“I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.

Or not me. It was hard to tell.“

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 21, 2011)

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne’s sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona’s garden party, she is happily married to Conor. There are no outward signs that there is trouble in the marriage and, as I read this book, I did not see the marriage and any shortcomings as a reason for the affair. Gina saw Sean, felt lust, and let her impulses prevail. Sean is married and has a child named Evie who, at the time that Gina first meets Sean, is four years old.

The novel is not told in any particular linear order. It is related to the reader in fragments of memory that Gina recalls. “So don’t ask me when this happened or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I was concerned, they were happening all along.”

Always playing a key role is Evie, Sean’s daughter. When she is five she begins to have childhood seizures that continue for many years. Annette, Sean’s wife, is vigilant about Evie’s medical care and appears not to notice that Sean is otherwise preoccupied with Gina. Evie, however, has the sense that something is happening in her home that is not quite normal. At one point, she even sees Sean and Gina kissing on the stairs of her home.

The novel takes place at the start of Ireland’s economic boom in the nineties and progresses to the depressions that hits later on. As the novel starts, people are making more money than they know what to do with, buying second homes with ocean views and dropping hints about all the money that they have. By the time the novel ends, people are lucky just to have jobs. Their houses have been on the market for a very long time and no one is buying. The market has seen a real depression.

Gina tells the whole story in the first person and we go along with her as she does her best to remember what happened between her and Sean. She strongly believes that Evie is responsible for her and Sean’s love. Evie’s watchful eyes, times of poor health, and perspicacious study of her father and his lover mark an ever-present omen for Gina.

As the affair progresses, Gina finds out that she is not the first person Sean has been unfaithful with. There was a young woman in his office, many years ago, that Sean had courted and loved. Gina is careful not to ask Sean too many questions about this as she wants to see their relationship as special and romantic, which it is, but as life goes, it is not that unique. “Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen foot of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate.”

During the course of the affair, Gina deals with the death of her beloved mother, Joan, her estrangement from her sister, Fiona, and the breakdown of her marriage to Conor. She tries to see these events in relationship to the affair but they all have a full life separate from her love for Sean.

It takes Sean a long time to leave his wife, time that Gina waits for him in agony and pain. She had hoped they’d be together by Christmas but as April comes around, Sean is just beginning to move into Gina’s home. “It was delicate business, being the Not Wife.”

The affair takes on a triangular pattern – Sean, Gina and Evie. “I said it to Sean once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as if I had blasphemed.” “As far as he is concerned, there is no cause; he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.”

The book is filled with musical metaphors and reads poetically. Enright is a master of the inner mind and our deepest thoughts. She not only tells a story but she captures lives, sparing no moment, no movement and no detail. Nothing is too small for her to notice and reflect on. In fact, it is the small things that make up the big deeds that change our lives from one second to the next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (October 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anne Enright
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Gathering

Bibliography:

• The Portable Virgin : Stories (1991)
• The Wig My Father Wore (1995)
• What Are You Like? (2000)
• The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002)
• The Gathering (2007) 
• Yesterday’s Weather : Stories (2008)
• The Forgotten Waltz (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004)

“Playing chamber music involves an intimacy between people that is no weaker than the closeness of love or sex. To play with others is to be bound by and respond to their rhythms and desires without sacrificing your own. Like sex, great music can be made with someone you know well or not at all—and with someone you loathe so long as there is passion in your hatred. Yet, unlike sex, great music can be made even with someone you merely dislike. This explains why Petra, Daniel, and Suzanne play well with Anthony, even when they find his arrangements too facile. There is some other, unnamable sensibility they share.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (SEP 23, 2010)

Classical music, and the games of evasion and deception we play with the ones we love, create the engine that drives this lyrical, well-crafted story by acclaimed author Elise Blackwell. The premise is simple but compelling: Career violist Suzanne hears over the radio about the death of her lover, orchestral conductor Alex Elling, in a plane crash. She can only grieve secretly amid the members of her household, which include emotionally-distant husband Ben, irreverent best friend and fellow musician Petra and her young, deaf daughter. Suzanne soldiers on, rehearsing with her string quartet, playing second mother to Petra’s daughter, until a phone call from her former lover’s widow changes her life a second time. Suzanne and Alex’s secret affair was no secret, in the end, and now his widow extorts a favor from Suzanne: to finish the viola concerto started by her deceased husband. Desperate to keep the affair secret, even now, Suzanne reluctantly agrees.

