“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” I found myself saying this out loud, listening to the brilliant audible version of “John of John,” the latest novel from Douglas Stuart,

Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his debut novel, “Shuggie Bain.”

As “John of John” came to a close, I found myself sitting in the driveway of a friend-- late for lunch-- but unwilling to turn off the recording until the final curtain of the family epic fell.

My “Don’t do it. Don’t do it “reaction resulted from various decisions made by characters in this novel where I could imagine things going extremely poorly, as in fact they frequently did.

Mark Harris, writing for The New York Times on May 9, 2026, said:

“John of John” is a stick of dynamite waiting to go off in your hand, the steadily intensifying story of a fractured trio—grandmother, father and son—who are held together, barely, by their waning ability not to say the words to one another that will blow them apart.”

Even though I like to spread winners around, I support “John of John” for the 2026 Booker award. (Full disclosure: I’ve read only one other contender: Elizabeth Strout’s latest, which I enjoyed but is nowhere near “John of John” in its sweep, lyrical writing, or plot.) “John of John” is brilliant, the perfect balance of a novel of time and place (1990s Hebrides islands off Scotland), a family drama of secrets and betrayals, and how love and desire can show up unexpectedly and sometimes disastrously, clashing with the moral values of a strictly moralistic religion.

First, a couple of words about the author, Douglas Stuart. Stuart was born in Glasgow in poor circumstances. He went to art school and landed a job as a clothing designer for Calvin Klein based on a scout having seen his master’s graduate collection. He moved to Manhattan designing clothes for both Calvin Klein and the Gap when the Gap was at the top of its game. It’s hard to quit a job that you’re good at and you’re well paid for to take a chance on becoming a novelist, but that’s exactly what Stuart did.

While he was waiting for Shuggie Bain, his 2020 Booker award winner, to be published, he found himself at loose ends worrying about its reception and what he was going to do next --that interminable wait between the time a book is accepted for publication and when it’s finally out in the world. He got the idea of traveling to the archipelago on the northwest coast of Scotland, (think Isle of Skye) which he had never seen, and with the blessing of his husband (he says this in every interview I’ve heard) spent twelve weeks interviewing people in tiny hamlets up and down the archipelago. These interviews form the basis of his characters voices. He found the inhabitants to be “gentle,” but had to spend hours in small talk to get them to open up.

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John Calum Macleod is the son of John Macleod and is called Cal. The novel is set in the 1990s, before cell phones and the internet, which contributes to the isolated nature of the island. As the novel progresses, we see how many ways Cal is both like and unlike his father.

John Macleod is a 40-something year old sheep farmer and a weaver of Harris tweed, a sort of cottage industry that helped folks meet ends. Cal had gone off to university in Glasgow to art school (as did our novelist ) and unable to find a job, has responded to a call from his father telling him that his grandmother was very ill and needed him to come home. Having no other source of support, Cal arrives in the hamlet of twenty-six people called Falabeg. The inhabitants live in crofts, or small homes, anchored by either sheep farming or fishing.

From the beginning of the book, we know the Cal is gay and that he has never had a satisfying gay relationship. We also know that nobody else knows that he’s gay (except his friend Isla’s brother, with whom he experimented in younger days and who isn’t talking.) His grandmother Ella asks him if he is a homosexual and he denies it. We learn toward the end of the book that Isla also knows. Saw him entwined years ago with her brother.

That no one suspects he’s gay seems to be a myopia on this small island. Stuart said in his interviews, he commented to one woman about the old bachelors that perhaps some of them were gay. She said, “oh, no, not here,” not in a homophobic way but simply naive.

I thought it was a missed opportunity not to show Cal either interested in pursuing art or pursuing clothing design. Or at least thinking about it. It’s as if he left his artistic desires in Glasgow. In one scene he finds a sparkly dress that he had knit in school a bag that he forgotten. He puts it on like a drag queen before another man — Don’t do it! But otherwise, we see Cal in worn clothes, generally drenched with the interminable rain and helping with the sheep on the farm.

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Stuart said that his novel united three issues that interested him after his twelve- week sojourn on the islands of Scotland. The first is Calvinism, which he found to be a stronghold in these islands. Calvinism, according to him, is a strictly biblical religion that assumed everyone was damned, and only a few people would be chosen to go to heaven. (competition anyone?) The second is the weaving trade in the small hamlets where people made the famous Harris tweed in outbuildings, often weaving at night after their regular work was done, and the third is the Gaelic language. John and Cal speak Gaelic when they don’t want the grandmother Ella (who is from Glasgow—not the islands) to understand them, not knowing that she has been secretly learning Gaelic for years.

“John of John” is filled with secrets and people who know things that if revealed might make it absolutely clear that they are not going to go to heaven. The church men were a glum lot. Cal’s father John is a precenter in the Free Presbyterian Church, which means he sings the first verse of every song a cappella (no musical instruments in a Calvinist Church!) and then the audience responds by singing back the verse. He is an important “elder” of the church, but he is also a man who is subject to desire that is antithetical to the church, so he lives in torment, often torturing those around him with his black moods.

One of the scenes that epitomized the working of the church occurs when Isla McDonald, Cal’s friend, leaves for college only to return seven months later pregnant. Isla, of course, is damned. The church fathers have decided that Cal must be the father. They call him into a conference in the “good room” in the croft and they sit squirming in front of a fire in their Harris tweed suits with sweat dribbling down their backs, accusing Cal of having fondled Isla, when actually he was giving her a hug goodbye. This is an opportunity for Cal to say “I couldn’t possibly be the father because I’m gay,” but he doesn’t say that.

The elders of the church try to talk Cal into marrying Ilsa. He says I” don’t feel that way about her,” and they basically say it makes no difference. You need to marry her anyway. Then the church fathers figure out who the father of her baby is. They go to Glasgow to track him down and make him come back and “do right by her.” However, once they get to Glasgow to the area where he lives, it is so poverty stricken and destitute that they come home empty-handed. In some very endearing scenes towards the end of the novel, Isla has her baby and Cal and Isla go walking out with the baby in a carriage (neither of them cares what other people think anymore) as if they were the parents of the baby boy.

There are so many moments in this novel where the truth could be revealed or at least a truthful conversation could be had, and yet the opportunities slip by. This echoes a phrase Stuart heard when he asked during his trip why some folks hadn’t married: “They missed their moment.” This is a heartbreaking novel that feels current, even though, as Stuart said, he had to write it in a time when there were no cell phones or internet, and in a time before Scotland embraced same gender marriage, which it does today. But the ties that bind one to one’s family, the way in which we try to present ourselves as worthy of respect, even when we secretly suspect we’re not, is as true today as they were in this novel.

If Stuart worked too fast tying up loose ends, he can be forgiven. Up until the ending, I was unsure if the novel would end with all the characters resigned to their lot in life, (“they missed their moment”) or whether some of them might dare to take a risk. See if you end up in a parking lot, as I did, to discover the answer.

I’ve been reading Nunez after I discovered “The Friend,” which I absolutely loved. One of the reasons that I liked it so well was its format. In the novel, the protagonist has a mentor who has committed suicide and she ends up with his great Dane against her apartment’s rules. But she talks in her imagination to authors and thinkers as she is working through her feelings about what has happened to her mentor and what to do about the dog. All those “asides” intrigued and delighted me.

The Friend” reminded me of Carol Shield’s novel “Unless,” which is ostensibly about a mother distraught over her daughter who, for reasons she does not understand, is sitting on a sidewalk in San Francisco, begging with a sign that says “Goodness.’ Eventually the reason for the daughter’s actions become clear (an ending with resolution), but what I liked most about the story was the mother‘s search for meaning in looking at feminist writers, and what they might have to offer her as she tries to figure out her daughter’s situation.

(When Nunez was interviewed by Vivian Gornick, she said a short story has no room for asides. ha! That’s an aside.)

Nunez’s book of short stories does not disappoint in the sense that they are intricately plotted and present protagonists who are in one form of a crossroads or another, but I found that many of her short stories ended in a way where I was more perplexed than satisfied. In other words, they ended without an ending.

To me a satisfying ending does not necessarily resolve all the conflicts that the protagonist presents but in the words of Amity Gage about her recent novel,”Heartwood,’ about a woman who gets lost having wandered off the Appalachian Trail and is perilously close to death. “I like a hopeful ending, not necessarily a happy ending.”

I take hopeful to mean that the protagonist has reached an understanding either with themselves, or another person with whom they are in conflict, or with an outside obstacle that leaves us hopeful for their future.

When Sigrid Nunez was interviewed by Vivian Gornick at the 92^nd St Y about her book of short stories, she said that she begins with a situation, such as jury duty or being stuck in an airport. When she starts to write, she doesn’t know what the ending will be: “I don’t have a plan.” Maybe my addiction to planning is showing, but I preferred the stories that ended as if she did have a plan.


I’ll give a few examples which shouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading her new book, as there are many short stories in it. In “Greensleeves,” a psychiatrist who has been newly left by his wife is invited to a dinner party by a woman who lives on his apartment floor.

She has a younger female friend, who, as it turns out, wants to get the psychiatrist to help her with her brother who is a schizophrenic arrested for assault —perhaps even filming him as a part of a film project she is making. The way she goes about this is to invite herself over to his apartment after the dinner party and then have sex with him. OK, so does it work? Is he going to help her? Can he help her? Is the relationship going to continue? Is he going to figure out that she was just using him? Is this even the primary storyline?

We have no idea because although the woman later talks to the hostess, her best friend, on the phone and they decide that the best way to get them together again is for the hostess to invite them to a dinner party, we don’t know whether the dinner party invitation ensues, or what might happen.

The story ends with the protagonist walking to his office and suddenly hearing the tune to Greensleeves in his head. He does some research about its history. He finds a number of versions of Greensleeves. The story ends

“ Named by many the world‘s most beautiful love song.

He played it. And he played it again.”

I could imagine this ending making sense if the protagonist had any feelings for this woman or had wanted to see her again, but in fact, his mind is simply about his daughter who is depressed and the fact that he will be soon leaving his apartment to live in the suburbs. So what are we to make of this enigmatic end? In the famous words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it?”

Similarly, in the title short story, “It Will All Come Back to You,” Nunez presents an unnamed [this is one of her quirks—no one in “The Friend” was named] protagonist who looks back on a troubled relationship with Gilda, a woman who had been a friend of her mothers and with whom she spent a lot of time when as Gilda put it, “her mother had trouble remembering she had a daughter.”

The protagonist grows up, idolizing Gilda, although her mother believes that the woman is trashy and shames her daughter when she comes home, smelling like April Violet‘s perfume with her hair all teased up and wearing lipstick. “Though they were friends, tramp and trash were words my mother sometimes used to describe Gilda behind her back and though I knew better than to say it out loud (and not that I had to) I wanted to look just like Gilda when I grew up.”

