“The Interestings,” said Ash. “That works.”

So it was decided. “From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived,” said Ethan, “because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.” In a ludicrously ceremonial moment they lifted paper cups and joints. “

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 24, 2014)

The greatest gift that any writer can give her readers is providing them with a fictional world they can immerse – and ultimately lose – themselves in.

That’s precisely what Meg Wolitzer achieves in The Interestings, surely the most fully-realized and satisfying book of her career.

This panoramic saga focuses on a group of Baby Boomers from the time they meet at a camp for the creatively gifted as teenagers through middle age. The bond that draws these divergent characters together is powerful and special; they dub themselves “The Interestings.” And the bond, for the most part, is stretched, sustained, and redefined as they age.

There is Jules, the key character, an aspiring comic actress-turned-therapist who attended the camp on scholarship . Her best friend is Ash – she and her twin Goodman have lived a charmed and fortunate life – and eventually marries their mutual friend Ethan. Ethan, the creator of an animated series called Figland, becomes successful beyond their wildest dreams. And then there is Jonah, the son of a Judy Collins type songwriter, who must navigate the boundaries of attachment at the start of the AIDS era.

At the core of this novel, there is an exploration of what it means to be special. As one character ultimately says about the camp that brought them together, “It made you feel special. What do I know – maybe it actually made you special. And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do – kill themselves?”

The spotlight is squarely on two couples – Jules and her ultrasound technician husband Dennis and their friends Ash and Ethan – as the lure of money and fame threaten to place them in different stratospheres. The themes center on longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success…and how the definition of what it means to be “interesting” changes as life goes on. Jules says to Dennis,..meeting in childhood can seem like it’s the best thing – everyone’s equal, and you form bonds based only on how much you like each other. But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore…”

The Interestings is cemented in a transformative time, touching on many of the milestones of a unique generation: the rise of feminism, the confusion and terror of being gay at the cusp of the AIDS era, and perhaps most of all, being alive during that tipping point when “portfolios” shifted meaning from art portfolios to financial portfolios. It’s authentic, it’s genuine, and it’s so good I didn’t want it to end.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1003 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; Reprint edition (March 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Uncoupling

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (2011)
• The Interestings (April 2013)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)

“I was suddenly crazy about collecting the hands of old mannequins, and vintage etiquette books, like the 1963 edition of  Blueprints for Building Better Girls! Ray and I’d take turns reading it aloud to each other. It was hilarious how clueless these women, teetering in hells, on the cusp of the sexual revolution, were.””

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 11, 2011)

Poor Holden Caulfield. In Catcher in the Rye, he muses, “Girls. You never know what they’re going to think.” How right he was! In Elissa Schappell’s new short story collection, the old blueprints for Appropriate Female Behavior — the name of a vintage etiquette manual, 1963 edition — have all been tossed away. And now the girls and women are forced to muddle through with the new rules: Be yourself but also be what your boyfriend, parents, and girlfriends want you to be as well.

These women are survivors, some only barely, armed with caustic humor to withstand the toughest stuff that life can throw their way. In “A Dog Story,” a couple that has long tried to have a baby discover, in a routine examination, that the technician cannot locate the heartbeat. “My husband asked her to keep looking,” the wife says, “as if the baby were playing Marco Polo and had swum behind a kidney.”

In another story called “Elephant,” two women who mouth all the right clichés about how “motherhood matters,” finally get real with each other. “She was crying the way mothers learn to do. Her body betrayed nothing. There was no wiping her eyes, or heaving shoulders, no sound at all.”

And then there’s “Joy of Cooking” – with all its anti-feminist connotations. An anorexic daughter, who believes she’s in love for the first time, calls her mother in a panic, cajoling her to walk her through the steps to roasting a chicken for her boyfriend. The story veers from what, at first, seems like a traditional coming-of-age rite of passage – the passing down of menus from any mother to any daughter — to a dark tale of manipulation, guilt, lack of gratitude, and hidden angers.

Each of the stories tackles a certain female archetype: the slut, the victim, the exhausted new mother, the party girl, and the seemingly infertile woman. At first, the reader settles in, secure and comfortable that she knows where the story is heading – after all, it’s been told many times before – but wait! There’s something a little “off” about each portrayal. Take Heather school slut, for example, who is involved with a newly trimmed down, former “fat boy.” Just as she begins to develop feelings, there is a subtle betrayal and she bites back, aiming to do the utmost emotional damage – and succeeding.

