“Fatherhood held at its heart a sweet, paradoxical masochism, the self-abnegation of one willing to die for another. Why else would he have come to this place?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUN 19, 2011)

The core of this exotic fusion of mainstream and literary fiction is defined by the eponymous title– displacement, exclusion, alienation, and even expulsion. The exquisite, poetic first chapter thrusts the reader immediately into a remote setting in Kathmandu 2006, where American cardiologist, Peter Scanlon and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Alex, face a guerilla death squad in the Himalayas. The reader is instantly spellbound with the story, where survival and danger coalesce in a taut, tense thriller that examines contrasts in exile: spirituality within human suffering, inner peace outside of war, and prosperity beyond pestilence.

Backtrack to 2005, and the events that shaped the current peril of the Scanlons. Peter, forced to expel his troubled daughter from proximity to her meth addict mother, removes her from the U.S. to start a new life. At his persuasion, Alex pitches a dart at an atlas to select a new home, which lands on Kathmandu, a deep valley surrounded by colossal mountains, and a politically sensitive and turbulent place marred by outlaws, massacres and instability. Peter gets a job at a volunteer health clinic, where diseases he has never seen and cries he has never heard permeate the city and pierce his cynical American heart.

Warring Maoists pervade the mountainside and threaten the life of citizens, and the lawless and nihilistic underworld controls the corrupt police and politicians. Moreover, the clinic’s acquisition of life-saving drugs depends a lot on the negotiation with these syndicate bosses of the city, specifically a savage man who runs a huge sex trafficking ring of young females, many who are sick with STD’s. Peter’s desire to save these girls threatens his MD’s license and his personal safety, and his frustration to cure the sick is challenged by the powerful epidemics that are resistant to antibiotics.

Peter and Alex live in relative comfort compared to the natives, but without heat and in extreme temperatures. Peter’s boss at the clinic has arranged for a housekeeper/cook, Sangita, a Tibetan woman whose daughter, Devi, is Alex’s age. Alex and Devi bond instantly, and Santiga’s maternal instincts are a welcome energy to the household. Mina, the nurse at the clinic who functions more like an agitating partner, vexes Peter, as well as beguiles him.
Ailments, treachery, and poverty permeate the city like the thick, grey fog and charcoal sky that hovers over the inhabitants. A feeling of dread snakes through the narrative, yet a soulful backbone of human stout-heartedness and endurance surprises the reader at each descent of gravity. Groner’s exuberant prose imbues the story with keen paradoxes and nimble dialogue that flow with sharp, pointed wit. The pace is quick, thrilling and cinematic; you will probably finish this novel in a few sturdy sittings.

The disadvantage of this hybrid genre of fiction is the tendency to inject the main characters with a staggering puissance. They wear their courage a little too easily, including the teenagers. There are also several convenient and predictable plot turns that are too facile, giving the narrative a rushed simplicity at times. Also, although Peter is out of his element, he steadily challenges pernicious criminals with a force and conniving that periodically flouts credibility.

Mina, who enters as an intriguing individual, flattens out as her contentious nature is mitigated. Sangita turns out to be a straw character, as are several other players in this drama. Buddhist practices lend a warm and exalted glow to the story, but almost tips into precious territory at intervals.

However, this is a potent story that, despite some inorganic elements, never fails to fill the reader with wonder. The magic arises from the immaculate prose and imagery, as well as luminous, cosmic turns of phrase, and the ties that bind humanity. This is a novel ripe with quotable passages, with a landscape of flourishing detail. As a story of exile, it lures and invites the reader within its foreign enclosures to a map that contours the human heart.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cary Groner
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Bibliography:

• Exiles (June 2011)

“Work. Tom knew what work was; knew what the work really worth doing was, too. Work in rain or shine, the work of keeping a good farm on the go. He knew Mark liked to read, liked to write, and Tom liked to read, the odd time, himself, but there was no way you could think of that, truly as work.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 28, 2011)

Solace, by Belinda McKeon, is a novel about love and longing. As a noun, “solace” means to find comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness. As a verb, it means to give solace to someone else or oneself. This book is about people who find solace in the small things of this world and find it difficult to talk about the bigger things. They hang on to what they know, especially when they face tragedy or their worlds turn upside down.

Tom and Mark are father and son. Tom works his farm in Ireland and Mark is working on his doctorate at Trinity University in Dublin. Tom finds it difficult to understand a life that does not consist of working the land and he finds it very difficult to understand his son.  Mark comes to his father’s farm when he can to help out, usually on a weekend. There is a huge emotional distance between them and they often end up fighting. Maura, Mark’s mother, tries to smooth things out but the gap between father and son is huge.