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Then another character shows up who becomes important to the story.
Our protagonist is living with Gilda and her second husband Jack, who sexually assaults her in some way. She tells her mother “I don’t want to go back there anymore.” and her mother says “Why not??” and she says because “he breathes on me funny.” Her mother does not see this as a legitimate excuse, but in a very telling section, the protagonist describes what Jack did:

How do men know that you’ll be quiet? Because they do know that you won’t tell. You won’t throw that bomb. You won’t bring the sky down on everyone’s head.

And tell what exactly? He breathes on you funny. What was that supposed to mean? He was just smelling your perfume.

It was just dusting lint off your dress.

It was just giving you a big hug because he was so glad to see you.

He was just teasing seeing if you were ticklish.

It was just trying to warm you because the radiator was broken and the room is so cold.

And the truth is none of this was the real problem. He wasn’t hurting me, Jack. He didn’t actually scare me. I locked the door before I went to bed. I could handle Jack. What I couldn’t handle was the sadness – the immense sadness and pity that I felt for her, of being the cause of Gilda’s humiliation.”.

When she meets Jack years later, he tells her it was he who insisted that the protagonist go back to her mother because the relationship with Gilda wasn’t healthy, that Gilda was living in a make-believe world.

There’s a lot going on in the story about memory, hearing loss, predators, mothers —good mothers, bad mothers and class, which makes it really interesting reading. Frequently the protagonist will tell a story she has heard and then say “that’s how she remembered it.” And we try to piece together the true narrative, if it exists.

The story ends with the protagonist wanting to do an experiment where she buys April Violets perfume to see how she will “feel.” Unfortunately, it’s no longer made. So the story ends with:

“For the experiment to work, only the perfume of old will do.”

Rereading the story, I realized that one of the indicators of Jack’s troubling conduct was that the protagonist says “he was just smelling your perfume. “And it seems to me that the issue with the perfume was not just did it smell of Gilda or did it smell of the shame with her mother throwing her in the shower to remove the smell of the perfume or did she want to see whether her treatment by Jack still hurt. It was about all those feelings, all of which have been revealed in the story.

At the time of the story, the protagonist’s mother has died, Gilda is 89 living with a boyfriend, Jack has remarried, and the protagonist is wearing hearing aids and worried about her memory. Although she doesn’t get to do her experiment, we feel that the story itself has been the experiment. I feel hopeful for the protagonist, which seems a fitting ending.

Verlyn Klinkenborg of The New York Times, by contrast, called Plainsong “so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.” Exaltation is clearly a word of high emotion. How close is exaltation to sentimentality?

No one could accuse Joyce Carol Oates’ novels of being sentimental, which prompted me to look up the definition as the term.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, sentimental as applied to a person means “a person strongly influenced by emotional feelings, especially about happy memories of past events or relationships with other people, rather than by careful thought and judgment based on facts.” It says sentimental can also mean giving importance to emotions such as sadness.

This first definition does not necessarily lead to condemning sentiment in a novel. But there is another side of sentimentality which means overly-emotional, “showing or expressing feelings in a heavy exaggerated or cheesy way, sometimes called mawkish or maudlin.” Is keeping your grandfather‘s watch that doesn’t run anymore sentimental? I’m betting we all have objects from loved ones that we treasure because of our relationship, not the inherent value of the object.

Then it occurred to me to wonder if a novel can stir strong sentiment without being sentimental in the mawkish or maudlin sense. And was Oates’ main complaint that Haruf depicted a cohesive little town where everyone pitched in to help neighbors get in their crops or buy goods when they couldn’t afford them at the country store? (none of this happened.) Was something about the McPheron brothers taking in Victoria unbelievable to her?

I believe if the novel creates characters or plot lines that are purely one-dimensional, or that do not seem realistic and cause the reader to question the writer’s ability then perhaps sentimentality is a problem, but is it a problem if a novel simply stirs strong emotions?

In “Eventide,” unlike “Plainsong,” there is no one main story line, although Ray McPheron dominates one part of the story.

Victoria and little Katie have gone to college, leaving the McPheron brothers empty, with nothing to talk about, missing her almost as much as she misses them. But there are several other story lines that don’t connect until the end. There is a ten-year old boy caring for his grandfather, his sole remaining relative (Read todays New York Times Magazine for an article on child caretakers.) There are parents of two children who are at best weak-willed and at worst mentally incapable of protecting their children from brutal beatings by a mentally unhinged uncle. There’s the town social worker, reduced to tears by the children who must be protected by shipping them off to foster care.

These stories all evoke strong emotion, but not because they are unrealistic or one-dimensional. And they definitely don’t display a cohesive society.

Joyce Carole Oates, who I’m sure never worked a cattle farm in Colorado, is perhaps not best qualified to opine about Haruf’s strong connection to the land, but that is one of the things that most impressed me about his novels. When he discusses cattle ranching, and the amount of work required to keep the farm going, I saw an author who had done his research, and in fact Haruf had spent some time working on a farm himself.

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Also, when I read his biography, I learned that Haruf had struggled to gain recognition as a writer for many years, until “Plainsong” made him famous at 57. I could appreciate his connection with characters who are unable to realize their dreams.

Galway Kinnell ends his famous poem “Wait,” about a student contemplating suicide after a breakup, this way:

Wait.

Don’t go too early.

You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair,

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

The poem stirs strong feeling. But it is not maudlin or mawkish. The speaker is trying to talk a student off the ledge with any argument he can create. And he’s realistic: “everyone’s tired.”

I’m reminded of the poet Mark Strand, who in a workshop I attended was asked “how do you put your emotions into your poems?” He answered “I don’t put emotions in my poems. I put thoughts in my poems, and I hope they stir emotions in you.” That strikes me as also a sign of a good novelist. The characters and the plot are words, but they are designed to touch us in some way, and I must say that “Eventide” truly touched me.

Perhaps this is because I grew up on a dairy farm with a grandfather who reminded me of the McPheron brothers. I used to drive with him on the milk truck in the morning to go to the pasteurizing plant. We would stop at the Balt restaurant in Princeton, where he had a cup of coffee, and I got a doughnut.

The Balt

In 6 am’s darkness, I’d throw off the covers.

Climb aboard the milk truck, jangling with metal milk cans

heading to the pasteurizing plant.

This was a treat, singled out as a five year old to ride

shotgun with Grandpa, audience for his aimless whistle,

cab filled with cigarette smoke.

First stop was the Balt, a restaurant in Princeton,

coffee for Grandpa, a sugar donut for me. Silent.

Spoons clinked stirring sugar. The sigh of newsprint

as working men perused the Trenton Times.

Back on the farm, cows let out to pasture,

flicking tails at flies, udders refilling for the pm milking

not special, just routine.

Years passed. Our farm was sold, cows off to Maryland.

The Balt became a dress store, then a hangout for Princeton

students. It kept its white tin ceiling, its black and white tiled floors.

Now it’s been restored, photos of those working

men grace the walls. No photo of a girl in pigtails

wiping powdered sugar off her lips.

It will strike no one as any surprise that I am still enamored of donuts.

In “Eventide,” the cattle are described, not with personal characteristics, but in ways that show us that they had distinct personalities. This reminds me of my poor father, an alcoholic who tried to farm with my uncle on the dairy farm my grandfather had allotted to them. He showed up with a six pack of Rhinegold in the morning and serenaded the cows. He died at the age of 50 in a parking lot behind a bar. Shortly before his death, he sent me a photograph of some cows he was taking care of and wrote their names on the photograph. Is naming cows sentimental? My dad when drunk was clearly sentimental in the mawkish sense.

I visited him when he was living at the Rescue Mission in Trenton, New Jersey and imagined what our lives might’ve been like had he not been an alcoholic. I wrote a piece called “Restore Us” us after I took an old photograph of the two of us and had it digitally enhanced.

Restore Us

A faded snapshot. My lips a blur,

long blonde curls cascade to frizzles

like wings of hummingbirds.

Was I smiling, standing with him

near my Mustang, in the parking lot

of the Rescue Mission?

What choice but to smile,

dance the one, two, three,

built into muscle memory?

His hat, a shapeless cotton, top squared,

narrow brim above his awkward grin.

His too-short pants from the grab bag,

a poplin jacket.

I’m in a shiny purple maxi-coat,

fashion next to no-fashion, me

next to not-me.

They say computers can restore old photos.

Bring us back: the father who was not-father,

standing with a daughter who’s fading,

who for that moment was willing to pretend,

arms entwined in an inner-city parking lot,

that he might someday take her arm

and walk into another picture,

do what fathers are supposed to do.

I hope my poem creates a feeling of loss and sadness, both powerful sentiments. But I hope it doesn’t strike the reader as sentimental.

Not everyone shared Joyce Carole Oates feelings about Ken Haruf‘s novels. In fact, he won the Wallace Stegner Award in 2012 presented by the Center for the American West. And “Plainsong,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Haruf died in 2014 of lung disease. He apparently hadn’t felt the need to defend himself against the charge of being sentimental. I just ordered “Benediction,” the third novel in the sequence, and am eager to get back to Holt, Colorado.

There are three major female characters in the novel. The first, Leila, is a sociology teacher at a Boston area university, and has written books on abused women. Leila discovers that her husband, a director of plays who thinks very highly of himself, and who was always a philanderer will in fact always be a philanderer. She makes her peace with his hooking up with a younger actress who gets pregnant. They get divorced.

Mary, Leila’s house cleaner, we learn, is homeless.

For me the aboutness us of the novel focused on Mary’s life and her desire--if you could call it that-- to have a roof over her head and enough food to eat. The housekey on the cover hints at the longing for a stable home. The problems of the homeless became viscerally apparent in Mary’s life. She had spent some time in a shelter, but that is only an answer for somewhere to sleep. The residents are put out on the street after breakfast to fend for themselves before the next night. Mary alternates sleeping in airports, malls, libraries, and the homes of her cleaning customers when they are absent. With Boston’s weather, she is constantly worrying about the weather and freezing.

When I did a bit of research on Marge Piercy I learned two things. First, she is NOT Maeve Binchy, which is whom I thought I was reading. lol. It didn’t take me long to realize that Binchy, known for her novels set in Ireland, wouldn’t suddenly decide to write about Boston. Second, Piercy is a strong feminist, and a champion of women’s rights, so it wasn’t a surprise to discover that I was most affected by the story of Mary. The Poetry Foundation says as follows about Piercy:

An extremely prolific writer, Piercy has published close to 20 books of poetry and close to 20 novels. Her novels generally address larger social concerns through sharply observed characters and brisk plot lines. Though generally focused on issues such as class or culture, and usually written from a feminist position, Piercy’s novels have taken on a variety of guises, including historical fiction and science or speculative fiction.