We meet Heather again, in the last story, my personal favorite, “I’m only Going To Tell You This Once.” Now a mother, she must confront the reality of her coveted son becoming involved with a young woman Candy, who reminds Heather all too well of herself. In fact, a number of characters are woven into other stories: Charlotte, a girl who left girlhood after being raped, is off stage but very central to another story, where her friend Bender – a self-destructive party girl – is left to deal with the effects of what happened to Charlotte. And we find that Paige, the young mother in “Elephant,” is the sister to the anorexic girl in “Joy of Cooking.”

This is a fine collection of eight stories for mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and for those who love them. As Heather says in the final story, “…there is no such thing as just a girl.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elissa Schappell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Boys and Girls Like You and Me by Aryn Kyle

Bibliography:

• Use Me (2000)
• Blueprints for Building Better Girls (September 2011)

“It’s taken me years to understand that dying doesn’t end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of another’s lives until not death, but distance, does us part – time and space and the heart’s weariness are the blander executions of the human connection.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 24, 2011)

Let’s Take The Long Way Home is, at its core, a love story. It’s a story of how a close connection with a friend can ground us and provide us with a life worth living. And it’s a story that any woman who has ever had a friend who is like a sister – I count myself among those fortunate women – will understand in a heartbeat.

Gail Caldwell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, met Caroline Knapp, also a writer, over their mutual love of their dogs. Ms. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.”

Both women – about a decade apart in age – are passionate about writing and their dogs and have successfully dealt with alcohol addiction that knocked them to their knees. “We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time,” Ms. Caldwell shares.

Quickly, Gail and Caroline and their two dogs become a “pack of four.” They are both self-described moody introverts who prefer the company of dogs. Yet, “…we gave each other wide berth – it was far easier, we learned over the years, to be kind to the other than to ourselves.” As they grow closer, Gail and Caroline learn that nurturance and strength “were each the lesser without the other.”

It is almost inconceivable that this close friendship would ever end, but Caroline is a smoker and at 42, she learns she has stage 4 lung cancer. Her death comes quickly, in a matter of weeks. Gail Caldwell reflects, “Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage form what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.” And later: “Caroline’s death had left me with a great and terrible gift: how to live in a world where loss, some of it unbearable, is as common as dust or moonlight.” Eventually, she comes to realize “…we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”

This memoir is poignant, authentic, unflinching, and genuine – never manipulative or sudsy. In addition to the profound look at an extraordinary friendship, it also focuses on “inter-species” love – between two fiercely private and self-reliant woman and their incredible dogs. The rich and moving portrayal of Gail Caldwell’s Samoyed, Clementine, will be entirely familiar to those of us who have shared our lives with four-legged “fur babies;” love in any guise is still love.

This eloquent book ends up being a celebration of life in all its complexities – including love, friendship, devotion, and grief. As Gail Caldwell writes, “The real trick is to let life, with all its ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring than its end.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 87 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Interview with Gail Caldwell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Mentor by Tom Grimes

Bibliography:

By Gail Caldwell:

• A Strong West Wind : A Memoir (2006)
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship (August 2010)

By her friend Caroline Knapp:

• Drinking : A Love Story (1996)
• Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs (1998)
• Appetites: Why Women Want (2003)
• The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays (2003)

“There is the need for the interdisciplinary reading of bodies with students, for breaking away from dichotomies, ruptures that are enviable and deforming.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (AUG 3, 2011)

In this artful, cerebral novel spanning four decades and encompassing the tribal conventions and counterculture movements of the 70’s and 80’s, the reader is plunged into a cunning world of philosophy and hedonism that is best described as baroque rawness or stark-naked grandiloquence. If these terms appear to be incompatible pairings, the reader will grasp the seeming polarity as axiomatic soon after feasting on Edie Meidav’s complex narrative style. A carnal vapor infuses every provocative page of this unorthodox psychological crime thriller.