Blackwell, who directs the University of South Carolina MFA program, excels in bringing small moments and insights to life through vivid detail that keeps the prose fresh and surprising. Pick a page, randomly, and odds are you’ll find some engrossing anecdote or pearl of wisdom about music, life, or class distinction, such as in the following:

“The houses she passes proclaim upper-middle-class respectability. Though Suzanne knows that unhappiness can invade any home, seeping through its cracks as easily as the scent of honeysuckle or skunk, and that all people are deeply strange when you really know them, it’s hard to imagine anything but perfectly browning apple pies, badminton games in the backyard, dinners eaten in the comfortable knowledge of growing stock portfolios.”

Initially the story’s pacing is languorous, chronicling Suzanne’s grief, her attempts to move forward, interspersed with flashbacks to her past, her time with Alex. An intriguing side story is the deafness Petra’s daughter suffers from, and Petra’s exploration of cochlear implants as a possible auditory enhancement, paving the way for some interesting introspection on the concept of hearing in general, and what it would be like to be forever closed off to sound, to music.

The story provides a wealth of information on classical music and its composers, the inner workings of a string quartet, the challenges of being a career musician. Other reviewers have argued that Blackwell used a heavy hand in the number of digressions about classical composers and concerts attended with Alex, but as a classical music enthusiast, I have to say I enjoyed that aspect of the story. Like Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, this is a music story for musicians.

The only false note came up in a flashback scene where Alex has used his conductor’s influence to have rising star violinist Joshua Felder (think Joshua Bell) perform, blindfolded, in a San Francisco hotel room, while Alex makes love to Suzanne in a bed four feet away. It seems to me a professional violist in a hotel room with one of the world’s top violinists would be far more interested in observing his performance and technique up close (and four feet is pretty darned close) versus the tawdry overtures—no pun intended—of a philandering conductor whose species, in general, is despised by orchestral musicians (add in the dictatorial nature, the seven-figure salary, and now you know why).

Could this really have happened? Sure, anything goes in a world where talent, ambition, desire and influence collide. But that Suzanne should remember the experience (and remember she does, referencing it three times in the story) as something romantic and exciting felt disingenuous, out of character for both her and the story. Further, a reference to Alex’s guest-conducting stint that night with the San Francisco “Philharmonic” (it’s the San Francisco Symphony) left me wondering uneasily if this were an attempt at fictionalizing, or an error that should have been caught.

That is my only rant. The rest is great stuff, fiction that strikes the perfect balance between literary and commercial. I enjoyed learning about Suzanne’s past, her career trajectory, her prospects and fears for the future, unsure of whether or not it would include husband Ben, whom apparently has plenty of hidden issues of his own. The other females in the story are masterfully drawn, in the form of Petra, a lively, opinionated, irreverent sort, raising a deaf daughter, sometimes taking rash action that serves to complicate everyone’s life. Olivia, Alex’s widow, is a wondrously vile creature, elegant, decisive and vindictive, and the reader, like Suzanne, can’t help but feel a mix of both admiration and dislike any time the woman sweeps into the room.

The novel is presented in the form of a concerto, with three movements. In the third part, the Appassionato, the story takes on a breathless, page-turning pace. As Suzanne puzzles through Alex’s concerto which Olivia plans to have premiered with a major orchestra, Suzanne is allowed a glimpse into who her lover was, deep inside, in a place incapable of lying. In his work, she searches for some last message from him. Her deepening confusion at the ambivalence is wonderfully depicted, turning the story into a psychological mystery of sorts, while, concurrently, dynamics in Suzanne’s personal life provide her with the same jolts of “who is this person I thought I knew so well?”