Although we don’t really know why Mary has become homeless, it seems to be a domino effect of having her husband leave her and his (or the court’s) apparent unwillingness to support her after their divorce. He is well-to-do, so it’s baffling that she has no support. She has two children, neither of whom wishes to help her or in fact be in much of relationship with her, perhaps poisoned by their father against her. We never learn that thread of the story, and I felt it was somewhat unrealistic to have a woman fall from a fancy home in Bethesda, Maryland, where she’s entertaining people at lavish dinners every night to living on the streets, simply as a result of getting a divorce. There are all kinds of reasons a woman might become homeless, but this didn’t seem the most believable choice.

The novel resolves Mary’s plight in an ingenious (if unrealistic) way. She becomes ill sleeping in Leila’s bed when Leila is away and can’t get out before Leila returns. Leila, shocked, tries to get Mary’s children to help, but neither wants her. She can’t have Leila living with her long term, so she contacts her own sister, Debbie, whose latest husband has left her on a ranch in Colorado with a broken ankle and no help. Mary is apparently the answer to the “help,” but we (and Mary) wonder if Mary will continue to be needed in this family. Although she imagines getting an education and perhaps becoming a masseuse as is Debbie, this is all unresolved at the end of the novel. Given Piercy’s strong interest in women who have been marginalized by society, I expected a better resolution than shipping Mary off to Colorado.

The third woman in “The Longings of Women” is Becky Burgess. Leila has been commissioned to write a book about the murder of a young man who has allegedly been killed by his wife, Becky, and her 17 year-old lover whom she met at the local community theater. Becky grew up poor in a large Portuguese family. Her goal is to meet a wealthy man, get married and live a comfortable life. She also wants to be on the nightly news, even though she has little chance of being promoted from a secretary in the media company where she works. Becky, like Mary, has a strong desire for survival. She has married a man from an upper-class family who thinks that he is too good for her. Then Terry, her husband, loses his job and seems to have no intention of getting a new job. He threatens divorce. Becky becomes terrified that if he divorces her, she will lose the condo that his parents helped them buy and be back living with her Portuguese family in an overcrowded house. Terrified enough to kill him?

For me the whole story of Becky, her husband, Terry, and the boyfriend Sam felt a bit contrived, in part because we don’t doubt that Becky and Sam did in fact murder Terry. At first, I thought that the murder was planted in the story as a mystery to solve, but both the detectives and Leila come to the same conclusion.

Leila’s interviews with the various people involved in the murder for the book, which will come out after the trials have concluded, is what propels her storyline and leads to a new man in her life.

This left me with questions about “aboutness.” Was the novel really about Leila‘s journey in leaving her philandering husband and finding new love? Was it about Leila‘s writing the book? Was it about Mary’s desperate life on the streets?

Was it about how women can get caught up in economic situations that make them do desperate things? Who is truly desperate in this novel? I concluded it was only Mary. But for the fact that she fell ill sleeping in Leila’s house, she likely would have died. Leila is employed and financially independent, so she isn’t desperate. Becky, although desperate to keep her husband from divorcing her, is employed. We have no doubt that even if she loses the condo, she would be ok financially. It’s her grandiosity and her desire to live as a “homeowner,” that leads her to a desperate move.

I’ll probably read more Piercy, including her poetry, but I may sprinkle in a bit of Maeve Binchy for fun.

This month we’re reading two segments from “An American Childhood, “by Annie Dillard, who is known as a meticulous observer from her work in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” I’ve ordered both books so will report back later.

What I read in the meantime was “The Spectator Bird,” by Wallace Stegner.

Stegner is best known for his novel “Angle of Repose,” which I read so long ago on another of my classic kicks that I can’t remember the plot.

There is no bird called the spectator bird. It is the protagonist’s reference to himself being more an observer than a participant in his life.

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The protagonist, Joe Allston, is a retired literary agent who has moved from Manhattan down the peninsula south of San Francisco in retirement. He says about himself: “As for Joe Allston, he has been a wisecracking fellow traveler in the lives of other people, and a tourist in his own.”

He gets a postcard from Astrid, a woman whom he and his wife stayed with in Denmark, 20 years prior, which prompts him to find the three journals that he wrote when he was in Denmark. Ruth wants him to read them out loud to her, and he does. The trip was prompted both by the untimely death of his son Curtis in a surfing accident, and the fact that his mother had emigrated to the United States from Denmark. They stayed three months, renting part of a large apartment from Countess Astrid, an intriguing magnetic personality who had her own room in the apartment.

The novel shifts back-and-forth between Joe reading his journals out loud to his wife, a current day story involving a good friend who is dying of cancer, and a hilarious set piece with a Italian author named Cesare, who comes for a luncheon and manages to both suck up all the air in the room and make Joe feel like he has given up on life.

I was expecting that the journal was going to reveal something about Joe’s mother. It’s tricky to make a journal like this a plot point because Ruth was on the trip with Joe and knew pretty much what he knew and went where he went, so although she’s getting his perspective at the time on the events, it’s not as if there’s something shocking that she is going to learn from his journals. In fact, the shock-- if it is a shock-- is what happened after he stopped writing his journal. It occurs to me that Stegner wrote the novel before the current popularity of telling two stories in different timelines that alternate in the narrative. That might have been a better choice.

The plot in Denmark centers on the Countess’ family, who have a country home in Sverdrup, the same town where Joe’s mother grew up. From this fact, I assumed Joe’s mother learned a secret about the family and they spirited her away to the United States, but this does not appear to be the case. There is, however, a major secret that Joe discovers about the Countess, as her father, Count Rodding, a noted scientist, was conducting eugenic experiments on his own family by participating in incest. He shot himself shortly after a scandal was revealed about him having had sex with his daughter, the Countess, although she never admits this to Joe, who finds it out at a local town records office. As there’s no evidence that Joe’s mother knew about the experiment (because she emigrated before it started happening), we question Stegner‘s ability to hold his plot together.

I would’ve preferred to have the novel be a meditation on the part of a 70-year-old retired literary agent who now questions whether his life made any difference. Perhaps it’s a quieter meditation than imagining a crazy eugenics experiment in Denmark.

It reminds me that I too had ancestors in Scandinavia, as my father‘s side of the family emigrated from Norway to the US in the 1850s. I have no idea what their life was like in Norway (no Counts or Countesses I’m sure) or what led them to emigrate, but I have written poems, imagining that my Norwegian ancestor, Harald Haraldson, wrote to my English ancestor, James Hardy, who was already in Philadelphia as a member of the Continental Congress. My parents’ marriage ended in divorce, largely because of my father’s alcoholism, so in the poems I wonder if the two ancestors could have averted the disaster.

September 1, 1855,

From James Hardy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Harald Haraldson, Hjartdal, Norway

Dear Harald,

It’s not the city of brotherly love. Not yet. It’s not a brand of cream cheese, silver box with neat blue script,

I’ve never seen a bagel, never will.

And you are not my brother.

Not yet. But it will come, my offspring will meet yours.

We don’t know, do we, Harald, have no idea that our genes will meet in one hundred years, Dick and Sue will meet, and mate, my blue eyes will join yours.

For now, I eat brown bread, thank God for sun and rain, an alternating pattern mysterious

but in the good years, alfalfa feeds the beef.

Dear James,

I don’t know anyone who has left for The New World. Thus far, no one has been struck by wanderlust. We are a steady folk, James, no longing to be anywhere but where God planted us.

But my wife has been overcome by spirits, sees birds soar over the fjords, attentive to the flips and swish of fish, that moment before the dive, she says she sees a sign.

She comes home crying, about the fierce piercing of flesh, wrested out of water to an atmosphere inhospitable to gills, fearing it’s a sign to escape to different waters.

But I see it differently.

I feel the pain he will surely cause, my great grandson Dick, not just to Sue but to his children too, and I think can I forestall it, can I thwart this union by staying safe in Norway?

Dear Harald,

Salted klippfisk is as foreign to me as tamales will be to Dick and Sue. But Dick will love some things you do— pickled pigs feet, sardines, oysters.

Your great grandson will also take to peanuts, packed tightly in a Mr. Peanut jar. Will he get his taste for salt from you, or is it just a strategy to balance out the booze?

I’ve also written a poem, imagining what my female ancestors must have gone through living in Norway, but I recognize that just like Wallace Stegner, I am creating a story that may bear little resemblance to the truth.

The Missing Button

[in the voice of my ancestor, Anne Haraldson, Harstad, Norway]

The question sits like a forgotten button

at the bottom

of the laundry basket, small and circular,

abandoned

perhaps torn from a shirt or skirt

in the heat of undressing

perhaps clipped from a garment worn and tattered

alone useless its pearl-like sheen

in shadows.

What shall I do about you, Freya?

You whisper to me in the night,

the purr of your cats,

your restless scramble,

you are anxious to be gone, but to where?

Is this an invitation or a warning?

I am confused not sure which way

to point my own chariot,

the children dozing fitfully after

piling up the kindling,

folding shirts,

sweeping, sweeping

peace, no not peace, just a quiet

as the afternoon steals on to evening.

Are you obsolete,

a myth created by the ancients,

your robe of raven feathers,

your faithful boar?

Hans returns from the barnyard, having fed the sheep,

satisfied with so little.

He is worn, weary

and so am I.

Grateful for his meal, his pipe, the fire waning into night.

I want to be grateful. I do. Five healthy children, a man who takes each day in stride. But I look at you, Freya, a goddess who loved many men yet still kept her husband and I wonder, what would Hans say if he knew how I tremble to look at our neighbor? A teacher, his hands are smooth as wind-washed pebbles in the fjord, smooth as kittens’ fur. Can I imagine that type of softness against my skin?

Where to put this longing?

Freya, shall we steal away together, climb into your chariot

escape to the clouds bathe naked in the streams of another world,

nestle pelt to pelt?

Will you teach me how to keep what I have, yet reach for the missing button?

“The Spectator Bird,” which won the 1977 National Book Award was a sequel to “All the Little Live Things,” (1967). Stegner was 67 when “The Spectator Bird” was published. Like Annie Dillard’s work, Stegner is a master at description. His novels are known as much for the writing style as the plot. Joe is frequently ironic, but I saw his use of humor as a way to deflect from Ruth’s efforts to probe his feelings about the Denmark trip and his friend Tom’s impending death. I came away with great compassion for Ruth in this book.

As I listened to the book, I found myself marveling at the writing, but unable to recall his turns of phrase. If I read the precursor, I’ll read it in hard copy with a yellow highlighter in hand for the memorable parts.