Mark meets a woman in Dublin named Joanne. Unfortunately, there is bad blood between Mark’s father and Joanne’s deceased father. This makes the relationship difficult for the family dynamics. When Joanne becomes pregnant, issues rise to the surface and even more distance is felt between Tom and Mark.

The novel takes place in the mid-2000’s when Ireland is just beginning to go from a booming country to a place of poverty. What was once a land of opportunity for everyone is becoming a place where housing values are decreasing, unemployment is rising, and large companies are moving out of Ireland to cheaper venues.

Mark has been working on his dissertation for several years without much success. He chose the topic of a woman writer who lived near his father’s farm and to assess her writing and relationships with other writers of her time in a new way. His thesis advisor is not impressed and Mark makes one false start after another.

Symbolically, these false starts are similar to the attempts at conversations that Mark and his father have. They start and stop, try to meet one another at some common ground but fail. When tragedy befalls both of them, Tom becomes very dependent on Mark but Mark distances himself even further from his father, burying himself in his studies.

The prologue opens with Tom and Mark alone on the farm with a baby girl named Aiofe. There are no adult females present and Aiofe is very enamored of her grandfather. Tom takes Aiofe with him on errands he has to do in town and ends up in a grand discord with Mark who did not know where his daughter was. No matter how they try to bridge their distance, they fail. They can find no solace in one another when they are faced with tragedy or pain.

The solace that they have comes from what is familiar to each of them. For Tom it is his farm and the land, and for Mark it is his child and his studies. We readers sadly watch the fumbling attempts they each make to reach each other and the increasing distance that occurs. At one point, Tom gets a cell phone and attempts to call Mark several times a day. Mark makes it a point not to answer and Tom keeps calling.

This is a story of a father and son, of rural Ireland trying to maintain its identity, and the difference between living in a city and living on a farm. Tom can’t understand cities and Mark abhors life on a farm. The book is very well-written but at times it goes very slowly, losing the pace that it might have carried. Belinda McKeon is a playwright and there is that sense of discourse in this novel. She has an MFA from Columbia University and this is her debut novel. She is a very promising novelist with a poetic sense and a gift with words. I especially love her characterization of Tom and Mark. I look forward to her future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Belinda McKeon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle

Bibliography:

• Solace (May 2011)

“It was frightening, though, how little time you got. You only became yourself when you were twenty-three or twenty-four. A few years later, you had an old man’s chest hair. It wasn’t worth it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAY 15, 2011)

The thirteen stories in the collection Bullfighting from Irish author Roddy Doyle examine various aspects of male middle age. Eight of these stories first appeared in New Yorker, and in this volume the post-boom stories collectively offer a wry, bittersweet look at the years past and the years yet to come. We see middle-aged men whose wives have left them, middle-aged men whose children have grown and gone, stale marriages, marriages which have converted lovers into friends, the acceptance of disease and aging, and the ever-looming aspect of mortality. Lest I give the wrong impression, these stories are not depressing–instead through these marvellous stories Doyle argues that middle age brings new experiences and new emotions–just when we thought we’d experienced all that life had to offer.

In “The Photograph,” Martin tallies up the pros and cons of aging:

“Getting older wasn’t bad. The balding suited Martin. Everyone said it. He’d had to change his trouser size from 34 to 36. It had been a bit of a shock, but it was kind of nice wearing loose trousers again, hitching them up when he stood up to go to the jacks, or whatever. He was fooling himself; he knew that. But that was the point—he was fooling himself. He’d put on weight, but he felt a bit thinner.”

As Martin faces his first serious health issue, he recalls the recent death of Noel, a friend from his youth. Martin tries valiantly to make light of his own health problem with mixed success.

In “Funerals,” middle-aged son, Bill starts ferrying his elderly parents around to funerals. What begins as a one-off favour turns into a weekly habit. Bill discovers that his parents actually look forward to funerals and that they view them as outings to be followed by a trip to the chip shop. Instead of feeling burdened by becoming their regular chauffeur, Bill finds himself fascinated by their behaviour and pleasantly comfortable in their company, yet at the same time some sort of seismic shift has occurred in the relationship:?

“He could enjoy their company and listen to them flirting. They weren’t his parents any more; he wasn’t their son. He was a middle-aged man in a car with two people who were a bit older. Once or twice, in a rush that made him hang onto the steering wheel, he was their son and the car was full of himself as a boy and a stupid, awkward young man, hundreds of boys and men, all balled into this one man driving his wife’s Toyota Corolla and trying not to cry.”

Bill isn’t sure why he wants to spend so much time with his parents, but he does know that he’s beginning to feel uncomfortable with his own crowd:

“He stayed clear of the local funerals, the old neighbours. He didn’t want the conversations. What are you up to these days? How many kids is it you have? He didn’t want to talk to men he’d once known who’d lost their jobs so recently they still didn’t understand it. Great, great. Yourself? There’d be too many middle-aged women who used to be girls, ponytailed men he used to play with, a mother he’d fancied–in the coffin. Fat grannies he’d kissed and–the last time he’d gone to one of the local ones–a woman with MS, shaking her way to a seat in the church, the first girl he’d ever had sex with.”