The story’s climax is well-paced and satisfying, casting new light on all that came before it, deepening each character, enriching the story as a whole. A coda neatly clears up loose bits and leaves us with one final image of music and the redemptive power it offers to those who serve it. An engrossing read on an evocative subject, An Unfinished Score should please fans of Blackwell’s previous writing and win her some new fans (myself included).

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Unbridled Books; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elise Blackwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:GrubUnnatural History of Cypress Parish Hunger

Bibliography:

• Hunger (May 2003)
• The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish (March 2007)
• Grub (September 2007)
• An Unfinished Score (April 2010)

“Don’t we all assume we’ll do it differently, not repeat the past? We believe with all out hearts that we can rise above the things [our parents] couldn’t. Sometimes, our beliefs blind us.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 19, 2010)

At first I thought this book was not for me as a male reviewer, for its focus is so much upon its central female character and her roles as daughter, wife, and mother. But I soon found Dori Ostermiller gripping me with her writing, and her uncanny ability to plot the emotional seismograph of a woman on the brink of an affair. “I want to ask if she ever felt she was falling through her life, pulled down through dream and memory by a force larger than gravity. I want to know if she felt the splintering pain of it — a terrible, fruitful pain like birth, a pain you can’t stop because you have to know what’s on the other side.”

The speaker is Sylvia Sandon, a 38-year-old artist living in the Berkshires, cautiously probing her mother about her own experience with adultery. Up to this point in the book, we have seen Sylvia in alternating chapters: as a rising teenager in California in the seventies caught on the edges of her mother’s affair, and as a mother herself three decades later, getting drawn into this affair of her own. While Ostermiller’s identification with the younger Sylvia is strong, her insight into the adult woman is extraordinary, as she struggles in vain against her attraction to the divorced father of one of her art students. One may not approve of Sylvia’s choices, but my goodness one feels for her.

Lurking in the background, however, is also the specter of child abuse. Not merely the physical violence that Sylvia’s father visited on her in his drunken rages, but the more subtle co-dependent relationship she was drawn into with both parents, which can be equally harmful in the long run. Sylvia’s mother recruited her daughters as allies, enablers, and secret-keepers in her long-running affair, playing into the unhealthy rivalry the girl was already feeling towards her father. Now Sylvia looks like repeating the mistake with her own children. Although the novel threatens to settle into a pattern in its middle section, Ostermiller keeps some surprises in store, showing that it may be possible to learn something from old errors. While avoiding facile conclusions, I found the outcome far more moving than I ever imagined I would.

It is not quite a perfect novel, though. It is hard to believe that Sylvia’s mother could keep her affair hidden from her husband for so long, when she even takes the children on holiday with her lover. More serious to me as a male reader is the comparative lack of dimension in Ostermiller’s male characters, unless she simply sees the world of men as inherently flawed. Sylvia has a tyrannical grandfather, a father given to outbursts of violence, and a well-meaning but excessively absent husband. To her credit, Ostermiller shows some of their good sides also, as when Sylvia, on the edge of her affair, is tormented by happy memories of her own courtship. But the male portraits are partial, and always seen through her eyes. Even Tai, the man she falls in love with, does not emerge as a character in his own right, so much as somebody who can touch Sylvia’s own private yearnings: “His lips fanned out inside the oval of his beard, broad and lonely, and it reminded me of the Northern California coast for some reason — a kind of beauty shot through with loss.”