What’s on your list of classics you want to read?

I began by asking people what they knew about Walt Whitman and was somewhat surprised to learn that three of the twelve people in attendance mentioned “O Captain! My Captain!” a well-known poem written by Whitman in praise of Lincoln after his passing. It’s odd that this poem is the one most remembered as it is written in a traditional format with verses, stanzas, and rhyme, which is not what Whitman is known for. He is known for free verse and long rambling sentences seen throughout his seminal work “Leaves of Grass,” which he added to throughout his life.

One of our members said she can recall distinctly memorizing “O Captain! My Captain!” in high school but as we talked about what it meant and its genesis, she said she was quite certain that her teacher didn’t tell anyone in her class that this was a poem about Lincoln or about Walt Whitman‘s anti-slavery reviews, etc. She said she memorized it without any idea what it was about.

Some thought Whitman was from Brooklyn. Actually, he was born on Long Island, left school at eleven, and moved to New York City at age 16 to work as a typesetter. He founded a newspaper on Long island and later was editor of The Brooklyn Eagle. He died in Camden, New Jersey, where he moved after a stroke to be near his mother. Philadelphia is across the Delaware River and has claimed Whitman as a repository of his life and work.

After his first self-printing of “Leaves of Grass,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an admiring letter which caused many people to read the book, although Emerson cooled as controversy mounted. The other thing people didn’t know about Whitman is that throughout his life he added poems to ”Leaves of Grass,” rather than writing new books. The book grew from 12 poems in 1855 to over 400 in the final printing in 1892, which almost didn’t happen because the printer was afraid to print a manuscript that was controversial and obscene. The first edition did not contain Whitman’s name—just the picture below:

When we looked at his biography, it was clear that Whitman didn’t stay at any one job for more than a couple of years. Finally, no one knew that Whitman had spent the Civil War years in Washington DC nursing soldiers who had been wounded in the war. He had gone to DC to look for his brother, who he had heard had been grievously wounded. In fact, this was not the case, but once there, Whitman was so appalled by the mountain of amputated limbs and the suffering of the soldiers that he decided to stay as a part-time nurse. In order to make money, he held a number of governmental jobs and was always looking for sponsorship from someone who would put him up for a job.

Only one member in the group commented that she believed Whitman was gay. Whitman was known for writing frank descriptions of sex, for which he paid a price, being fired from a government job and having his book banned in Boston because his work was viewed as obscene. So why did he persist? Yet Whitman’s sexual orientation has been part of his enduring mystique.

Whitman writes about sex with women and men. He writes about body parts, bodily fluids. He writes about prostitutes. His collection of twelve poems called “Calamus,” was printed in the 1860 version of Leaves of Grass, and concerns a male lover.

Here is one section from “Leaves of Grass” that is often cited as being explicitly homosexual, although the members of our group felt that it could just as easily apply to sex with a woman as with a man:

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

It’s clear that the mystique of Walt Whitman is alive and well today. Take a look at this amazing graphic.

This is one of 242 graphics Allen Crawford designed around Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” in his book “Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself.” He took a sixty-page poem and translated it to 234 illustrated pages, which took him over 2,500 hours to complete. Crawford says he worked in his cold basement, wrapped in robes, socks, boots and a Russian fur hat. What would possess him to lavish this love and attention on Walt Whitman? Here’s Crawford from his forward:

“ It’s become commonplace, even cliche, to suggest that Whitman’s iconic collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, is a kind of sacred American text. Whitman himself made such comparisons, going so far as to use biblical verse as a model for his own. So it seems fitting that his work should be transcribed by hand, the way that monks illuminated Holy Scripture in the Middle Ages.”

“Keeping up with Whitman’s torrents of people and places sometimes felt like rising a bee-stung bison down the aisle of a bus.”

Crawford says that he added elements from his daily life and the life of Philadelphia, which houses a Whitman collection. “Not doing so would have been a disservice to Whitman’s work, which attempts to create a new form of verse for The Here and The Now.”

For Crawford, this work is a holy mission, which I believe would please Whitman.

Allen Ginsburg, a well-known beat poet, was also entranced with Whitman and placed him in his poem “A Supermarket in California.” His reference to Whitman being gay is clear;

A Supermarket in California

Allen Ginsburg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Berkeley, 1955

More recently, the poet Mark Doty has written a book called “What is the Grass. Walt Whitman in My life.” The flyleaf says: “Doty reveals the power of Whitman’s persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large.”

For Doty, there is no question that Whitman was gay:

“The history of the reading of Whitman’s sexuality is a drama in itself, and it shows no real sign of letting up. Depending on your critic, Whitman’s an onanist who never touched anybody, or a bisexual fantasist who might have had a little queer sex, or a trailblazing sexual pioneer.”

Doty comes out on the trailblazer side:

“Whitman is ultimately a queer poet in the deepest sense of the word: he destabilizes, he unsettles, he removes the doors from their jambs.”

Here is Doty’s “evidence:”

He infuses his descriptions of men’s bodies with such palpable longing that anyone sympathetic to such desires cannot miss his intent. Gay men mostly grow up in hiding even to this day [2020]. In hiding they learn to listen attentively, to read the signals around them, to know who and what is safe, where lies judgment and where the solace and good company of their own kind.”

Doty seems to conclude that Whitman was intentional in writing about both male and female sex, but that his true desires were clear. What is also clear is that Doty views Whitman as important in his life today.

I love to challenge our group to write just one line of poetry. For our writing assignment, I typically take a line from the poems that we are reading and ask participants to fill out that line. Then they can share if they wish. Most do. Last month we did Emily Dickinson and the prompt was:

“My life has stood,” [a loaded gun] People filled in what their life has stood for.

For Walt Whitman, we did:

“ I hear America singing. I hear the song of...” and then fill in the blank.

The results, perhaps like Whitman’s poetry, was mixed. Some people wrote about songs of hope and others wrote about the song of children crying.

Was Walt Whitman gay? When asked if his Calamus poems implied a homosexual union, he denied the allegation as damnable and stated he had fathered six illegitimate children to prove otherwise. Whether he had a male lover will doubtless never be known. But whether Whitman was gay or not, he was groundbreaking. And he was brave. And he is still inspiring writers and artists today.

Mary Oliver wrote her first poem when she was 14 years old. She spent her years from 17 to 24 living at Austerlitz, which was the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, organizing her papers. There she met Molly Malone Cook, a photographer, who became her life partner. The two women eventually settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is known as a gay enclave. Although Mary Oliver did some teaching at various universities, she was not an academic. She never completed a degree, and she quite clearly did not aspire to the academic life.

Provincetown, Jacie on unsplash.com

One of the things we looked at in our poetry group was whether we could see any influence of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry on Mary Oliver. After all, she’d spent seven years presumably reading some of these poems in detail. I don’t see much influence there. As you may know, Millay was famous for writing poems about romantic love and relationships. (“What lips my lips have kissed/and when and where. . . . )She had a number of lovers and wrote about many of them. Mary Oliver, by contrast, as far as we know, had only one lover in her life and although she did write a few poems about Molly Malone Cook, she was not primarily what one might call a “relationship poet.’ Quite to the contrary, she is often called a “nature poet.”

In my view, however Mary Oliver does not use images of nature to simply describe the natural world or argue for taking care of it. I believe her use of nature is to open up a consideration about the nature of being human. Therefore, she is really following Emily Dickinson‘s advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The slant in Mary Oliver‘s poetry is simply coming at a meditation on loss, grief, joy, and faith through looking at the natural world.

In the course of preparing this presentation, I grappled with the opinions of some poets and critics, such as Maggie Millner, who in the Yale Review (11/5/2025) asks “Is Mary Oliver embarrassing? The most common reason given for her being embarrassing is the charge that she is trite, and although trite may sell Hallmark cards, it is a death knell for a poet who wants to be taken seriously. But why do people think Mary Oliver is trite and what does it mean to be trite anyway? That’s what I want to talk about today. I want to investigate Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Summer Day,” which is probably her best known poem.

I think one of the reasons people object to Oliver’s work is because her poems are easily understandable. In the common parlance of poetry critique today, that term is “accessible.” And there are those who believe that unless the reader needs to work to figure out what the poet is trying to say (meaning inaccessible ) the poem is too simplistic. I’m going make an argument about Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Summer Day” that although her final line has been criticized as trite or overly sentimental, it has a long and distinguished heritage.

Here is the poem “A Summer Day:”

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

From House of Light, 1990

You can see that in the poem, Oliver moves from a dragonfly to the idea of prayer and then to the idea of finding meaning in life, although as you can see, the meaning that she’s finding in her life is looking at a dragonfly and lying in the grass. It isn’t going to feed the hungry in India.

Now let’s take a look at a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

You will see similarities between his poem, which is viewed as one of his masterpieces, and Mary Oliver‘s poem. In each poem the writer starts with an image and unpacks it in specific detail. In Rilke’s case, it is a statue that is missing its head. Written in German, it has been translated variously in its reference to the genitals of the statue, which gives it a bit of frisson, but what I find most interesting is at the end of Rilke’s poem, he makes a turn to the statement, “You must change your life. “

This statement is not necessarily earned by a contemplation of the torso of Apollo, and it is rather shocking as it comes at the very end of the poem, but is it really any different than Mary Oliver‘s poem ending with “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Aren’t those two final statements really about the same thing? Rilke looks like a heritage to both the sentiment of changing one’s life and the idea of planting it as a turn at the end of a poem.

That led me to wonder if Mary Oliver had been a man working in an academic institution, if people might view what some call “trite” as startling and meaningful as the end of Rilke’s poem. It’s unlikely that Rilke has ever been called “embarrassing.”

In her criticism, Maggie Millner apparently feels that poetry should concern itself with politics and the issues of living in the modern world:

“the world of Oliver and the world Oliver attends to is suspiciously easy to praise, scrubbed of other humans with their pesky politics and noisy technologies. This world is mostly pre-industrial activistic. It is not unlike the America I’ve come across in the travel logs for early European settlers: idealized, dubiously, unpeopled and full of wild potential for the white imagination. “

Whoa. I’m glad Mary Oliver was not around to be able to read this (she died in 2019). I also think that it’s hard to read a poem like “Wild Gesse” where she refers to loneliness and grief without recognizing that she is attuned to the concerns of modern people. Mary Oliver is not a “confessional poet.” We do not hear what has caused her grief. Although in an interview with Krista Tippet, she revealed that her father had sexually abused her. “He got no love from me. He didn’t deserve it.”

