next term: what a thought. A year ago the very idea of being back in the classroom was completely overwhelming. It seemed impossible, unthinkable. “How do they do that?” I puzzled as I reflected on 
And then, just like the cemetery cats, the sun reached as far as my room, reached under my sheets. I opened the curtains, and then the windows. I went back downstairs to the kitchen, boiled the water for the tea, and aired the room. I finally returned to the garden. Finally gave fresh water to the flowers. I welcomed the families once again, served them something hot and strong to drink.
It isn’t that Violette isn’t warm or compassionate: reflecting on the demands of her strange job, which include assisting and often comforting those who come to bury or visit their loved ones in the cemetery she oversees, she says “for a woman like me, not feeling compassion would be like being an astronaut, a surgeon, a volcanologist, or a geneticist. Not part of my planet. Or my skill set.” She has been “destroyed,” though, and as a result has retreated into herself, leaving love and happiness to others—until things change and she resolves that “unhappiness has to stop someday,” even unhappiness stemming from a grief as intense as hers for her dead daughter Léonine.
As a cemetery keeper, Violette is surrounded by other people’s death and mourning: a connoisseur of funerals, she believes you can understand and maybe even judge someone’s life by the send-off they get. She records every one in her notebook: the weather, the coffin, the flowers, the family and friends, the speeches. She knows her quiet neighbors’ birth and death dates and often much of the story of what came in between; she tends affectionately to their graves, watering, weeding, cleaning. Her work and thus the novel is a provocation to think about the many ways people live and then die. “Death,” as Violette observes
It’s a long list, two pages, and even though it’s not Owen’s list, I couldn’t (can’t) stop crying as I read it, because it’s so true that part of what you are grieving is that future, the one you pour your hope, your effort, your time, your love, your heart into as a parent. Thankfully, Perrin avoids easy, inadequate clichés about consolation, the kind of implicit or explicit messages that hurt rather than help. There is no 
In fact, there’s quite a lot going on in Fresh Water for Flowers, and although overall I really enjoyed the novel, I did wonder sometimes if it needed quite so many elements. Violette seemed like enough to me, although I suppose it would be harder to appreciate the journey she makes from death back to life without the rich ambience the novel provides, in which life and love and loss and death and humor and tragedy and pain and beauty are constantly mingling and the sheer variety of human character and experience is a recurrent motif. Every chapter begins with what I saw as epigraphs, but which are referred to in the discussion questions at the end of the novel as “epitaphs,” which surprised me and then made perfect sense, even though many of them are not quite the kind of thing you’d actually carve on a tombstone. It’s a novel that immerses us in death, but in the spirit of inviting us to think about life. Violette’s specific path from the darkness back into the light felt a bit pat to me, a bit too easy and romantic, but maybe that’s what novels are for, at least some of the time. In the book of life, after all, as the epigraph / epitaph for Chapter 5 reminds us,
Griffith brings the same dedication of detail to the fight scenes, which are brutal but also fluid in a way that reflects Peretur’s mystical connection to nature and especially to animals, including the horse she rides in a dramatic test bout with Lanza (better known to most of us as Sir Lancelot). And she brings a commitment to another kind of historical accuracy: inclusion. “This could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men,” she explains;
April comes and April goes, whether you want her to or not. In the teaching term, it is always a blur of a month—a bit out of control, like rolling down a hill. I used to welcome the feeling—the exhilaration of finishing up, the anticipation of summer—but this year it is just one more reminder of how relentlessly, and how strangely, time passes.