Contrary to the suggestive cover, title, and product description, this will not appeal to fans of chick lit or genre suspense thrillers. This is more in tune with Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, with a peppering of TC Boyle and Dan Chaon. Muscular, sweat-producing, and erudite, the satisfaction of reading these pages rests on the reader’s consent to capitulate control of predetermined ideas and conceptions and enter into a contract with the author, giving Meidav permission and authority to rule the aesthetic jurisdiction, and to accede to the flow, command, and demand of its prose.

The eponymous title refers to Lana Mahler and her best friend, Rose, who meet as teenagers and form a bond that graduates from symbiotic to alpha/supplicant (Lana as alpha). They call themselves Lola One and Lola Two. Lana’s parents are both esteemed academics; her father, Vic, is a neuroscientist cum philosopher of the counterculture variety, and has his own willing supplicants known as “shaggies.”

Lana’s mother is an ethnologist/feminist who has garnered popular fame. As noted, the novel takes place primarily in California, with an emphasis on the analysis of California lifestyles and attitudes, particularly the free-thinking Berkeley. Lana and Rose parted ways many years ago, but the psychodynamics of their early relationship continues to haunt both of them.

The book opens in 2008 in the Alcatraz penitentiary. Vic Mahler is on death row, with an execution date less than two weeks away. The author takes us into Mahler’s mind, which gravitates from hearty to hallucinogenic. We learn that he hasn’t seen his daughter in twenty years, but that Rose has been writing him letters and offering her assistance as an attorney. Juxtaposed with the prison opening, the story takes us to Lana, who is on her way to a desert spa with her latest boyfriend and her twin boys, a place right out of Boyle‘s The Road to Wellville. Rosa is on the verge of tracing Lana down after a twenty-year separation.

The disclosure of Vic’s crime and fate, as well as the unveiling of the Mahler family and Rose, is gradually revealed by positioning each character in alternating chapters. They examine their lives, past and present, and dissect each other, so that the reader is shown each character through various lenses that eventually coalesce into a prism of overlapping and juxtaposed realities.

Like Chaon’s Await Your Reply, the narrative unfolds with an intricate opacity toward transparency. Meidav has a knack for shocking the reader at intervals, like the best thrillers do. Just as the Lolas once worked as strip-tease dancers together, the author unveils surprises in increments like a strip-tease act for the reader.

Lana and Rose are the locus of the novel, and the narrative forms a mosaic or tapestry of several dialogues and narratives between them and their relationship with the external world, much like Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children is a tapestry of texts and collage of languages that form a unity of what is virtual and what is real. There is a constant flux between the Lolas, and a tension between what is true and what is illusive, what is implied and what is extant.

It took me about one hundred pages to relax into Meidav’s style, the wrap-around sentences and esoterica of neuroscience and philosophy, the limbic arousal and dourness of Martin Amis.

“…people’s faces work to hold up new veils by the minute: the all-time favorite is dignity, as is the visage of sex-transcending enlightenment, a new kind of spiritual chastity armature.”

Meidav’s bare-bones plot–a crime, a perpetrator, and a fate–are less important than the characters that inhabit this dystopia of false and renegade idols. Nature, the pliable state of consciousness, and the desire to reclaim the credo of youth and supple confidence, is the plaintive hope and recursive doctrine. We are all disciples of the mind; we are prisoners of our bodies.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Edie Meidav
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon No One Tells Everything by Rae Meadows The Legacy by Kirstin Tranter

Bibliography:

• The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (2001)
• Crawl Space (2005)
• Lola, California (July 2011)

“They love one another with an atavistic ferocity, though, it occurs to Babe sitting in the sunporch, these days perhaps they do not like one another. But she is asking too much of them. Friendship, like marriage, is not all of a piece.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 28, 2011)

“War…next to love, has captured the world’s imagination,” said the British lexicographer Eric Partridge in 1914. And indeed it has. in English classes, we rapidly become acquainted with The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom The Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five…the list goes on and on.

But here’s what we don’t read about: the personal battles that are fought on the home front. We don’t get an upfront-and-personal look at the women behind the men and what war means to them…and to the children they create together.

Next To Love starts out very strong. We meet three childhood friends in Massachusetts – Babe, Millie, and Grace – whose men are on the cusp of going off to World War II. Ms. Feldman deftly juggles their stories and breathes life into their characters. Grace is the beauty who is married to the heir of one of the town’s most illustrious citizens and has a young daughter; Millie is married to Pete, the pharmacist’s son; and Babe is the feisty wrong-side-of-the-tracks gal who is in a committed relationship with an upstanding man who wants to become a teacher.