Here again is Mary Maggie Millner:

“In the poems I like best, this experience of self-forgetting feels genuine, but in others, it can feel generic and contrived: less like transcendence, more like avoidance. As she [Oliver] writes in “Dogfish“: you don’t want to hear the story/of my life and anyway/I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen//to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. As I watched Oliver repeatedly dodge her reader, it occurred to me that the self-consciousness I felt while reading might be a mirror of the author’s own – and that the embarrassment I’ve been struggling to swallow actually helped me find new valences in her poems.”

Did you have to look up “valences"?” I did. Sounds like academia to me.

In addition, Millner criticizes the final lines in “The Summer Day” as being moralizing and passing judgment on the speaker’s life:

Oliver‘s recognition of mortality is both a caution to herself (why pay attention to a grasshopper?), and potentially to the reader (why pay attention to a poem?) This is at once self-deprecating and self-defensive; the same logic that strips the poet of the authority to praise the world, divests the critic of the right to judge it. The final sentence in the poem is the only one that uses the pronoun “you,” and I am tempted to read it with special emphasis: what is it you plan to do with your life? What gives you the right to censure mine?

Rilke, too, uses “you”?” Should we read it with “special emphasis?” In his final line, do we see his tone as censuring?

It’s sad to think that “one’s wild and precious life” may become trite simply because it is used so frequently. But that is a testament to its enduring appeal—and that’s not embarrassing.

In “The Life Impossible,” Haig ramped it up. I felt there was too much magic. There was a magic sea through which some characters entered into another world, and magic powers given to some characters to change events to their liking. But there were also subplots, climate change issues, developers who threatened the island of Ibiza, and a fascinating goat. The novel was replete with action!

“The Midnight Train,” by contrast, seems mundane and by the time some magic finally appears, the novel has sunk into the world of trite and predictable.

At the outset, Wilbur Budd is 81. He gets a call from Maggie, his former wife, which prompts him to reread a letter she sent him 30 years before when she left him, and then he dies. Then he finds himself a ghost on a train that stops at all the major events of his life. He’s told by his guide (the former owner of a bookshop Wilbur bought) that to get to eternity, he has to ride the train. OK, I get that some people said the story is heartwarming. Other people feel that it’s wonderful writing. But this novel is replete with statements such as “the only way to learn is to live,” and “I don’t know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.”

Wilbur views many of his life choices with regret. But the train isn’t going to let him get off to fix or change anything. He just has to suffer through each stop.

Wilbur had married Maggie when young and honeymooned in Venice. He ran a small bookshop in Sheffield, England, which had been started by Agnes Bagdale (her ghost is his guide on the train). Wilbur expands the bookshop, becomes obsessed with opening more and better stores, an IPO, and moves to London (which charmingly, if you are from Sheffield, is called “the south”). He becomes withdrawn and unavailable to Maggie, who languishes in London as a “corporate wife,” unable to make a career in art, which had been her dream.

It’s a sad story. But is it a story that needed to be told with a train and a couple of ghosts? Even if Wilbur didn’t experience regret at the time when he put his work ahead of his marriage or was unable to really grieve a loss with his wife, the reader can see the chances lost, the alienation Wilbur has from what makes life worth living.

The idea of looking back at one’s life and choices is not novel. It’s fundamental to “A Wonderful Life,” although in that case by seeing how George will make a difference in other people’s lives, he decides not to take his own. It also features in Emily’s decision to spend one day back in the world as a 12-year-old in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

And the topic of magic trains has also been done to better effect. Think Platform 12 and one-half where the magical train to Hogwarts School waits to whisk Harry Potter into a world of magic and menace.

Midway through the book, as Wilbur the ghost is watching himself fall asleep before dinner on his honeymoon in Venice, he decides to invite his dreaming self onto the train (Agnes tells him he’s toying with no eternity and the dreamer never waking up. The train isn’t happy either. It bucks and shakes but stays on the rails). The result is 24-year old dreaming Wilbur sees the events that will occur in his future.

Because Wilbur is dead, he is referred to throughout the novel as “the ghost.” As I was listening to the novel on audible, this became extremely annoying. I’m not sure how I would’ve solved it, but I didn’t like it.

I am not a big fan of either science fiction or dystopian fiction-- at least if it takes place in another world where there’s a whole new set of rules that apply to life. But a magical characteristic that is well presented and carried through, I can appreciate. For example, in Kevin Wilson’s novel “Nothing to See Here,” the protagonist, Lillian, is hired by her former roommate from college to come take care of her children while her husband is busy campaigning for political office. It turns out that the children when stressed spontaneously ignite.

The first time this happens it feels wacky, (to both us and to Lillian) but it’s handled in such a matter-of-fact fashion that before long I just accepted that these were two children who sometimes start to burn.

Unfortunately, Kevin Wilson followed up this novel with “Run for the Hills,” which has no magic element. It’s a story about a road trip where three children from the same father who have been raised apart by different mothers get together and make a road trip to California to confront their father. I felt that Wilson could have used some of the wonderful imagination that created the flaming children and given us more of a payoff when the children finally find their father.

As it was, we never really learned why their father couldn’t stay long with anyone woman, even though he had a child with each one, why he had a different profession in each “life,” and had to keep moving on, except for a fear of settling down. For that novel to have worked, in my opinion, the father needed to be a character who was both larger than life, fatally flawed in his inability to settle down, but also prompted by something more than not having had a father himself.

With Wilson, as with Haig, I feel that their latest novel is not nearly as good as their earlier one.

I’m going to reveal the ending of “The Midnight Train,” so if you plan to read the book, please stop here. I kept expecting a turn in the narrative that would allow Wilbur to actually relive his life. (I guess this is pretty obvious, particularly once you know “The Midnight Library” concept.) But it just didn’t happen.

After all, if time is just a construct and there is no present or future (which his friend Charlie expounds on at length when stoned) why couldn’t Wilbur go back and make better choices? Well, he’s a ghost. He can see himself in his former life but he can’t be seen or heard by the real people.

By the time we finally see that Wilbur is going to be able to live a different life, (40 minutes before the Audible version ends) I already knew all of Wilbur’s life story and could imagine what better choices he might have made. At the end, Wilbur and Agnes disappear from the train. The dreamer wakes up and tells Maggie he’s decided not to take the loan that would have enabled him to expand, choosing a smaller, simpler life with the woman he loves. I would have ended it right there. The falling action as Wilbur and Maggie go to a restaurant (which he discovers he saw on the train) trails on too long.

Fun detail: when Wilbur is old, he takes piano lessons from Nora Seed, the protagonist from “The Midnight Library.”

Haig talked about his novel in a recent podcast at www.nytimes.com/books.

Asked about the relationship between the new novel and “The Midnight Library,” he said:

It’s not a sequel. It’s a companion at best, or a sibling. “The Midnight Train” started as a very, very different novel. It was originally called “The Memory Thief” and it was quite dystopian science fiction about A.I. Along the way, it became something else. It became this story about your life flashing before your eyes. And there was a vehicle, a train. And I started to realize I was actually having an argument a little bit with “The Midnight Library,” which is very much about acceptance. I feel like this book represents a desire to act or change things. So it’s a different approach to regrets. In its own subtle, gentle way, it’s having a little falling out with “The Midnight Library.”

I found myself wishing that Haig had stayed with his initial idea and written “The Memory Thief.” But given his popularity, perhaps that will be next.

It’s a story about a woman named Daphne, who meets her long-lost stepfather, Eddie, in an art museum, which leads to unraveling stories about her family life when she was young, including a car accident in which both of them could have died. Daphne had both a biological father, and her mother married again after Eddie. So—three “fathers.”

“Whistler” is being marketed as a “love story” between a woman and her father and I have heard Patchett defend her work as a “romance.” Because I’ve read “These Precious Days,” a book of essays by Ann Patchett published in 2021, I know that she also had three fathers. The first, her biological father, was named Frank Patchett. When she was five, her parents divorced and her mother married Mike Glasscock, whom Patchett calls her stepfather. When that marriage dissolved, her mother married for the third time a man named Darrell Ray, when Patchett was 27 and no longer a candidate to be anyone’s step child.

I once heard a poet asked at a retreat,“ Are your poems real or do you make them up?” which the poet thought amusing, but actually the person was asking whether the poem represented the writer’s life experience, or whether it was totally a work of imagination, which is a legitimate question. In the case of “Whistler,” it seems to me that Patchett is reflecting on her life with three fathers-- in particular, her biological father whom she says she saw only one week a year when she was growing up. In her essay “Three Fathers,” she says:

“[M]y father and I didn’t see each other and so we didn’t understand. It was clear that he didn’t know me, but it took a long time for me to realize that I didn’t know him either.”

When Patchett’s sister married in September 2005, all three of her fathers were present. You can see the photo below that she reprinted in “These Precious Days.” She describes them as follows:

“My father, who had always hated my stepfather, hated him less now that he too had lost my mother. At my sister‘s wedding, my father contented himself simply hating my mother, even though she had left him for my stepfather in 1969. Beneath the glow of the little white lights striped over the ceiling’s crossbeams, my stepfather‘s love for my mother and my father‘s hatred of her looked remarkably similar.”

Patchett, knowing all three men would be at the wedding, organized the photograph of the four of them, says:

“Darrell holds up one of my hands, Mike holds the other, and my father in the middle has his hand on my waist. They look like they’re trying to steady me. My father is the handsome one, the one whose face registers genuine happiness for the day. Darrell is smiling bravely, very straight in his back brace. And Mike looks like he’s going to leap out of the frame the second I let go of his hand.”

‘We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,’ my father told me later on the phone. ‘And Mike said, you know what she’s doing don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with piece.’”

Whistler seems to be both “real and made up,” a narrative about fathers, stepfathers, family estrangement, and a child’s longing for the love of a father. In “Whistler,” Daphne’s biological father was more interested in his life as a boat builder and fisherman then he was as a family man. Daphne‘s stepfather Eddie was married to her mother for only two years and although they had in common being book editors, which was how they met, Daphne never really understood why the marriage broke up. She assumed it was because her mother blamed Eddie for the car accident. Daphne learns the real reason from Eddie in the novel.

There were some scenes in Whistler that I thought disquieting, including Eddie inviting Daphne to be his date at an anniversary party and then crashing a wedding at The Plaza, where they drank free champagne and danced in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. But by and large this story is one of Daphne getting to know Eddie and who he really is and uncovering some of the events in the aftermath of the car accident that neither of them knew.

So where does the horse come in? It turns out, that the horse Whistler, notwithstanding star billing on the cover of the book, plays a minor role in the narrative. Whistler is in an author’s book proposal Eddie recounts to Daphne when they are trapped in their car after having driven off the road. I’m not sure whether Patchett will eventually be sorry that she chose a horse photo for the cover because people who think the book is about a horse may be very disappointed. In fact, I thought it was about a horse and for that reason did not initially want to read it, so that illustrates the power of a cover.