Bill finds his parents child-like, and there’s a comforting sensation to the day trips he takes with them as they attend funeral after funeral. It’s as though Bill is a parent once again–after all his own children are grown and no longer need his care.

If I had to pick one favourite story in this stellar collection, it would be “Animals.” In this particularly poignant story, George, the middle-aged narrator, whose children are now grown and gone, recalls his life as a family man through memories of the animals the family owned. At one point, George tells how he once colluded with the local pet shop, Wacker’s over a lost canary. The canary, Pete, escaped from the cage, and George returns home to find “four hysterical children in the kitchen, long past tears and snot, and a woman outside in the back garden, talking to the hedge.” The woman is George’s wife, Sandra and she’s pretending that the canary is in the hedge:

“–Listen, he said.—I’m going to bring the kids to Wacker’s, to see if Pete flew there. Are you with me?
Sandra looked at him. And he knew: she was falling in love with him, all over again. Or maybe for the first time—he didn’t care. There was a woman in her dressing gown, looking attractively distraught, and she was staring at George like he was your man from ER.

–While I’m doing that, said George,–you phone Wacker’s and tell him the story. You with me?
–Brilliant.
–It might work.”

Some people measure their lives by the holidays they’ve taken, the jobs they’ve held, or the homes they’ve lived in, but George measures his life as a husband and father through the family pets. Perhaps, under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that middle-aged George finds that his loyal companion is a dog.

The stories include some gentle humour as we hear of one man who brags about picking up 57-old-twins. Another story tells of a couple whose relationship devolves into insult slinging (“Four decades of arse parked inside a piece of string”) in some sort of aging contest. Doyle’s characters, while sketched lightly, are fully realized individuals who cope with the various problems and disappointments of middle age: loneliness, illness, failure, and boredom. These stories examine middle-aged life from all angles, so we also see that middle-age is a mixed bag with consolations in unexpected places. Bullfighting, a rich mature collection from Doyle, shows us a writer at the top of his game, and Doyle’s stories are infused with generosity and wisdom–even as they examine, so excellently, the foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Roddy Doyle Wikipedia page on Roddy Doyle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Republic Paula Spencer

Bibliography:

• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
• Wilderness (2007)
• The Deportees: and Other Stories (2008)
• Not Just for Christmas ( 2008)
• Bullfighting: Stories (2011)

Barrytown Trilogy:

• The Commitments (1987)
• The Snapper (1990)
• The Van (1991)

The Last Roundup Trilogy:

• A Star Called Henry (1999)
• Oh. Play That Thing! (2004)
• The Dead Republic (2010)

Paula Spencer Novels:

• The Women Who Walked Into Doors (1996)
• Paula Spencer (2006)

Children’s Books:

• The Giggler Treatment (2000)
• Rover Saves Christmas (2001)
• Meanwhile Adventures (2006)
• Her Mother’s Face (2008)
• A Grey Hound Girl (May 2012)

Nonfiction:

• Rory and Ita (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Commitments (1991)
• The Snapper (1993)
• The Van (1997)

“Mohammed was afraid. Afraid of having to climb mountains, pyramids of stones. Afraid of tumbling into the ravine of the absurd, of having to face each of his children, over whom he had lost every scrap of authority.  Afraid of accepting a life in which he no longer controlled much of anything.  He lived through his routine, the long straight line that carried on regardless.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 26, 2011)

In a palace in the old village Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the elegiac and moving story of a simple man from a small village in Morocco, who feels completely lost in the fast moving, modern world. Mohammed had to change “from one time to another, one life to another” when back in 1962, this young peasant was persuaded to leave his remote village in Morocco and join the immigrant labour force in France. Now forty years later, he is about to start his retirement and this new situation preoccupies and worries him deeply. From one moment to the next, it will end the years of daily routines which have made him feel safe, secure and needed. They have also protected him from reflecting on his life and its challenges: “Everything seemed difficult to him, complicated, and he knew he was not made for conflicts.” Why does he have to retire at all? It is “a trap,” a strange, “diabolical” invention! In this gently and simply told story, Tahar Ben Jelloun explores themes of home, immigration, faith, the social and cultural discrepancies between immigrants and their French surroundings, and last, but not least, the resultant mounting estrangement between parents and their children.