The period details are handled beautifully. Ellen Feldman summons up an age where instant communication (cell phones, Internet, etc.) did not exist and when lovers wrote their heart out in letters. It’s an age where women were divided into “nice girls” and “tramps” and men kept a stiff upper lip and talked about “honor” and “duty.” And it’s an age when the telegram is feared and one town can suddenly lose several of its beloved American boys overnight.

It’s also a time when there’s a clear divide between men and women. “The husbands speak the language of drills, marches, and officers who don’t know which end is up; the wives speak the dialect of carping landladies, dirty bathrooms and no hot water to wash their hair, and endless spirit-killing games of bridge. Since there is no common tongue between them, they communicate in sex,” writes Ms. Feldman. In this aspect, the book calls to mind another excellent one: Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When The Men Are Gone.

Profound change comes after the war. The novel takes on a lot in a scant 300 pages and the characters I had come to love in the first half begin to feel a little bit like stand-ins as the forces of history flow past. Yet Ms. Feldman’s riveting style keeps the reader in a “what’s next?” mode.

We are at their side as they try to understand the men who have been forever changed by the horrors of war; one of them has what would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today. We see the toll it takes on their young children who can only fantasize about the fathers they have never met. And we are on the sidelines of what is now familiar milestones: the way that black veterans are shuffled aside after the war, unable to participate in the new prosperity; the treatment of women as frivolous things, not worthy of jobs or deep thoughts; the bigotry against Jews, ironically, after a war where six million of them were callously murdered.

Ultimately, the book is focused on female friendship – at turns, courageous, poignant, and fragile. The friendships are not idealized, but rather portrayed to be sustaining, enduring, and nurturing. At its core, it is about survival through life, love, children, war, grief, and resurgence, delivered with just the right amount of drama and intensity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 88 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ellen Feldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	As mentioned above: You Know When The Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon Read our review of Ellen Feldman’s: Scottsboro Rearview Mirror

Bibliography:

• AKA Katherine Walden (1982)
• Conjugal Rites (1986)
• Looking for Love (1990)
• Too Close For Comfort (1994)
• Rearview Mirror (1996)
• God Bless the Child (1998)
• Lucy: A Novel (2003)
• The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (2005)
• Scottsboro (2008)
• Next to Love (July 2011)

“I propose we make a pact. If Kate agrees to go down the Grand Canyon, we’ll each promise to do one thing in the next year that is scary or difficult or that we’ve always said we were going to do but haven’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 9, 2011)

A few years ago, a new phrase burst into our vernacular: “the bucket list,” based on a movie in which two men confront their limitations and prepare a list of things they must do. The list is predictably exotic: skydiving, flying over the North Pole, eating dinner at Chevre d’Or in France.

In Joy for Beginners, it’s the women’s turn to enact that list. On an uncharacteristically sunny day in Seattle, six women assemble to celebrate their friend Kate’s clean bill of health from breast cancer. Unbeknownst to them, right before arrival, Kate’s daughter had suggested an exhilarating white water rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. Her friends urge her on and she agrees to go on one condition: that she gets to choose a challenge for each of her friends to overcome.

Unlike an adventurous male version, the challenges are far more targeted and subtle. For example, the recently divorced book store owner, Caroline, is asked to sort through her ex-husband’s library and dispose of all the books he left behind, clearing the decks (or the shelves!) for a new life. Daria, a gifted but restless potter, is directed to mold loaves of bread as a way of getting past emotional damage done by a hypercritical mother. Another friend, Ava, who was most reluctant to visit Kate at the hospital, as a result of flashbacks to her own mother’s battle with cancer, is requested to do the sixty mile breast cancer fundraising walk. And so on.

If this sounds a little formulaic, it’s because it is. Each woman, in turn, must confront her deepest fears and ask herself: what is holding me back? What am I most afraid of? What obstacle must I overcome to grow and thrive? What does it truly mean to be alive? As each discovers, hidden terrors need not be physically demanding ones, such as whitewater rafting. Often the little things that seem simple on the surface (making bread, tackling an overgrown garden, getting a tattoo) are indicative of more daunting issues.