And yet this is the imagery of an artist, which Sylvia is. When struggling to get a handle on her feelings, her confused emotions do become a kind of poetry. And I realize that Ostermiller is being entirely consistent in viewing her men exclusively through Sylvia’s eyes. Her mother’s lover is no more fleshed out than a young girl would see of him. Her own lover exists mainly in a dream world, because she never sees him in his everyday one. Her husband remains a shadow until she begins to think seriously about what she might be giving up by leaving him. I can admire the intensity of Ostermiller’s identification with Sylvia from a certain distance, but I bet there are many readers out there who will say: “In different circumstances, this might well be ME.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mira; Original edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dori Ostermiller
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other books to explore: Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart She is Me by Cathleen Schine

Bibliography:

• Outside the Ordinary World (July 2010)

“The fight went on from there, to such places as whether it took longer to do the laundry (my job) or the dishes (his). If there’s anything we’ve learned from the endless parsing of everything, it’s that nothing is ever about what it seems to be about….There’s a subtext to the subtext, every argument a rabbit hole. Do you we know why we’re angry? Do we know what we’re fighting about?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (JUN 17, 2010)

The first person narrator of Leah Stewart’s Husband and Wife is thirty-five year old Sarah Price, who has been married to Nathan Bennett, a fiction writer, for four years. They are the doting parents of an incredibly precocious three-year-old girl, Mattie, and a baby boy. Sarah, who was once a promising poet, is now a busy mother who has a full-time job as a business manager for the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University. She is perpetually worn-out, but considers herself to be relatively fulfilled. One day, Nathan throws a monkey-wrench into their relationship when he confesses that his new book, Infidelity, is not completely fictional. Nathan morosely admits, “I cheated on you.” These four words shake Sarah’s faith in her marriage, leading her to microscopically examine every facet of her life with the man she thought she knew.

Sarah and Nathan somehow go on (they have responsibilities, after all), but Nathan’s betrayal makes it difficult for Sarah to act as if nothing has happened. Although she freely acknowledges that Nathan is “a good stay-at-home parent” who “did a lot around the house,” she becomes increasingly agitated and even slightly unhinged. Although Nathan may feel better for having unburdened himself, he may have also destroyed Sarah’s self-esteem (“I looked fat in my dress, and I wasn’t a poet anymore”) and her ability to trust him.

Stewart is an accomplished writer who capably examines the rocky terrain of modern marriage. There is so much pressure on young couples to balance parenthood, a profession, and a social life. As a result, they may become too preoccupied with the minutiae of their day-to-day routines and forget that love needs constant nurturing. The author, who is a married mother of two, knows this terrain well. Stewart understands that Sarah, who breastfeeds, entertains Mattie, bathes and diapers her son, and goes to work every day, has become so frazzled that she is ill-equipped to deal with so much domestic drama.

Although Husband and Wife has its strengths, it would have been far more effective had Sarah showed even a semblance of maturity. Instead of dealing with her problems constructively, Sarah wallows in self-pity and makes herself and everyone she encounters miserable. She has an irresistible urge to hurt Nathan: “Who doesn’t want to punish the person who’s punished them?” Although he is not a flawless human being, Nathan is intelligent, funny, and sensitive. He is also an involved and devoted father who loves his wife and is committed to saving their marriage. Sarah, on the other hand, admits that she “was a child of the good times” who does not handle disappointment well and, as a result, panics when she encounters the inevitable bumps in the road. This novel is both entertaining and irritating. We grow to care about Nathan and Sarah, but at the same time, we want to shake them for taking one another for granted and being so stupidly narcissistic.

Editor’s Note:  This would be a great pick for a book club… see the link below for the Reading Guide and the long list of discussion questions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leah Steward
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More husbands and wives: On Beauty by Zadie Smith Marriage: A Duet by Anne Taylor Fleming Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck

Bibliography:

• Body of a Girl (2000)
• The Myth of You and Me (2005)
• Husband and Wife (May 2010)

Everything is illusion, and I am confident that all is well. – a Tibetan adept

Book Review:

Review by Beth Chariton (JAN 11, 2010)

Francis’s story is a familiar one – she’s a housewife who’s bored in her marriage, unfulfilled as a mother at home, and unsure of her own identity. She’s married to reliable, boring, regular Harry. They live in the suburbs of New York City with their two children, seven-year-old Cathy and three-year-old Bernie. The man she was once so attracted to when they married, has become chubby, clumsy, and pathetic in her eyes.