In his musings, much of it conveyed in direct voice, Mohammed recalls images of different stages in his life: his childhood, his marriage, the first ever sighting of the sea… all memories that he cherishes and contrasts with his life in France. It is his firm grounding in Islam, however, that has always guided his thinking and behaviour: “His touchstone for everything was Islam: My religion is my identity. I am Muslim before being a Moroccan, before being an immigrant.” Tahar Ben Jelloun delicately elucidates the intricate correlation between faith and reality in Mohammed’s life and, interestingly, he links it to the concept of “time.” When Mohammed was young, time was structured around the five daily prayers and the year around major festivals throughout the seasons. We, as readers, can easily perceive why, after decades of time-keeping through his work at an automobile plant, he feels completely lost in these early days of “tirement,” as he calls it. How can he fill time now and in France – “a place where he does not belong at all?”  Time stretches without structure, unless – Mohammed realizes – he takes on a new project and sets out planning it: he will build a house for the whole family in the old village… Surely, that will bring his children back to him and the traditional life, as it was before, can be rekindled.

A man like Mohammed, barely literate, who only speaks his Berber language, has never felt the need to make an effort to learn French beyond the basics. He can cite the Koran in Arabic, but cannot express an independent thought in this holy language. He has come to France to work, get paid and to return home to his village every summer and eventually for good; his emotional centre is only there. His five children, on the other hand, are growing up in the French environment and speak only French to him. The author, while seeing the world primarily through Mohammed’s eyes, such when he describes his hero’s attitude towards his wife and inability and unwillingness to comprehend his children, nevertheless encourages us as readers to see beyond Mohammed’s narrow and naïve interpretation of his surroundings and place his perspective into a broader context. And we, in turn, feel growing sympathy both for Mohammed’s efforts to rebuild his life and for his taciturn, acquiescent and submissive wife. Will he, once ensconced in his new project, convince the now grown children and their children to follow his plans?

Tahar Ben Jelloun, who also emigrated as a young man to France in 1971, is intimately familiar with the issues that face North African immigrants in France. Son of a village shopkeeper, he was fortunate to do well in school and was able to pursue his studies in Paris after his release from prison in Morocco. He is a prolific and much revered author of many novels and other writings. Despite his own education in Arabic, he writes exclusively in French – a language he feels is better suited to the social topics he wants to address in his fiction. As for his hero, Arabic for him is a sacred language which commands reverence and humility from those who use it. While completely at ease in the French environment, he stated in an interview with the Paris Review in 1989: “When I tell a story, I feel Moroccan and tell it like a Moroccan storyteller, with imagery and a construction that is not always realistic, but where poetry can reside.” His language in this novel fully reflects his intentions: his affection for the Moroccan landscape and life in the village shines through in rich and poetic imagery. The fine line between reality and mysticism becomes opaque. For me, these passages are add some of the most precious aspects in this touching account. “I tell a story in the hope that it will incite reflection, provoke thought.” That indeed he does with this insightful novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin; Original edition (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tahar Ben Jelloun (In French)
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Friend The Blinding Absence of Light

Bibliography:

• Solitaire (1976)
• The Sand Child (1985)
• The Sacred Night (1987)
• Silent Day in Tangiers (1990)
• With Downcast Eyes (1991)
• Corruption (1995)
• This Blinding Absence of Light (2001)
• The Last Friend (2003; February 2006 in US)
• Leaving Tangier (March 2009 in US)
• Rising of the Ashes (February 2010 in US)
• A Palace in the Old Village (January 2011 in US)

Nonfiction:

• Racism Explained to My Daughter (1998)
• French Hospitality: Racism and North African Immigrants (December 1999)
• Islam Explained (2002)

“Then, what has only just bloomed within him curls brittle and brown at the edges, and he believes now, in the slow seconds of understanding, ephemeral as they ever are, that what lies behind a man in the expanding landscape of his past can never be left behind entirely,…and all that’s left is the caustic certainty that there’s no moving forward unbridled,…that the weight of all that is dragging behind will know no abatement.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 17, 2010)

Family bonds, particularly between fathers and sons, and mothers and sons, are explored with great sorrow and depth in this elegiac and epic tale of the Skala family, hard-working Czech farmers in Lavaca County. In the fertile flat lands of South Texas, in the fictional town of Dalton, 1895, Karel Skala is the fourth son born to Vaclav and Klara, and the one that results in Klara’s death. Vaclav’s pain shuts him down, and he forsakes holding his son.

Instead, Vaclav treats Karel and his brothers like draught horses and works them to the bone on the farm. As Karel grows and develops into an apt horse rider and racer, Vaclav gambles land, and Karel rides to win. A particular race in 1910 squeezes the last morsel of strained loyalty and affection between Karel, his three brothers, and his father.