Each chapter comes with its own back story; we get to meet each friend, one by one, learn the task that she has been assigned by Kate, and see how she is capable of accomplishing that task – whether it’s connecting with the right man, gaining a degree of added independence, or delving into herself to face her fears. Unlike real life, there is resolution for each and every woman. By the time Kate takes her own journey down the river – a metaphor, of course, for life – she is able to recognize her own cathartic role in the lives of her friends. “She had been a river, Kate thought, the thing that took them close to death made them suddenly, courageously, honest.”

Joy for Beginners is a book for a select audience, primarily women who enjoy inspirational tales about how the power of sisterhood can help transform lives. Its message is a powerful one: by taking risks and opening up to joy, one can surmount any personal obstacle including dealing with divorce, accepting a mother’s failings, embracing independence, acknowledging hidden talents, and choosing to live with confidence. At the end, it’s likely that each woman will question, “What is the one thing in life that I need to deal with to live more fully?” And that, of course, is the point.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Putnam Adult (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erica Bauermeister
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Bibliography:

• The School of Essential Ingredients (2009)
• Joy for Beginners (June 2011)

Nonfiction:

• 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader’s Guide (1994) (with Jesse Larson and Holly Smith)
• Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14 (1997) (with Holly Smith)

“Mankind as you may have noticed, has become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other, and I’d been taking full advantage of the recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Instead of meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I’d got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAR 11, 2011)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the film The Social Network. I expect most of us know what the film is about, but for those who don’t, it’s the fictionalized account of the creation of the social networking internet site: Facebook. I liked the film a lot, and one of the things that remained with me after the credits rolled is the changing idea of friendship. In the age of the internet, what does friendship mean? It used to be that we made friends in school, at work or at university, but now many of us have friendships with people online that we’ve never actually met in person. Are these relationships real? Are they substitutes, or are they a facsimile of the “real” thing.

The authenticity of relationships is just one of the many things that trouble the protagonist of Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. Maxwell or Max is 48 years old, and while he struggles with many of the issues that have concerned people for decades (divorce, loneliness, and intimacy), Max seems downright confused by the additional element of social networking that’s reared its head thanks to the internet. Throughout the novel, Max confuses the real and the virtual to great comic results; he misinterprets the smallest gestures and at one point, his most significant relationship is with the female voice of his GPS navigator.

When the novel begins, Max, who’s suffering from depression and is on leave from his job, is on holiday in Australia to visit his father. Since both men have problems with intimacy, it’s a drab lonely visit. The trip is a gift from Max’s ex-wife, Caroline, and while her intentions are murky, nothing seems to come from the trip except an emphasis on Max’s isolation. Max’s return to Britain underscores this isolation. In spite of having 70 friends on Facebook, there are no messages indicating that he’s been missed, and while the junk e-mails pile in, only one appears to have been written from friendship; it’s a request from an old workmate, Trevor, to join him for a drink when he’s in town. The irony here is that the evening with Trevor is based on a job offer and is not extended from friendship at all.

As the novel continues, Max begins a journey–both literal and figurative–a journey to solve his relationship issues and a journey to the Hebrides on a mission to sell toothbrushes. On his journey north, he makes stops at various locations that are connected to his past, and the assumptions he made about his past undergo renovation. As he goes father north, Max begins to unravel as he compares his journey to the notorious and bogus around-the-world yacht trip of Donald Crowhurst, but whereas Crowhurst’s story is tragic, Max’s journey is comic.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is great fun to read, and it’s stuffed full of lively, fascinating characters who all seem to slot into Max’s problems in one way or another. He meets Poppy, a professional “adultery facilitator” –a young girl who finds plenty of work cooking up alibis for adulterers who need help covering their tracks, and Miss Erith, an elderly socialist who loathes the capitalist face of the New Britain. This is a novel that deals lightly with a number of big issues: the changing landscape of Britain, the Americanization of British society, outsourcing, and the growing isolation of the individual as many aspects of everyday life become replaced by virtual alternatives.

