Author: Bev Tappan

Anne Tyler takes us with 40-year-old Delia as she steps off the ladder of her family life and starts over from the bottom. How often we have felt like doing the same. The death of a father, increasingly cooler relations with her teenagers, long resentment of her doctor husband’s seemingly superior attitude, and (most of all) anger that he seems to have married her to inherit her father’s medical practice all combine to send her walking off the beach during a family vacation, into the van of a plumber returni

As in Ordinary Life and True to Form, Elizabeth Berg speaks through the lips of children with remarkable sensitivity, as pre-teens Ginny and Sharla tell us about their early years with a “perfect” mother and their lifelong resentment of her leaving them to pursue a successful career as an artist.

The story alternates skillfully between the adult and the childhood memories, evoking our liking and sympathy for a frustrated wife, a bewildered husband and two unforgiving children, recreating their world for us in loving and illuminating detail.

We also carry away its message, that in order to become true adults we must let go of all the bitterness we harbor toward our parents.

David Snowdon writes a very readable memoir about how he came to know and study a large group of retired nuns for research into the problems of aging, including Alzheimer’s Disease, for which this study was and continues to be a premiere data source.

It is a pleasure to become acquainted with and see pictures of these lively and appealing women who have selflessly donated their brains to research for the benefit of us all.

For anyone wishing to understand the causes and  progress of and the  different outcomes and possible palliatives for this disease which 85% of people 70 to 90 will develop, this book is a goldmine of information in an easily understandable form.  Surprisingly, the age group 90 to 105 appears to have survived or avoided the risks of  developing Alzheime4r’s.  They are “home free”.

I have loved every one of Fannie Flagg’s novels about the little Missouri town where neighbors, especially women, keep track of all that goes on.

In this episode, Elner Shimfissle gets an early glimpse of heaven and former neighbors now residing there but returns to tell the tale.

In her lighthearted tone, Flagg still manages to remind us of serious problems including abused children and wives, racial disharmony, problems at modern hospitals, profiteering lawsuits and others. She also leaves us with encouragement about what good folks can do to alleviate those evils.

Having long enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana series about the Lady Detectives, I read with anticipation one of his Edinburgh series about the inquisitive Isabel Dalhousie, well-to-do middle-aged single mother with a young lover.

Her experiences with a  new baby and his father, formerly the rejected boyfriend of a still-jealous niece, are as  interesting as her investigation into the mysterious origins of a seemingly new painting by a reputedly dead artist. As always, Smith sews up all the loose threads into satisfying outcomes.

And the Scottish scenes are evocative of our memories of a three-week walking vacation there.

The word RURAL does not do justice to the reality of Jimmy Carter’s boyhood.  Hard scrabble, heavy farm work from the age of five on, barefoot plowing with a mule, it all sounds more like Abe Lincoln than Carter.  But it is a true picture of his family and life in the Georgia farmlands during the Depression.  He then had more black friends than white.

Refreshing to read of a President who worked hard and kept to a solid code of morality both as a youngster and as an adult.

Meredith Hall’s memoir was of special interest to me as I am very familiar with Hampton Beach, where the pivotal moment takes place for this All-A, pride of the family student when she has an unfortunate naive sexual encounter on the beach.  As naive as I was at her age, the same thing could have happened to me on the night I double-dated with an equally naive friend two sailors on wartime leave.  We went to Revere Beach.  Luckily my date was not as predatory as Hall’s.

The ensuing story of Hall’s life as she pulls herself up from beatnik poverty to teacher of college litereature is moving and instructive, if a bit disjointed.

Ian McEwan reconstructs moment by moment, in every sensual detail, the dawn to dawn Saturday of a London neurosurgeon, from his unusually early awakening in time to see a fiery plane arrowing toward land to his emergency operation, in the pre dawn hours of Sunday, on the brain of a man who has threatened to kill him.

What he sees on the streets, hears on the radio, remembers, thinks while operating, feels for his wife, we share the whole experience as he talks with his talented blues musician son and newly published poet daughter, his lawyer wife, her irascible famous poet father, colleagues, patients, finally a dangerous brain damaged mugger.

Ironically, the writer McEwan describes in 19th century style prose  the slow evolution of  a physician’s mind almost devoid of poetry to evaluate the imagery with which his daughter celebrates her young sexuality.

For the reader there are astonishing new experiences in the world of neurosurgeons, London city life, blues guitar style, and Huntington’s Disease among others.

Similarly, McEwan’s On Chesil Beach describes a failed honeymoon in which a talented violinist whose chamber ensemble will become famous finds herself repulsed by the messy details of first sex with her earnest but inexpert young husband, a history major from a blue collar family. We come to know their parents, their homes, their early and later lives, and especially the details of Chesil Beach in this short novel, almost, for my stomach, too much about the sexual details of their unconsummated union.