The story goes back and forth in time between 1895 and 1924, in a seamless and tension-building tale that is both heart stopping and lushly evocative. Machart writes like a veteran writer and is reminiscent of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, both for his brutal tale of family instability and his towering, metaphorical passages tying the land to the people, and the narrative of his social and moral themes surrounding the decay, anguish, and redemption of the human heart. Like McCarthy, Machart has an arresting, commanding sense of predator and prey:

“Across the creek along the far bank, near the tangle of water oak and pine roots and the deep impression of boot soles in the wet silt, she [the amber-eyed horned-owl] discerns the slightest distinction in the clustered dancing of bluestem spires, knowing by some sharp and instinctive insistence in the grainy fibers of her muscles that rain and wind bend the uppermost inches of grass blades while the scuttling of prey and the dragging of a tail will set the reeds to shivering upward from the tillers.”

Machart’s frequently long and undulating sentences are not awkward or burdensome, as his assured, poetic, and elegant style takes the reader deeper and more evocatively into the richness of the landscape and the texture of Karel’s pain. Soon after the race of 1910, Karel quits riding, folds up into himself, and begins his own family and future without reconciling his past. The story brings the reader into key events in a well-paced manner that also teases out the facts gradually. The past and the present intersect in the denouement with an uncompromising and resolute exhilaration. Getting there allows the reader to accompany Karel into the territory of his tormented soul.

“It occurred to Karel that this was the way the whole county must see them, as the family that everyone but they themselves recognized as such, and the thought of being the kind of fool who called for fair weather when green clouds folded up in hail-bearing corrugations on the horizon wicked at him until he felt parched and withered and longing, like a cotton plant wilting in a month-long drought, for the unabated battering of that which might save him.”

Whether it is the rich, metallic smell of rain; the mineral scent of flooded soil; a sun-struck fence; a moonlit winter pine; or stray swirls of cotton in the brisk, smoky air of a burning mesquite tree, Machart sears the images of his story so thoroughly that they will cascade down your spine and give you an electric buzz. I can open the book anywhere and return to eloquent passages that, even lifted from the story and taken independently will cause my heart to flutter. Compelling, unyielding, and utterly satisfying.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 76 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade; 1 edition (October 21, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bruce Machart
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More to read: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• The Wake of Forgiveness (2010)
• Men in the Making (2011)

“This Wednesday has been building to since seven this morning, Jacqueline thinks, since Sylvie was first born.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 6, 2010)

From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and just recently, Jennifer Vanderbes’ Strangers at the Feast, unhappy families have been a staple of literature all over the globe. What, or who, put the “y” in unhappy, in dysfunction? Canadian author Lee Kvern mines this question with a brutally honest sensitivity in her intimate family portrait of Lloyd and Jacqueline Burrows and their three children–“four, if you count Sylvie.”

In short, enigmatic, alternating chapters, over three decisive Wednesdays in three successive decades, the story of the Burrows family is teased out with measured restraint from its blistering beginnings to its nuanced conclusion. Three days of narratives gradually unite–Jacqueline in 1961, Lloyd in 1973, and Lesa, their oldest daughter, in 1987–and the years between them melt away and form a cohesive, lucent whole.

In the punishing prairie landscape of Red Deer, in Calgary, Jacqueline Burrows lives with her philandering husband, Lloyd, and their three small children, in a small and indistinct row house next to other RCMP wives, aka “the abandoned wives.” Lloyd is on the night shift of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and is rarely home. In 1961, Jacqueline is pregnant and exhausted, her maternal eyes on Lesa, Nate, and Sylvie, as they frolic bantam through the street. A devoted and sensible mother, she nevertheless relies on five-year-old Lesa as her bulwark to keep Sylvie close.

Sylvie was born asphyxiated, the cord wrapped around her neck. She was left with severe mental challenges and suffers from grand mal seizures. Jacqueline loves her fiercely but is overcome with guilt.

On this hot July Wednesday, Jacqueline sees Sylvie (from the kitchen window) start to climb in a strange man’s car. She intervenes and saves her with a scream, blames Lesa for failing to protect her, and subsequently chides herself. To make matters worse, the RCMP can’t find her husband when she calls for help.

“She thinks about her husband…in the arms, the bed of some other woman. Another other. And…while she no longer wants her husband–whether by God or by the sheer luminosity of their children, she needs him. The two are twisted up like electrical wires, complicated and live.”

Flash forward to February, 1973, and Corporal Lloyd’s narrative. His shift has ended, but he is embroiled in rescuing Jimmy Widman, the town drunk, who has been beaten senselessly and left frozen in the snow. Jimmy has had countless drunk-and-disorderly troubles, and no authority wants to help him anymore. But the taciturn corporal overextends himself and risks his job to help him.

Ironically, Lloyd recoils from home life and is often absent during family crises. Early in the marriage, he was Dudley-Do-Right to Jacqueline’s Nell, but the moniker has faded along with his vows; the matter of Sylvie has eroded his love.