There are many, many hilarious scenes here as clueless Max misinterprets actions–reading romance into text messages and reading friendship into work meetings, for example. He even, at one point, assumes a female identity in order to maintain an online correspondence with his ex-wife. Lest it should seem that forty-eight-year-old Max is just “past it” when it comes to social etiquette of the internet age, as the plot continues, it’s clear that Max also misinterpreted childhood events. Max’s very real childhood experiences seem as confused and as open to interpretation as Max’s 21st century virtual encounters, and indeed this is the premise that author Jonathan Coe toys with right up to the very last pages. Max seems cartoonish at times, a sad sack at forty-eight, and while we root for Max’s epiphany, the novel’s disappointing conclusion instead pulls the novel into another direction entirely.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jonathan Coe
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rain Before It Falls

Bibliography:

• The Accidental Woman (1987)
• A Touch of Love (1989)
• The Dwarves of Death (1990)
• What a Carve Up !  (1994) (US title: The Winshaw Legacy)
• The House of Sleep (1997)
• The Rotters’ Club (2001)
• The Closed Circle (2004)
• The Rain Before It Falls (2007; Jan 2009 in pb)
• The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (March 2011)

“He wasn’t a student anymore, at least formally. He was nearly twenty-three and out of school for a year. Whether he liked it or not, many things had started to merge and coalesce in an unsortable tangle, enlarge and expand and grow complications like mold.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 21, 2011)

“What is it About Twenty-Somethings?” asked a recent story in the New York Times. The article—one of the most popular on the newspaper’s website—talked about the “changing timetable for adulthood” these days and the concept of “emerging adulthood.” The article’s author, Robin Marantz Henig, wrote: “The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.”

Robbie and Maize, the principal characters in Ralph Sassone’s immensely readable debut novel, The Intimates, totally fit the profile of these restless and searching young adults. As the book opens, the two are still in high school; Maize nurses a crush on her guidance counselor and when Robbie’s path crosses hers, it doesn’t immediately amount to much. Robbie is gay—a fact he doesn’t realize until much later in high school.

Maize and Robbie meet again during the college years and it is then that they become inseparable friends; after graduating they become roommates in New York City. They also become each other’s sounding boards as each goes through a different form of sexual awakening and through mediocre entry-level jobs.

Robbie has a brief but torrid affair with a young and needy college professor while Maize loses her virginity to a college admissions officer. Sassone chronicles the characters’ slow march toward adulthood through their sexual maturation as well. Towards the end when Robbie finds out that his lover, Daniel, is really not the ideal partner, you can tell Robbie has become wiser in forming this judgment.

As much as one can fault Robbie and Maize for their listlessness, you wonder how much of a role their parents play in their general malaise. The two are united by a general sense of resentment toward their parents—Robbie and Maize are convinced they can never measure up to their parents’ high expectations. When Robbie lands an unpaid internship after graduating from college, his mother’s acerbic reaction underlines the point: “Terrif, Robbie. You spend years getting honors so you can type and file and run other people’s errands for forty hours a week. And for free.”

“Meaningful changes didn’t happen when you expected and that you didn’t graduate when everybody else claimed you did, with ceremonies and celebrations and moving vans, with diplomas and severed ribbons cut to applause,” Sassone explains in The Intimates. He does a great job of exploring the lives of his young protagonists through their sexual awakening and eventually, as they stand on the cusp of real adulthood. Towards the end of the book, they have “No boyfriends, no significant new relationships, no parties or meetings or avenues where they fully belonged, no serious prospects, no commitment to graduate school or rigorous self-education or anything else.” Nevertheless the book never feels like a drag probably because the characters are so actively invested in making things turn out right.

Back to the Times article, emerging adulthood was defined by “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between” and “a sense of possibilities.”

In (arguably) the best scene in the book, the older, twenty-something Maize comes across a newspaper announcement showing Bethany Campbell, a once popular girl in high school, now married to an investment banker. Even if everything about Bethany at school screamed “I Will Marry Well” Maize is shaken by the finality of the announcement and worse, the ordinariness of it. “Had she expected Bethany to be exceptional? To break out of the cage of her former identity and become someone completely unexpected?” Maize wonders. The answer is yes, she did. The pain she feels is of course not just for Bethany but for all their younger selves—hers and Robbie’s included. Here Maize mourns the slow erosion of the “sense of possibilities.” Like it or not, adulthood is right around the corner. And Maize already suspects it isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ralph Sassone
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book about friendships: The Legacy by Kirstin Tranter

Bibliography:

• The Intimates (February 2011)

“And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning…Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 14, 2011)

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of “nothing left to lose.” If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story–a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts–from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup–to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

“The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands.”

