Month: August 2008

As an soothing antidote to Joyce Carol Oates, I read Anne Tyler. She restores the humanity to human beings and keeps you smiling if not laughing out loud. Rebecca is a fiftyish grandmother who realizes (as who does not at that age?) that she has ended up with a huge and diverse family and is not sure how she got there.

The Davitches are a hapless but entertaining lot….actually entertaining by renting their Victorian house and catering for faux-luxurious group parties. Widowed soon after marriage, Rebecca overcomes her own shyness to become the socializing hostess who makes this all work. The characters, ranging from her own prissy mother to the prissy ex-fiance she might have married and including all the odd and often sparring yet somehow endearing members of the Davitch clan are as delightful as a cast in a Noel Coward comedy.

Joyce Carol Oates has written another terrible book…a traumatic experience ….which should be required reading for all incipient parents, especially the well-to-do.  The damage wreaked on nine-year-old-Skyler Rampike (recall Ramsay?) and his six-year-old sister (wee skating star tarted up and renamed BLISS by her socially insecure publicity grasping mother is unbelievable.

But narrated in the voice of the still teenaged boy struggling to put down memories foggy with prescribed drugs it is all too believable.  He captures the Mommy Dearest voice and the hearty self  congratulatory voice of the CEO-to-be father as well as the smarmy Jesus-loves-you voice of the arena church preacher and those of psychopharmacologists prescribing drug after drug, TV hosts battening on family trageidies, McMansion-plus peddling realtors and other wonderful figures of our upper class and aspiring middle class social ladder climbing castes.

She nails them and puts their heads up on spikes.: sadistic prep school teachers, frantic trainers of the hapless offspring of would-be-Olympic winners parents, drug-addled children of blue-collar criniinals, murderers (remember a sports hero indited for the murder of his wife and lover?) and others.

Yet the teen aged boy, rumored to have murdered his sister at the age of nine, still manages to make understandable if not sympathetic the terrible adults in this relentlessly gripping murder mystery.

Richard Russo sounds like a Mainer as he tells the story of a northern mill and lumber town fallen on hard times largely in the phlegmatic voice of Miles Roby, who came home from college to take care of his dying mother and was persuaded to stay on as manager of a grill owned by the widow of the town’s largest property owner.

Slow to act, Miles is also slow to perceive that he is being manipulated, as was his mother, by the vindictive Mrs. Whiting, whose husband once loved Miles’ mother, and by his father, a shrewd self-serving parasitic drunkard.

The story gradually reveals to Miles secrets probably known to others in his town and to his brother. There is a dramatic retribution in the end that almost destroys his daughter but results in a healthier relationship of Miles and his family and for the town, long subjected to a wealthy woman’s domination.

It is a painful and life-changing experience to read Michael Lavigne’s account of the holocaust seen through the eyes of a dutiful Nazi bookkeeper at a concentration camp who escapes the Russians by posing as a Jewish prisoner. Contemptuous of Jews by upbringing and indoctrination, he slowly morphs into a religious Jew himself, who spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the atrocities he took part in.

Whether by design or not, this man’s son is also a Michael. He slowly learns of his father’s dual identity and comes to accept the love that is finally made clear to him.

For the reader as for Michael, the atrocities of the camps and the later sufferings of the Israelis in their first war with the Arabs are terrible reminders of the extremes of human cruelty.

I am happy to have discovered British author Madeleine Wickham. She provides not only an entertaining story but thoughtful characters and an unpredictable plot.

In this book she brings together two couples who do not at first realize they have connections in both the past and the present that could change their lives. We soon learn that the first connection is an old love affair but the second remains undetected for most of the book.Hugh and Amanda, Chloe and Gerard have very distinct and unlike personalities, all interesting, none a stereotype. Jenna, the nanny, is perhaps the most entertaining of all, with her acute perceptions of all that is going on and the jolting contrast between youth and adult cultures. Even the children are of interest, four very unique young persons. There is also a mildly diabolical meddling acquaintance at work here who gets his just desserts in the end.

In THE GATECRASHER, Wickham depicts a beautiful woman,  Isabel, orphaned in a foreign land as a teenager, who has survived by going to funerals of the wives of wealthy men, luring the widowers into becoming her lovers, and eventually disappearing with a large chunk of cash off their Gold Cards.

I begin to recognize some character types…the naive boy-man who is educated by a wiser-than-her-years girl-woman, in both books the son of the male protagonist and here the daughter, Zara, of Isabel, who also convinces her mother to finally try staying with a good man who has plenty of money.