“He sits in his cruiser, motor idling, glances down Main Street–his street, his town…farmers, ranchers, one doctor, one vet…one drive-in theater…one wife, three–no, four children, if he counts Sylvie, but he seldom does. The cruel, imperfect line across her small lips, her dark eyes glimmering like Lloyd’s, like the blonde’s in the bar last night…”

The connection of Jimmy’s destiny to the Burrows’ fate is disclosed through the drama of his story. Lloyd hauls a bundled-up Widman through hoops in a cat-and mouse chase to save Widman’s life and perhaps his own soul.

Lesa’s Wednesday of 1987 begins with a plane ride home to visit her mother in Red Deer. She’s a wreck, an adolescent at thirty-one. She flirts shamelessly but silently with a stranger at the airport, hoping to–she doesn’t know what. Her live-in boyfriend is home in Vancouver, but she’s terrified of emotional intimacy. She has dyed her firebrand red hair to the inky black of Sylvie’s, her agenda unknown.

Moreover, she is parading around in a super-hero costume with spiked pleather boots and a tawdry wig. (Her excuse–it is almost Halloween) Her brother, Nate, doesn’t recognize her at the baggage claim. When they get to Red Deer, her courage takes a flying leap. She deposits Nate at Jacqueline’s door and goes on an adventure in her Storm costume and cape that is poised to either sabotage or awaken her life.

“She wishes she were a kid again. That brief period of time when no matter what, all is forgiven; everything slips away like silk to skin, smoke to air, a magician’s trick performed by her mother…She knows the trick of the dysfunctional family all too well in that it leaves you lacking, looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

This isn’t a sentimental story about caring for Sylvie, a child with special needs. It is about a family’s catalyst to a long, uncertain truth. Sylvie, at age four, was that catalyst, on a particular thorny day when Murphy’s Law and Wednesdays became destiny. In elegiac and spare prose, Kvern brings the reader from the oblique to the sublime, from the edges of the family to the heart of the matter…of Sylvie.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Brindle & Glass; 1st edition (September 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Kvern
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Bibliography:

• Afterall (2001)
• The Matter of Sylvie (September 2010)

“I just don’t know,”  he said aloud. “Roy, are you awake?”
“Yes”.
“God, I just don’t know.”
That was our last communication. I didn’t know, either, and I wanted only to shrink farther down into my sleeping bag. He had a terrific pain in his head that painkillers couldn’t reach, an airiness in his voice that was only becoming more hollow, and other mysteries of despair I didn’t want to see or hear. I knew where he was headed, as we all did, but I didn’t know why. And I didn’t want to know.

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (AUG 15, 2010)

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide consists of a novella and short stories that are semi-autobiographical. Vann spent his early years in Ketchikan, Alaska where his father had a dental practice. His father sold the practice and bought a fishing boat that he hoped would provide a living. His father invested unwisely and lost a lot of money. On top of that, the IRS was after him for some investments he made in other countries. Vann’s parents divorced when Vann was about five years old because his father was unfaithful. Vann was witness to some horrific fights between his parents. His father was mercurial of mood, likely with manic-depression that appears to have been undiagnosed. After his parent’s divorce, Vann moved to California with his mother and sister. When Vann was thirteen years old, his father asked him to spend a year in Alaska with him. Vann declined. Two weeks later, his father shot himself. This book is Vann’s attempt to get his head around his father’s suicide, along with his own feelings of guilt, shame, anger, denial and fears.

Vann states in an interview that he believes that it is important to read this book in order. The first short story, “Ichthyology” is where the opening quote of this review comes from. In the book, David refers to himself as Roy and his father as Jim. This beautiful and painful story is about the impact of his parent’s divorce on David’s behaviors. He becomes oppositional and vandalizes his neighborhood. No one appears to connect his behaviors with what is happening in his life at the time. The story is told against the backdrop of Roy’s aquarium and a blinded iridescent shark that manages to survive a horrific attack and continues to live, gradually learning to make its way in the tank without bumping into things.

The novella,”Sukkwan Island,” is in two parts. It took my breath away with its wildness, beauty, pain and anguish. In the first part, Roy goes with his father to Sukkwan Island, an uninhabited island in southeast Alaska, where his father has purchased land and a cabin. There, he has to deal with the horrors of his father’s anger, unpreparedness and depression. His father cries most every night and “confesses” to Roy about the mistakes he’s made in his life. Roy doesn’t know what to do. He wants to leave the island but he is afraid of hurting his father. His father ends up taking his life. In part two, Roy walks in and witnesses his father holding a pistol to his head. His father gives Roy the pistol and walks out. Roy takes his own life. The action of suicide and the reactions to it are what give this novella its power and grace. What leads up to suicide or attempted suicide is a psychological study of the human psyche lost in pain and despair, choosing to go into the unknown rather than live another day. I have never read such an achingly painful testimony to grief and survival.