I should add the cover of “These Precious Days” also features an animal, Patchett’s dog Sparky. Whistler is the horse in the story Eddie tells to Daphne as they’re freezing in a snowbound car wreck. He learned it from Mary Carter, a woman who sent a book proposal to Eddie and then had second thoughts. The book was never published, but Eddie kept a photo of the horse on his desk for all these years.

In her story, Mary Carter had taken Whistler out in a raging storm to find a missing horse. Lightning spooked Whistler, and Mary fell, breaking her ankle and other bones. The spot was remote, and she was unlikely to be found. As she lay on the grass, hoping someone would discover her, she was visited by images of people she had known and loved. Eventually Whistler comes back, lies down, and Mary is able to get on the back of her horse and get to safety. Eddie chose the story to take Daphne‘s mind off their precarious situation, but when Daphne gets scared about all the impending danger and asks whether anybody dies in the story, Eddie says,

’Everybody lives,’ because the creation of narrative tension was not his objective. He only meant to take her mind off the fact they were trapped in the freezing car. He meant to take his own mind off of that as well.”

Daphne is both calmed and troubled by the story and she and Eddie both agree that they are going to become novelists.

And that’s it for horses-- real or imagined they never return in the story again.
So why did Patchett put a picture of Whistler put on the cover of the book? First of all, it’s important to understand that only certain authors get to choose the cover of their book—Most authors who are not as famous as Ann Patchett are stuck with whatever cover their publisher decides to choose. For example, you can see below the cover for my friend Cathy Fiorello‘s novel called “Dreamreader.” It’s a startling picture of a woman who bears no resemblance to anyone in the story, but it is eye-catching, and although my friend did not like the cover, she didn’t have veto rights.

By contrast, the cover of “These Precious Days” is a painting of Ann Patchett’s dog, a small, black and gray terrier named Sparky who looks remarkably like the dog named Marty in Mary Carter’s story of Whistler. Sparky lived at Parnassus, Patchett’s bookshop in Nashville, Tennessee. He died in 2024 at the age of 12 from an enlarged heart, and it is clear from her video that Patchett knew she would be inconsolable.

That photo of the horse Whistler on Eddie’s desk, which he gives to Daphne, may be symbolic, perhaps of the story that got away, or perhaps of his telling the story to a nine-year-old trapped in a car with no sign of rescue.

Here’s the thing about “Whistler.” Wherever Daphne and Eddie go, he introduces her as his daughter, not his step-daughter. He loves her the way she had always wanted to be loved by a father. And as he said in the freezing cold wreck stuck on a snowy hillside all those years ago, “Everybody Lives.”

This is a book to savor through the summer. I highly recommend listening to it narrated as the voices are incredible in the depth and complexity of bringing to life characters in 1930s Mississippi. They are as varied as Meg, an 11-year-old orphan, Birdie Calhoun, a 24 year-old woman from Footely Mississippi, Victoria Tartt, an aging doyenne who owns a mansion in Oxford, Mississippi, and Frances, her social-climbing daughter and Meg’s sister, who has married disastrously. You cannot help falling in love with Meg, narrated by Jenna Lamia. She’s precocious, smart alecky, and very funny for a kid in definitely unfunny circumstances. January LaVoy narrates Birdie and most of the other characters in what Stockett called a “credible Southern accent.”

First, let’s get out of the way the review of the New York Times, which, in my opinion, damned “The Calamity Club” with praise for its suspenseful plot and its characters, but said it was not a “novel of ideas —at least not new ideas.” Perhaps the plot and the characters detract from the underlying gravity of the issues, but they are there and while not “new ideas,” the issue of eugenics and women’s rights over their bodies simmer beneath this book. After all, the eugenics movement was about ensuring a white race. Anyone who thinks the battle over immigration today doesn’t involve race may be naive.

In the novel, Charlie, who turns out to be Meg’s mother, had been scooped up from a train platform, where she was falsely accused of flirting with a black man, thrown in jail, deemed an imbecile, and sterilized against her will. There was a law on the books in Mississippi in the 30s and in 26 other states which allowed the forced sterilization of undesirable types of people, including those who were disabled or who were imbeciles.

Stockett said she wanted to get the issue of who does and does not belong up front in her novel, which she accomplishes with the sign above the orphanage:

We do not accept: Coloreds, Indians, Jews, Mexicans, Oriental types, twins, Anyone who has or has had Leprosy, Consumption, Missing Limbs or Harelip. No Boys. No Sick Children or anyone of a Retarded Nature. No Girls over the age of twelve. No Women in the Family Way. We do not deliver babies.”

If this isn’t a “big idea, “I don’t know what is. But the reviewer is correct—Calamity Club is primarily an epic story about Meg LaFleur, her missing mother, the brutality of the Orphan, the pending foreclosure of the Tartt house, and the disappearance of Frances Tartt’s husband, Rory (along with all the family valuables). It’s also about the desperate need to find enough money to save the Calhoun property in Footley, the mansion in Oxford, repurchase the furniture the family sold to raise mortgage money and get enough cash for Charlie to take Meg out of the reach of the orphanage to a new life in California. Even in 1930s Mississippi, that’s a lot of money.

Stockett, the author of the international best seller, “The Help,” took 17 years to write this second novel and says she was “fired” by her publisher for taking so long. In part this was due to the backlash over “The Help,” which sold 15 million copies. Some critics objected to whether a white woman had the right to write about black maids and others claimed that she had not accurately represented their lives. She was also unsuccessfully sued for misappropriating the life of a Black woman she barely knew.

“The Calamity Club,” with a couple of exceptions (how could you write a novel set in 1930s Mississippi without including Black characters who were so much a part of the underpinning that made society work) is mostly a novel of white characters, although they are not all of the same class.

Stockett said that she wrote the first draft of the novel over 7-9 years and submitted it to her agent. They concluded that it was “vanilla” or as she put it that “it lacked heart.” She realized she had written it cautiously because of the reaction to “The Help.” It was too cautious. So she started over again.

This reminds me of Arthur Golden, who wrote “Memoirs of Geisha.”

Golden first wrote the book in a form that one of his early readers told him sounded like a PhD thesis. He started all over again and wrote a second time from the perspective of an elderly geisha, looking back at her life. Then he realized she already would know everything that the reader needed to discover about the life of geisha, so he re-wrote it a third time beginning with the young girl who becomes a geisha so that we learn what she learns as her life progresses. Fortunately for him, his efforts in writing his novel three different times paid off.

“The Calamity Club” contains alternating chapters in the voice of Meg and Birdie. The first storyline involves Meg, who has lived at the Orphan since she was nine. These scenes are pretty gruesome. Meg has been pulled out of classes and associating with her friends, relegated to a back room where she sits at a table all day occasionally counting change. The room is moldy. The windows are boarded up--a symbolic representation of how trapped she is in the Orphan.

Meg’s nemesis, Garnett Pittman, who runs the Orphan, has recently been proclaimed the chair of the statewide anti-vice league and is on a rampage to rid the state of anyone she does not consider pure. She appears to have an unusual hatred for Meg, the source of which is revealed at the end of the novel.

The second storyline involves Birdie Calhoun, who lives on a farm in a town about 30 miles away from Oxford called Footley. She has been dispatched by her mother to go see her sister Frances, who has married into the wealthy Tartt family in Oxford, and ask for money to keep them afloat. There is no money, not even to keep the Tartt’s afloat. Rory has absconded with what little he didn’t gamble away at his job in the bank his father had founded.

Birdie meets Meg when she is asked to take a short term job doing the accounting for the Orphan before a state inspection. Birdie brings Meg biscuits from home and helps her open the boarded window and clean up the mold. Then Birdie meets Charlie, newly released from prison, who is desperate to find Meg and asks for her help.

But then Meg is adopted and leaves the Orphan for a wild ride as the adopted daughter of a wealthy family named Heidelberg. It’s a fake adoption. The son of the Heidelberg‘s, Tom, and his wife Lucille have adopted Meg for free instead of using the $300 they were given by his family to adopt an infant at a different orphanage. Of course this eventually comes to light.

Meg and Tom bond together. He teaches her to swim in a nearby lake. He tells Meg that he is writing a novel that is similar to “This Side of Paradise,” by F Scott Fitzgerald. We begin to hope that Meg has found a loving parent. But Tom’s wife, Lucille, is avaricious and an alcoholic who creates havoc in the family, leading to a dramatic event when she tells Tom that he has been a failure at everything in his life. What follows is a decision to return Meg to the Orphan.

Like plates spinning in a circus act, Stockett creates many obstacles to Birdie and Charlie obtaining the funds they need-- which results in an unusual business scheme with a ragtag cast of characters. The business is illegal. Stockett creates suspense, so that we are constantly worried that Birdie and her friends are going to be caught and thrown in jail.

Stockett says that she knew about 10% of what the novel would be when she began writing it. After that she let the characters write their story. She modeled Meg on the voice of her own daughter. She modeled the character of Birdie on herself as she admits to being scrappy and not willing to accept defeat ( example: getting fired by her publisher).

Another side plot involves Birdie falling in love with a local banker who has told the Tartt family that Frances’ husband has been fired from the bank for losing it money and that their house is going to be foreclosed.

The only real sex scene in this novel (which could have included many sex scenes) is when Birdie goes to Jack’s apartment after church on a Sunday, they lie on his bed (unheard of in this time and place) and each unbuttons some of the other’s clothing. Stockett has a real gift here—It’s the gift of both restraint and the ability to harness the imagination to what’s not on the page.

Stockett said her favorite character to write was Flossie, one of the partners in the illegal get-rich-quick scheme. I agree. First of all, she’s from North Dakota, so her speech pattern is out of step with Mississippi. She will remind you of Frances McDormand in “Fargo.” Second, like Meg, she has a strong sensibility against hypocrisy. Stockett’s hardest character to write, she said, was Garnett Pittman, who runs the Orphan. A plot point at the end creates a bit of empathy or understanding of why Garnett is bitter, but nobody is going to like Garnett.

This novel is also laugh-out-loud funny. Stockett said she asks her characters: “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” and their answer is frequently unexpected and hilarious.

Oprah asked Stockett if there was going to be a sequel to the novel as Oprah was invested in what was going to happen next to many of the characters. Stockett replied that she was not intending to write a sequel, but you will probably feel as I did that we have fallen in love with so many of these characters that we really want to know what happens to them next.

Grab this book before your ice cream melts!

I’m not ready to write about it, but when I am, it’s going to be a really fun essay.

I also just downloaded “Whistler,” by Ann Patchett, which is featured on the front page of the New York Times book review today.