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian’s most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

“People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.”

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60’s followed Sierra Leon’s hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias’s confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian’s probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won’t share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai’s achievements are measurable–stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can’t measure his patients’ success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person’s interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian’s bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Forna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story’s leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious novel.

There are coincidences in The Memory of Love that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna’s characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories–the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together–transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

“There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian’s] profession…And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.”

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

“Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky…The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Love endures. One and all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aminatta Forna
EXTRAS:	Diane Rehm show interview with Aminatta Forma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A River Called Time by Mia Couto

Bibliography:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002)
• Ancestor Stones (2006)
• The Memory of Love (2010; January 2011 in US) Commonwealth Prize

Nonfiction:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002)

“They had one good month followed by a bad month. Then they had three good weeks followed by a horrific week. During the bad weeks, Webster began repeating a single phrase over and over, like a tune he couldn’t get out of his head: My family needs to be rescued. It galled him that he … couldn’t suture the simple lacerations in his home life.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (NOV 30, 2010)

When Vermont native Peter Webster was twenty-one and a probationary EMT, he helped rescue a drunk driver who wrapped herself around a tree. The victim was twenty-four year old Sheila Arsenault, a woman fleeing from an abusive boyfriend in Massachusetts. Sheila and Webster pair up too quickly for either of them to take a hard look at their motives. Webster is attracted to Sheila physically and wants to help her move on with her life. Sheila is drawn to Webster because he is kind, mature, and makes her feel safe. Pete will regret his rashness in getting involved with Sheila, but he will never regret the birth of their daughter, Rowan. Circumstances change for Webster and Sheila over the years. However, Rowan will always be number one in her father’s life.

Rescue, by Anita Shreve, focuses on the ways in which parents and children deal with physical and emotional trauma. It is a poignant story about a good man who makes a mistake, but takes full responsibility for his actions. Webster is a conscientious parent and a hard-working breadwinner who accepts the fact that he must make the best of a bad situation. Some might quibble that Webster is too good to be true and that may be so. Nevertheless, he is a person we can root for wholeheartedly. The capricious Sheila, on the other hand, is a tortured soul who lacks the self-knowledge to comprehend that no one can save her from herself.

Shreve’s style is concise and straightforward, with no flashbacks, no changes in points of view, and no gimmickry. One outstanding aspect of this novel is Shreve’s vivid depiction of the heroic work of EMTs and paramedics: We are there with Will when he rushes to help the injured in a six-vehicle pileup involving a school bus; a woman in heart failure; a mother and daughter involved in a domestic dispute; and a man who is has suffered a stroke. These are dramatic and unforgettable scenes that demonstrate how people’s lives can change drastically in an instant. Shreve’s attention to the details of everyday life illuminates her characters’ hopes, fears, and disappointments. The author offers no pat answers—just the insight that, in any relationship, love is not enough. It can grow and thrive only when it is accompanied by respect, communication, and genuine concern for the loved one’s happiness and well-being.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 99 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (November 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anita Shreve
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More reviews of Anita Shreve books: A Change in Altitude Testimony Body Surfing A Wedding in December Light on Snow All He Ever Wanted Sea Glass The Weight of Water

Bibliography:

• Eden Close (1989)
• Strange Fits of Passion (1991)
• Where or When (1993)
• Resistance (1995)
• The Weight of Water (1997)
• The Pilot’s Wife (1998) *
• Fortune’s Rocks (1999) *
• The Last Time They Met (2001)
• Sea Glass (2002) *
• All He Ever Wanted (2003)
• Light on Snow (2004)
• A Wedding in December (2005)
• Body Surfing (2007) *
• Testimony (2008)
• A Change of Altitude (2009)
• Rescue (2010)
• Stella Bain (November 2013)

*Set in same NH Beach House

Nonfiction:

• Remaking Motherhood: How Working Mothers are Shaping Our Children’s Future (1987)
• Women Together, Women Alone: the Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement (1989)

Movies from books:

• The Weight of Water (September 2002)
• Resistance (2002)