In the short story “Ketchikan,” Roy is a young man of 30 who returns to Ketchikan to try and learn something about his father. Though he is not very successful, he does re-enact some of his rage and anger towards his father by replicating the vandalism of his youth.

This is a book of metaphors, layers, and attempts to build meaning out of nuance and emotion. It is a brilliant book, one that left me feeling raw and numb but also in awe of having read something that will stay with me forever.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Vann
EXTRAS:	Excerpt in The New York Times
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our two reviews of Caribou Island: Betsey’s  and Bonnie’s Another book that struggles with a family tragedy: The Lesser tragedy of Death by Cristina Garcia

Bibliography:

• Legends of a Suicide: Stories (2010)
• Caribou Island (2011)
• Dirt (2012)
• Goat Mountain (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea (2005)

“He wants it each way. Both ways. All the ways. He wants his marriage solved, and he wants to be on the road with Rena, one of the undersea creatures strapped to the luggage rack, Yul Brynner with his head out the window, licking the air. He wants the Beanbags to smile, shake their heads, look at Hendrick’s charts and tell them ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a long road in front of you, but his chances for a normal life are. He may now be able to. We’d like to present this case at the.’ He wants to feel less lost.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman (JUL 11, 2010)

Jack Lang is not great at being in the world. At the start of this quirky and original book, he has impulsively purchased a second ranch house – right across the street from his original house – at an auction. His wife Beth, a teacher at a local college, has just left him for his good friend Terry Canavan. Terry’s long-time girlfriend, Rena, may or may not be coming on to him.

To really complicate things, he is left in charge of his autistic savant son Hendrick, who has a penchant for memorizing the Weather Channel and mimicking advertising (in its entirety) and sloganeering verbatim.

And that’s just the start of things.

We never know exactly why Beth left Jack except for she’s just fed up. “You can’t just let everything happen to you,” Beth tells him at one point. “You can’t always just wait.” But Jack is out of control; his plans and ideas exceed his abilities to execute them. “Sometimes he thinks of his life like everything that’s happened to him has been something he’s at least half-fallen into.” That includes his mulch-and-garden business at Patriot Mulch & Tree, which is authentically described but if truth be known, is a little too heavy on the details (at least for this reader).

The novel takes place in an abbreviated time period and meanders along as Jack falls into one situation after another. For instance, he impulsively buys a huge fiberglass catfish from a defunct miniature golf course as decoration for a concrete tricycle path at the back of his new home. The point is made: Jack is unconventional and whimsical and Beth is solid and controlling. Still “he knows he needs Beth to save him from his crazier angels, or try to, and he knows, too, or hopes, that she needs him to try to save her from his plainer ones.”

The depiction of Hendrick, the autistic savant, is delightful, especially when he emerges from his shell to spout off Spanish or participates with Rena in a karaoke night; it’s hard not to fall in love with this child. The father-son interactions sparkle.

There is much wild black humor, despite the over-the-top, sometimes marginally successful characterizations. And there are fresh insights into what keeps couples together when by all natural instincts, they should fall apart. Drew Perry has a fresh and audacious imagination that shines through…again and again.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Drew Perry
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another quirky neighbor: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth And another guy who doesn’t know what he wants: Next by James Hynes

Bibliography:

• This is Exactly Like You (2010)
• Kids These Days (January 2014)

“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives. ‘I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,’ she said in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place I could not dream or imagine. I wanted to grab her and bring her back, but there was no turning back. Suddenly every point of connection between us had vanished.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 17, 2010)

Michael Greenberg’s brilliant and mesmerizing memoir of his daughter’s madness is a poignant and terrifying book about the depths and peaks of mania and the desperate struggle that a loved one will go to in order to bring someone back from the world of psychosis.

When Greenberg’s daughter, Sally, first becomes psychotic, he thinks it is more her creativity than anything else. He is slow to recognize her manic state. But then, who would first assume that someone they love has gone to a place of madness. “But how does one tell the difference between Plato’s “divine madness” and gibberish? Between enthousiasmos (literally, to be inspired by a god) and lunacy? Between the prophet and the “medically mad.”

A long journey ensues for Sally and her familiy: hospitalization, horrendous psycho-pharmacological interventions, psychiatric care, day hospitals, regimens for behavioral therapy and behavioral contracts. The medications make her weary and unable to concentrate. She becomes sluggish and unlike her quick and creative self. Her father decides to try the medication to get an idea of what it is doing to Sally. He says, “It begins to hit me – – in waves. I feel dizzy and far away, as if I am about to fall from a great height but my feet are nailed to the edge of the precipice, so that the rush of the fall itself is indefinitely deferred. The air feels watery and thick, until finally I am neck-deep in a swamp through which it is possible to move only with the greatest of effort, and then only a few feet at a time.” Such is the state that his daughter is in with the medicine. Without it, however, she is mad.