My reservation was that I thought based on the cover that it was going to be about horses and frankly having read Geraldine Brooks’ book “Horse,” I couldn’t imagine a better book about a horse. In fact, at least as far as I can tell, Whistler is not about a horse —at least not a living horse. It’s opening set piece is a zinger—download a sample and you’ll see.

As you know, I often fall into a rabbit hole reading The New York Times Book Review, which happened again today. “A.I. Loves the Em Dash,” by Vauhini Vara bemoans the usurpation of the em dash by ChatGPB, Claude and Gemini.

These days I’m more likely to encounter an M dash in someone’s ChatGPT-produced LinkedIn post then in literature. There’s an overeager jauntiness to its latest incarnation, as if it’s trying to sell you something: – isn’t just functional – it’s profound.

Most of the article is about the use of the M dash in Moby-Dick and Vara’s unsuccessful attempts to write without using the dash. But she adds a bit of history about the em dash:

[A]round 1440 the printing press arrived in Europe, and after that punctuation became more standardized in languages that use the Latin alphabet. Dashes show up in letters and plays from at least as far back as the 16th century, often signifying an informal break in thought. The m dash got its name because it’s just as long as the letter m.

A quick review using A.I. will reveal the difference between the hyphen, the n dash, and the m dash. The hyphen (the shortest) is generally used between two parts of a word or modifier.

Example: I wore sling-back shoes to the party.

The n dash (you guessed it—named because it’s the length of the letter n) is a bit longer, often used in multi-word phrases.

Example: She admitted the sling-backs were an over-the-top-fashion-choice.

The M dash is used for a longer break, often as an appositive, or to signal a change in direction in a sentence.

Example:

My mother—being a woman of impeccable taste-- recommended the sling-backs.

As most of the world knows, Emily Dickinson was famous for her use of the dash in her poetry. Because she was writing by hand, we will never know if when typeset, she intended an n dash or m dash– or if she even knew the difference. My own word processing system, for reasons unknown, requires me to type two hyphens to make a dash. Sometimes it automatically converts to an m dash and sometimes it leaves the two hyphens in place. Just look at the example above beginning “My mother.” My system converted two hyphens to an m dash the first time but not the second. I suppose I could spend hours trying to fix my settings so that I always got an m dash when I type two hyphens, but I know that with every technological problem, it either takes 10 minutes or 10 hours to fix and as I don’t know which when I embark on the project, I’m reluctant to invest the 10 hours.

In addition to the grammatical use in an appositive or change in focus, the m dash helps guide the reader into how to read a sentence. But when you apply this concept to Emily Dickinson’s poetry, you might ask why the use of line, line breaks (caesura or end-stopped) or stanza isn’t enough to guide the reader. Why would Emily Dickinson, who already had at her disposal many ways to create silence or a pause in her poems, add a dash as one of her signature punctuation maneuvers? Of course, no one knows the answer to this question. It could be a simple as the fact that she liked to see the way a dash looked on the page—a nice slash of black ink. Maybe it wasn’t significant at all in terms of grammar, punctuation or guidance.

As Beth Towle, in “Actuary Lit,” February 11, 2014 (reprinted on poetryfoundation.com) commented:

No one mastered this type of interrupted sound and vision better than Emily Dickinson. Her dashes are little breaks in form that force the reader to be considered meaning. It can become confusing at times to read a Dickinson dash. Where do we place the emphasis of meaning – on the word before the dash or the word after? Do we assume the dash plays the same role as a period or comma or do we need a new way to think of the pause it creates?

Much has been made of the possibility Dickinson meant for her dashes to be considered as marks of rhythm or meaning. Scholars have been trying to understand the ways in which her downward versus upward slash marks might mean different things. There are considerations about dash length that original manuscript readers have had to take into account. Many others have pointed out the ways in which the dash is also an act of violence. And it certainly is, in that it forces unpleasant things to happen to our consideration of sound in Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson’s dashes perform better than most poets could ever hope to do with mere words: they express aching dissonance, painful interruption.

Dickinson did not restrict her use of the dash to poetry. She used it in correspondence as well, leading to the conclusion that it was not so much a guide to meaning as an affectation. Here is a letter to an editor, Mr. Higginson, to whom she sent four poems:

Mr. Higginson, are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask –

Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –

If I make the mistake – that you dared to tell me – would you give me sincerer honor – toward you –

I enclose my name – asking you, if you please – Sir – to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me – it is needless to ask – since Honor is it’s [sic] own pawn –

It’s useful to add that Dickinson published only ten poems during her lifetime. After her death, her family found over 1,600 poems hand-written on “fascicles,” small paper booklets sewn together by hand at the seam. Mabel Loomis Todd and Higginson published the first selection of her poems in 1890, but “edited” and removed many of Dickinson’s dashes. A complete volume did not appear until 1955, in which her unusual punctuation and spelling choices were restored.

As you can see below, Dickinson’s poems are sometimes printed with an n dash (or maybe a hyphen) which is doubtless not what she wrote by hand. This version is on the poetryfoundation.org website.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

You will notice that Dickinson used a comma after “Extremity.” Is that pause supposed to be longer or shorter than the line above after “Sea?”

By the way, according to A.I., this poem is the most frequently quoted in literature. True? Not true?

I can tell you it’s quoted by Meg in “The Calamity Club.”

Robbie created an avatar of himself named Wolfe and basically lived an online life until he decided to move to Iceland, where tragedy struck.

This week I read “By Nightfall,” written earlier by Cunningham in 2010. “By Nightfall” too had a couple where the brother of the wife had come to stay with them, having decided that his quest for spiritual enlightenment at the foot of a guru in Japan was not actually what he was looking for.

The young man is called Mizzy, which stands for mistake, a moniker given him when he came along after everyone thought his parents were done having children. There’s something about the youngest child that can create dependency, and Mizzy seems to have fallen into this trope. Too cute, too glib, and easily forgiven.

The husband of the family, Peter, owns an art gallery, and the novel is a fascinating look at the world of art-- who is current, who is not, how art gets sold and the world of consumers of art, generally wealthy people who are looking to impress other people with their purchases. I found this part of the novel to be fascinating, as I always love a novel where there’s something to be learned. The combination of the personalities of artists with the personalities of art buyers made it an unappealing prospect for a stable, successful enterprise.

Praewthida K on unsplash.com

Mizzy, as it turns out, is a drug addict, which Peter discovers when a drug dealer delivers drugs to their home. Mizzy may or may not be gay, but he attracts something in Peter that surprises, shocks, and ultimately seduces Peter. Peter questions his marriage, whether his career has been a success, and what if anything he is supposed to do with a young man who shows up in his kitchen when they both have insomnia stark naked.

Mizzy is a manipulator, as are most drug addicts. He manipulates Peter into keeping his addiction from his sister, fearing another intervention and treatment center. Peter, enthralled by the attention of Mizzy, doesn’t see this until it is too late.

And although there are certainly some shocking plot points in this novel, they are almost ancillary to the overall theme, which is Peter‘s evaluation of his life. In particular, he wonders whether he is a success or simply a peddler of whatever appeals to the art market. He wonders whether his estrangement from his adult daughter, living in Boston and working in a bar, is truly the result of poor parenting on his part. She says he neglected her when she was young. He doesn’t even seem to remember this. I felt that the novel shirked delving into this estrangement and Peter’s attempts to connect with his daughter (a telephone call is awkward and sad.) Is Bea, like Mizzy, coming to terms with not being as smart or special as she had hoped?

Having now read multiple reviews of “By Nightfall,” I conclude that the reviews fall into three camps.

First, there are those who feel that Peter is an entitled white upper middle class unlikable character and they’re not interested in what he thinks or what he does.

Next, there are those who are captivated by Cunningham‘s writing and savor his style.

Third, there are those who feel that the novel is pretentious because of the extent to which Cunningham drops references to literature, ranging from “Ulysses” to “The Magic Mountain” to “The Great Gatsby.” (and more, much more.)

The reviewer for “The Guardian” was appalled and felt that the novel was both pretentious and a failure because of all of its literary allusions. I enjoyed the literary allusions (maybe I’m pretentious too?). It’s a feature of many of my favorite novels, including “The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez, who sprinkled imaginary conversations with literary personalities throughout the novel, which I found intriguing.

I doubt Cunningham felt that he needed to demonstrate his literary chops, having won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, “The Hours,” (1998) inspired by “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Wolfe. Maybe he just had fun riffing on them. As to whether Peter is likable or unlikable, I was neutral. Was Harold Bloom likable in “Ulysses?” (also cited).

There’s an argument that if we are truly privy to what’s in another person’s mind, none of us would probably be that likable. I didn’t feel that Peter was whiny (one of the reader complaints.) Obviously, he’s well to do and owns a loft in Soho, but his art gallery is not a thriving success, and he’s reduced to peddling a brass urn to a rich client that while outwardly beautiful is inscribed with sexual innuendos and swear words. So, is that art? What’s the purpose of art, anyway? To shock? To generate conversation? To advertise one’s wealth? I could see Peter ruminating on these questions.

Ultimately, however, putting aside the issue of the literary illusions and whether Peter is likable or unlikable, I found Cunningham’s writing style to be captivating. Janet Fitch, the reviewer for the LABR felt the same way.

“Beyond the drama though, the book’s real achievement lies in its portrayal of Peter‘s multilayered contradictory consciousness. I didn’t so much read this book as press it to my nose and mouth like an oxygen mask. Its prismatic interiority is exactly what I needed – a reminder that the airless feedback loop of our social networks and beehive like interactivity is a thin substitute for the kind of mental life Cunningham depicts so richly – the private life of the adult mind.

I think it’s fascinating that this novel has created both ardent fans and foes. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe an author everybody loves like Elizabeth Strout or Richard Russo could take it up a notch a bit and create some controversy.

Like Fitch, I found much of the writing irresistible. Here is a description of the Taylor family (Rebecca and Mizzy’s) that Peter married into:

Rebecca‘s family is in a way a country unto itself. Peter married into it as he might have married the customs and legends, the peculiar history of a girl from a small, remote nation. The Taylor family nation would be solvent, but not wealthy devoted to regional dishes and handicrafts lax about timetables and train schedules, tucked into the declivities of a mountain range, daunting enough to have protected it from invaders, immigrants, and most ideas and inventions it did not itself engender. Mizzy would be its wounded patron saint, whose pale glass-eyed effigy is paraded annually through the streets and into the central square.

I ultimately conclude whichever camp you agree with, even if you think Peter is entitled and Cunningham drops too many literary figures into the stew, you will be captivated by the writing style. Plus—great ending!