Francis meets Beat poet, Joseph Pasternak at a wedding. He’s the total opposite of Harry – he’s artsy, philosophical, worldly and poetic, and she’s immediately smitten. She begins to fantasize about him, and they write personal letters to each other almost daily, full of erotic and romantic possibilities. Within a few weeks she’s on her way to Colorado where they begin an illicit, irrational affair. With Joseph, Francis creates her fantasy world where she feels sexy, desirable, living a life that’s passionate, interesting, and way more exciting than her regular life.

Harry is angry and upset by the affair, which Francis does very little to conceal, but he refuses to leave his wife and break up their family. While she’s away with Joseph, Harry tends to the house, the kids, and his job as an engineer. At first, he sleeps on the couch, but then builds himself a hut in the backyard, where he sleeps and works.

Joseph is not a self made man; he has been molded by his common law wife, Arlene Manhunter, a powerful and persuasive woman who is used to getting what she wants, and is relentless in her pursuits. She’s the respected founder of a school of poetry and translation, and she conveniently makes Joseph a Sanskrit professor. She provides him with a lifestyle that any man could want, in the hopes of calming his wandering eye.

When Arlene realizes that Francis might be a real threat, she does everything in her power to separate Joseph from her. She harasses Francis, threatening her by phone, and telling her of Joseph’s other indiscretions, hoping to scare her away, but Francis doesn’t care. When Arlene can no longer control Joseph, and sees he’s used her to get ahead, she disappears, knowing he will be arrested for suspicion of murder. Fearing that she’s next on the list of suspects, Francis begs Harry to let her go to Paris with their daughter, Cathy. He relents after many heated arguments.

Once in Paris, Francis takes on a carefree and bohemian existence, another fantasy world. Like Joseph, Paris is exhilarating to her, and she can’t understand why her daughter doesn’t immediately fall in love with the city. They go to museums and cafes, from hotel to hotel, oblivious to their limited funds. Their time there is extravagant and unrealistic, much like Francis’ affair with Joseph.

After some time in Paris, they realize they’re being watched. Eventually, Cathy and Francis befriend Lewis, the private investigator who’s been sent to follow them. Francis is still in contact with Joseph, who is in prison. But as time passes, the flaws of her relationship with Joseph begin to surface, and she realizes that she’s a long way from home, and the comfortable life that she took for granted. Although she’s suspicious, Francis begins to answer Lewis’ questions, finally exposing the truth – that she was in over her head, caught in a love triangle where she had no control, and that she had nothing to do with the disappearance of Arlene Manhunter.

The book was intricately written, and driven by frustrating characters. At first, I couldn’t find anything to like about Francis – she seemed selfish, insensitive and narcissistic. I couldn’t understand what she saw in Joseph. He saw himself as the victim in all of his failed affairs, couldn’t sustain himself financially, and had no official professional merits that he’d accomplished independently. But yet sensually, many women were drawn to him as a poet and a lover of nature. Harry consistently appeared as a doormat, and I wanted him to put Francis in her place. And Arlene, who was so beautiful, talented and capable, ended up to be no more personally assured than the others in the story. As the story slowly developed, I realized how hard Francis was trying to be someone she never would be, and how saddened and defeated she was by accepting her life and who she had become.

There were points where I almost ran out of patience, waiting to see a glimpse of a redeeming quality in Francis, while Joseph’s surface charm quickly dissipated. I found myself disappointed that Harry didn’t have more self-respect. The ending was depressing, and other than Francis realizing that the affair had to end, and that she had taken her wonderful family life for granted, I couldn’t find any positive outcome for any of the other characters. However, the story was thought provoking, and could certainly inspire a number of interesting and reflective debates. It was definitely geared more towards women, and many will secretly relate to Francis and her personal dilemma.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (August 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Beth Chariton
AMAZON PAGE:	Beat
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Only information I could find on Amy Boaz
EXTRAS:	Another review of BEAT
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	This one makes me think of : Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates Good Morning, Darkness by Ruth Francisco

Bibliography:

• A Richer Dust (March 2008)
• Beat (August 2009)