The other books I read all of in April (I’m assuming I won’t finish another one by Sunday) were Elspeth Barker’s O, Caledonia and Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture. It’s hard to imagine two books with less in common! I enjoyed O, Caledonia a lot, although it is strange and wild and—I thought—a bit random, almost artless: as I read it, I was often surprised, even confused, by it, uncertain why this was what was happening or this particular detail was in it. Yet it felt unified, nonetheless: maybe that strangeness itself unifies it! Its fierce protagonist Janet takes the “not like other girls” trope to an extreme: she’s equal parts compelling and appalling. It has something of the flavor of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
March was a rough month. For one thing, I had more academic integrity hearings stemming from a single assignment than I’ve ever had in one term. It was an exceptionally disheartening experience, especially given the lengths I have gone to in my introductory class to reduce the risk for students of just trying to do the work for themselves: this is the class in which I’m using specifications grading, meaning there is really no risk involved. As I plaintively reminded the class as it became clear just how widespread the problem was, the class is designed to make it safe to be wrong, safe to be confused, safe to be learning. But if you don’t actually do your own writing, you strip the whole process of its meaning. Plus (as I pointed out to many students in the actual hearings), if your uncertainty leads you to copying other people’s writing, you will never build your own skills and your own confidence: you will never find out that you can in fact do the work, and get better at it.
Easily the best novel I read in March was Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows. This was recommended to me last year when I was (as I so often am) casting about for new ideas for my two mystery fiction courses. I started it then but had to abandon it, as a novel about suicide and a mother’s grief was not an experience I could bear. I kept it on my mental TBR, though, and I’m glad I tried again, because it really is exceptional: slight but fierce and complex, with its overlapping interests in disability, ageism, misogyny, and autonomy. I think it would be a really interesting book to read in my course on Women & Detective Fiction, even though in many ways it is not really a mystery. It is certainly about a crime – or, crimes, if you think socially and systemically – and there is an investigation, even if there isn’t a detective, or evidence, or any of the other conventional elements.
It has been quiet around here. I’m not really sure why that is. I’ve been busy at work, but that has never stopped me before. When this term began, I intended to make posting about my teaching routine again. When I kept that up, in the old days, it didn’t matter if I felt I had something in particular to say when I started: eventually I would discover what I had to say, because (as I’ve been trying to convince my first-year students) that’s how writing works. My reading hasn’t been going very well, but I used to write about it anyway.
After I finished Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, I commented on Twitter that I was finding cold, meticulous novels wearing and asked for recommendations of good, recent warm-hearted fiction. Along with the understandable and spot-on nods to writers I already know well (such as Barbara Pym and Anne Tyler), I got a lot of good tips, which I am still working through. Here are the ones I have read so far. I have to say that while they have all been fine, none of them really got much traction with me: I don’t think it is necessarily the case that “warm-hearted” means lightweight, but that’s how these mostly felt. I don’t think I will remember much about them. The exception so far is 
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book. I liked this one quite a lot except for the uneasiness it created in me about what kind of book it is, exactly. I realize that is one of the main points of the book, to destabilize assumptions about what constitutes a memoir or a novel or autofiction or whatever. I understood this because McCracken makes rather a lot of noise about it: “What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir?” she asks; “I couldn’t tell you. Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.” “It’s not a made-up place,” she says about a trip she and her mother make to the theater (or do they?),
I’ve been ordering next year’s books — not because I’m that ahead of the game in general but because early ordering enables the bookstore to retain leftover copies from this year’s stock and students to get cash back at the end of term if they have books we’re using again. I’m teaching a couple of the same classes again in 2023-24 (my first-year writing class and Mystery & Detective Fiction) and so it isn’t too hard to get those orders sorted out. While I was at it, I thought I’d also make my mind up about which novels I’d assign for the Austen to Dickens course (this year I’m doing Dickens to Hardy — once upon a time I taught them both every year, but now I do them in alternate years) . . . and this has had me thinking about how my reading lists have changed over the past twenty years.
I could still add a fifth book to next year’s list if I want to. So far, I’m committed to Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Warden. In 2017 I assigned Persuasion, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, North and South, and Great Expectations for the same course; in 2013 the list was Persuasion, Waverley, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and North and South (I remember that year distinctly, because it was the year of the 
The last train was in forty minutes. I pulled the sleeves of my jacket over my hands and wrapped my arms around myself as I sat on the bench to wait. Eventually, I got up and bought a bottle of sake from one of the vending machines. It was clear and cold, tasting at first of alcohol and something vaguely sweet, before evaporating into nothing. After a while, I was no longer cold, but only very tired. I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.
Novel Readings 