Her identity becomes obscured. Who is this beloved daughter? How did she get to the state she is in? “I keep asking myself the obvious question, the helpless question. How did this happen? And why? One has cancer or AIDS, but one is schizophrenic, one is manic depressive, as if they were innate attributes of being, part of the human spectrum, no more curable than one’s temperament or the color of one’s eyes.” The author struggles with how to view his beloved Sally, how to separate her from her disease, how to separate himself from her disease.

The book is peopled by interesting characters. There is Steve, the author’s mentally ill brother for whom he is caretaker. There is a family of Hasidic Jews in the Psychiatric unit, looking over and caring for one of their own. There is the author’s wife, a dancer and choreographer who loves Sally very much. There is Sally’s biological mother, the author’s ex-wife, who is paralyzed with fear at Sally’s illness and first hopes that some homeopathic remedies will make a difference. There is the author’s well-dressed and lovely mother who searches her past to assure the author that Sally is not, absolutely is not, like his brother Steve.

Sally eventually reaches an equilibrium of recovery and remission from her manic depression. She is able to return to school though she is fearful and reticent about her history as a “mental patient.” The story has no happy ending, as the disease does not just disappear. It may hide for a while but it is ever present. Sally has a lifetime of heavy-duty medications and psychiatric interventions in order for her to maintain a semblance of normalcy. She is forever in the grips of the mental health system, a system not always user friendly to families and loved ones.

The author paints a realistic and painful picture of what mental illness in a family can do to the victim and her loved ones. It is a powerful picture, one that is not soon to be forgotten. Anyone who has every dealt with mental illness or has an interest in it will be enriched by this book. It is a must-read for any person who loves someone who is mentally ill or is touched by mental illness in any way. This means all of us.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 99 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Hurry Down Sunshine
AMAZON PAGE:	Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Greenberg
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on the schizophrenia: The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks And in fiction: Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

• Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness (September 2008)
• Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (September 2009)

“This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.

He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and boom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.”

Book Review:

Review by Sudheer Apte (FEB 5, 2010)

Just like her earlier debut novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love, Lauren Grodstein’s new book, too, is written from the point of view of a morose male protagonist. The hero in A Friend of the Family is Peter Dizinoff, a doctor living in a very comfortable New Jersey suburb.

In the beginning of the novel we find Dizinoff unhappy and separated from his family, but we are not told why. Flipping between flashbacks, we learn that his son Alec, on whom all of his fatherly expectations are laden, has disappointed his father by dropping out of a promising school. Not only is Dizinoff worried about his son’s life and career, but he is also worried that his wife Elaine seems much more blasé about how their son will manage, content to just love him and trust that he will find his own way.

Why can’t Alec be more like their best friends’ children, two of whom went to MIT? There are plenty of bad examples on hand to beware of: the same best friends’ eldest daughter got pregnant a few years ago as a teenager, was suspected of having murdered her baby after birth, and left home for years to escape the scandal. In fact this girl, Laura, now thirty years old, is back home now, and the much younger Alec is taking an alarming interest in her.

The central dilemma of the novel is a father’s love for his son and how far he is willing to go to protect him from approaching horrors. This kind of story is tricky to write: make Peter Dizinoff too sympathetic a character, and you veer into tragic melodrama as bad things happen to an innocent person; yet if you make him too flawed, the reader is apt to stop caring what happens to him.

Grodstein does a good job balancing these tensions, although your reaction to the novel will depend on how much Dizinoff’s character repels you. The man has no empathy for others. He is quick to judge people and to interfere in his son’s life, all the while offering elaborate justifications to himself for his own actions. Always a bit off, he gradually becomes more and more socially conservative, starting to take an interest in his Jewish heritage. He desperately wants his son to talk to him but is unable to relate to him. What prevents Dizinoff from becoming a Bollywood movie dad is Grodstein’s use of the first person, so that we see his life through his eyes. He is also a somewhat unreliable narrator; gradually his perspective becomes more and more skewed, while the past and present become more and more intertwined.

What I liked about the novel was its fast pace, especially toward the end when the mystery is revealed. Grodstein’s minute observations of everyday life, and her insight into a middle-aged father’s mind, also make this novel enjoyable. With well-researched medical terminology and some excellent lines, this should make for a good feature film—I can already see Robin Williams in a white coat.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (November 10, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Sudheer Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lauren Grodstein
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on Fatherhood: Captain Saturday by Robert Inman Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Bibliography:

• The Best of Animals: Stories (2002)
• Reproduction is the Flaw of Love (2004)
• A Friend of the Family (2009)
• The Explanation for Everything (September 2013)