In both books the plot, slight as it is, carries us along: will the doctor and his family survive, will the young lovers reconcile, although we think we know the answers from the first. And we feel we have lived for awhile in England, among different but not totally unfamiliar people.

A painful read by the author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, this is the story of two wives of a brutal, murderous shoemaker in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The first wife, Mariam, is the illegitimate daughter of a prosperous businessman, affectionate but spineless when it comes to defying tradition and bringing her up as one of the family.  Instead, he farms her out with her servant mother in a remote shepherd’s hut where, ironically, she spends a happy childhood, the happiest days of her life.

Then she is married as a teenager to a lecherous widower who hopes to spawn a son.  When no offspring appear he becomes brutal, but Mariam soldiers on with her household work.

Then Rasheed finds another teenager, this time the cherished, beautiful daughter of a teacher whose parents are killed by a bomb which leaves Laila almost dead.  Before long Racheed insists she marry him, which she quickly agrees to do because she is newly pregnant with her childhood sweetheart’s child.

At first Mariam is jealous of the new wife, but in time she and Laila bond in rebellion against Rasheed and one of them eventually finds freedom and a precarious happiness.

Conditions are incredibly appalling for these Arabian slave-women.  To read of them is an awakening for those of us who enjoy the right to own property, vote and live independently.

This collection of short stories by Elizabeth Berg shows all her strengths in  vignettes of plain folks of all ages…79 years old Mavis McPherson taking a few days’ retreat in her bathroom to revisit her memories, a home nurse relating to a difficult Aides patient, junior scientist Sarah Harris teaching English to a newly immigrated German grandmother, and other delightful persons.

These brief encounters encourage one to read Berg’s novelettes.  So far I have enjoyed WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE, in which ten-year-old Diana copes with her own conflicting resentment and  love while helping to care for her quadruplegic mother.  Berg captures children’s voices particularly well, I think.  In a compelling subplot, Diana’s astringent housekeeper chooses between loyalty to her employer and flight to save the life of her civil-rights protesting husband in that time when blacks were beaten and killed for efforts to obtain their voting and social rights.

In THE YEAR OF PLEASURES  newly widowed Bostonian Betta Nolan follows her beloved late husband’s encouragement to try out their dream of a house in the MidWest and her own dream of a store full of lovely things for women.  Here poignant moments from the past are skillfully interwoven with the demands of the present in a new environment.

TRUE TO FORM is narrated by a preteen who reluctantly accepts two summer jobs she expects to hate: helping an aging husband care for his stroke-damaged wife and baby-sitting for two obnoxious little boys.  To her surprise she does well at both jobs and comes to empathize  with  all her charges.  In addition she  learns that when one betrays an old friend in the effort to impress new ones, the result can be painful but instructive.

Here is a memoir, no fiction, which compares well with The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Like Rebecca, Jeannette Walls pulls herself up out of an incredibly filthy, abusive and deprived childhood to become a woman of culture, in this case a journalist.

Her parents are not immigrants but 60’s hippies, a brilliant but erratic engineer with complete architectural plans for a solar- maintained glass mansion, and an artist with no time for homemaking or mothering. The conditions are hard scrabble, first camping in western deserts and then barely housed without plumbing or heat and always, always hungry.

Yet Jeannette and her brother and sister save themselves. . She goes to Barnard College. At the end of their lives, despite efforts by their daughters to house them, her feckless parents choose to be homeless and living out of dumpsters in New York City.

Amazingly Jeannette never totally condemns them. There is humor and loyalty and tolerance for their foolishness throughout her history, an experience that would have destroyed most of us.

Joyce Carol Oates’ novel appears to be based in part on the history of her grandmother, daughter of a German math teacher and printer (Lutheran, not Jewish) who with his music loving but emotionally fragile wife and two sons manages to buy their passage out of Germany to escape the Nazis’ persecution of teachers.  The daughter, here called Rebecca Schwart (the misnomer given Joseph at Ellis Island), was born on the cattleboat in New York Harbor in the filthy conditions they somehow survived

The upstate New York town hires Joseph as gravedigger but does not give him enough to live on and the squalid cottage with contaminated water in which they struggle to live is a disgrace, but we see that in their eyes this educated couple seem like ignorant peasants speaking broken English.

Joseph becomes  trapped and broken, finally suicidally manic with delusions of Nazi troopers among the graveyard visitors.  His sons are not able to rise above day labor work.

It is a harsh story which loses some of its forcefulness as the angry. sturdy bodied  Rebecca transforms herself into  delicate, sexy, fastidious and impeccably dressed Hazel Jones (a name she adopts with its own murderous history), mother of a child music prodigy.

But in the final chapters, as she struggles to reconnect with her origins, we see the real Rebecca emerge again.

The American reader must feel a load of guilt, similar to that experienced in Snow Falling on Cedars, at how callously we have treated not only Nazi=fleeing German immigrants and native born Japanese citizens but also at how we still look down on and resist the influx of present day immigrants.