Her book was recommended in the New York Times book Review column called “Read Like the Wind. “By MJ Franklin, yesterday, June 7.Here’s what the New York Times said about a Bluets:

“no brief description could do justice to the beauty and complexity of the slim monograph, which is also a memoir in pieces, a scrapbook of a relationship, a chronicle of heartbreak, a peak into depression, the music of an artist and the field notes of a scholar.”

Like Carson‘s book, Nelson‘s deals with a bad breakup. The Times quotes one of her 240 fragments:

“This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking talking, always talking to you “

and this

“by documenting her obsession with a color, Nelson makes legible the indescribable agony of heartache. Reading Bluets is like touching a live wire – it’s raw and electric”

Jeannine Ouellette, who teaches an online course on Substack called “Writing in the Dark” (recommended for anyone even thinking about creative writing) has a term she calls “shimmers and shards.”

She frequently will ask writers to get to the heart of their story by coming at it sideways with little observations about the world around them. I now have a whole bank full of shimmers and shards, and as I said to a friend recently, when I am under a deadline to write a poem, I will often go into my file of shimmers and shards and just ask them which one wants to be turned into a poem today.

So I thought I’d share with you my response to Maggie Nelson‘s book “Bluets.” Ouellette asked us to write a piece in 20 numbered short sections, and to plant within it a desire. She also asked us to use the phrase, “Now I see I was wrong.” It didn’t need to be the same desire for a lover as in “Bluets.” I worked both with the surface desire to be special as the invited guest to my granddaughter’s play and the deeper desire revealed by braiding the “Five Love Languages,” a desire to be touched. You can see it peek through in paragraph 17.

You can see the first version below.

Elizabeth

1. Her eyes, a sea green color, unlike her sister‘s bold blue which we said was so beautiful, so special. Then she asked, aren’t I special too?

2. Mistakes were made of course they were. Equality is an illusion.

3. Writing letters backwards, a simple decoding to reveal I love you.

4. Her eyes, their sheer delight as she spied me in the audience. Her special guest, the one who flew 2000 miles to see her on the stage.

5. The roses, pink, yellow, purple, nestled among red berries and wax green leaves.

6. Their stalwart stems, unlike black-eyed Susans or Queen Anne’s lace, whose tiny, pale green stems tremble in the wind-- how can they hold them up? I need holding up.

7. I admit that I was secretly thrilled to be her first and only guest at opening night, not wanting to share her with anyone.

8. Sharing is hard for me. My brother ate my chocolate pudding when I was ten. Perhaps that’s where it began.

9. I love my poodle, her friskiness and longing to sleep at the foot of my bed. I gaze into her poodle eyes and know that I am special.

10. But now I see, I was wrong —far better to have offered her wildflowers than the hot house roses.

11. The five love languages: gifts; acts of service; quality time; words of affirmation; physical touch.

12. What if touch is fleeting? What if “love you,” a rote goodbye, has nothing to do with love?

13. I am here, right here. I will never leave you. Are these words of affirmation if you don’t believe me?

14. I lavish time on these little children, my delight in their delight, my willingness to play an endless game called pet store where I alternate the roles of the owner and the patron and they get to be the pet.

15. They don’t know this-- how fleeting are the years, how soon they will adopt a veneer of bravado thinking they no longer need me or my presence to complete them.

16. What is the love language that goes with being cherished? How do I feel cherished? How does she?

17. Touch me. Take my face between your hands, look into my sea green eyes and tell me I am your beloved.

18. She is ten now. This year, I am no longer permitted to bathe her. Her baby sister still squiggles like a minnow in the bathwater, acts out roles with tiny dolls in the water.

19. In a photo, black and white, I am ten, wearing a frilly party dress on an elementary school stage, where we prepare to sing a song or dance. I do not recall which. The words are lost to me.

20. Who is in the audience? Who took the photograph? Who did I wish to look at me as if I were the star, as if I were the only one who mattered?

granddaughter, center stage in pink

Then I revised the piece into a poem, took out parts that were extraneous that I had used to fill up my quota of 20 items and worked with both line breaks and stanzas. In poetry, this is often called removing the scaffolding. After we have created an on-ramp, we can sink deeper into our poem. We can often get rid of the scaffold or the on-ramp in my case. The scaffold was the idea of 20 short snippets. I also moved my “desire” line to the end.

School Play

Her eyes, a sea green color, unlike her sister‘s bold blue

which we said was so beautiful, so special.

Then she asked, “Aren’t I special too?’

Mistakes were made of course they were.

Equality is an illusion.

Her eyes, their sheer delight as she spied me

in the audience. Her special guest, the one who flew

2000 miles to see her on the stage.

The roses, pink, yellow, purple, nestled

among red berries and wax green leaves.

Their stalwart stems, unlike Queen Anne’s lace,

whose tiny, pale green stems tremble in the wind—

how can they hold them up? I need holding up.

I admit that I was secretly thrilled to be

her first and only guest at opening night,

not wanting to share her with anyone.

But now I see, I was wrong —

far better to have offered her wildflowers

than the hot house roses.

The five love languages: gifts; acts of service; quality time;

words of affirmation; physical touch.

What if touch is fleeting? What if “love you,” a rote goodbye,

has nothing to do with love?

I am here, right here. I will never leave you.

Are these words of affirmation if you don’t believe me?

They don’t know this-- how fleeting are the years,

how soon they will adopt a veneer of bravado

thinking they no longer need me to complete them.

She is ten now. This year, I am no longer permitted to bathe her.

Her baby sister still squiggles like a minnow in the bathwater,

acts out roles with tiny dolls in the water.

In a photo, black and white, I am ten, wearing a frilly party dress

on an elementary school stage, where we prepare

to sing a song or dance. I do not recall which.

The words are lost to me.

Who is in the audience? Who took the photograph?

Who did I wish to look at me as if I were the star,

as if I were the only one who mattered?

Cherished. Touch me. Take my face between your hands,

look into my sea green eyes and tell me I am your beloved.

For those of you who may think I’m writing about poetry because I didn’t read a book this week, I did. This week I read “Rise and Shine,” by Anna Quindlen, a 2006 novel about a TV reporter who calls a loathsome guest a “fucking asshole” on a live mic.

That may have been more incendiary in 2006 than it would seem today, but I did enjoy the book enormously. It’s definitely on my list of recommended summer reading, not because Anna Quindlen is not a thoughtful author but because it’s fun. She deals with the themes of fame and the persona one adopts when famous and the effect it has on family and friends. It is Anna Quindlen at her best.

“Perhaps we need to remember that “Madame Bovary” was composed at a time of ruin and rapture on an unprecedented scale...Flaubert changed the genre of the novel forever. Until him, far too often, writers were supposed to create characters and choose themes that carried “noble messages,” “higher values.” ...Whereas Flaubert wanted to dissolve inside his stories...he did not judge his characters. He wanted to walk with them.”

“I asked myself: what would happen if, instead of Flaubert writing about a woman, Emma, women could pluck the quill from his hands just this once, and dream up a whole new story for Gustave—the boy, the youth, and the man. ...Thirty women from every class, creed and circumstance.”

As far as I know, this is Shafak’s first novel without a connection to Turkey (although I’m guessing a few of those thirty women are Turkish.)

While I’m waiting for her new book to be published, I decided to read another of her earlier novels, called ”The Forty Rules of Love.”

Shafak clearly cares deeply about her native Turkey, although she lives in London now. As I’ve written before, I highly recommend Shafak’s novels: “The Island of Missing Trees” and “There Are Rivers in the Sky.” Both deal with big topics, including genocides. She anchors “The Island of Missing Trees” in Turkey and Crete; “There are Rivers in the Sky” includes a Yazidi family in Iraq that ends up in a genocide.

Shafak on her Substack (Unmapped Storylands), talked about being sued based on a character in her novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul.” Apparently, there is a law in Turkey that makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness.” The state sued based on a comment by an Armenian character referring to the 1915 genocide of Armenians by the Turks. She won the lawsuit, but her comment led me to pick up the book to see what the fuss was all about.

I confess halfway through my interest flagged, and I haven’t finished the book. As I’ve said before, I acknowledge that some authors have written better books than others, and I do not subscribe to the notion that each book should up the ante in some way, although I have to say, I think that is in fact what Shafak has done in her writing.

Geraldine Bedell, writing in The Guardian about “The Bastard of Istanbul” said:

“It’s unquestionably an ambitious book, exuberant and teeming. But, perhaps because of the sometimes florid writing, reading it feels like holding a sack from which 20 very angry cats are trying to escape.”

Lorraine Adams, writing for The New York Times, noted that this was Shafak’s first novel written in English:’

[A]lthough Shafak may be a writer of moral compunction, she has yet to become—in English, at any rate—a good novelist...but Shafak, still in her 30s, has more than enough time to grow into a writer whose artistry matches her ambition.”

I believe her later novels are proof of this.

Now back to ”The Forty Rules of Love.” This novel, written in the early 2000s and published in 2009, is about Ella, a modern-day unfulfilled housewife in Massachusetts who is reading a manuscript written by a man in Amsterdam with whom she falls in love. (text romance has improved markedly since the year 2000 but I doubt Shafak has much experience in it.) The manuscript is about the meeting of Shams of Tabriz, who was a Sufi (commonly called a whirling dervish) and Mauland Jalai-Ud-Din, known as Rumi (1207-1273) in Konya, Turkey. Rumi is well-known today as a poet of extraordinary insight and spirituality, to say nothing of wit.

In the novel Shams, then 60, was told by his mentor that he needed to go to another town and find a spiritual partner, the goal of which would be to improve both their lives. When Shams meets him, Rumi (30) is a scholar and an academic, who gives sermons to hundreds of admirers in a local mosque, but he is not a poet. Shams strikes up a friendship and the two men become enraptured with each other. Shams alienates and confuses Rumi’s family, particularly Rumi’s wife Kerra, who feels abandoned by her husband. Shams is a fire brand who is perfectly happy to stir people up and shake up old ideas, earning him enemies.

In the novel as in real life, after a friendship of about three years, Shams disappears. Whether he was murdered, as some believe, by his enemies, or he simply disappeared to give Rumi room to grow is not known, but what is known is that after his encounter with Shams, Rumi wrote thousands of poems dedicated to Shams and became one of the best known poets in the world.

I thought the idea of interspersing 40 rules of love in the novel was interesting. I assumed it encapsulated the wisdom of Shams and the Quran in short little statements about love. Actually, the “forty rules” were created by Shafak using a style found in the Quran, but they do not appear there. I felt they were highly repetitive and could have been encapsulated into many fewer “rules.” But apparently the number 40 is important in Islamic tradition.

I did enjoy, however, Shams’ stories, which reminded me of the parables of Jesus. And in one touching scene, Shams discovers Kerra, Rumi’s second wife (a Christian who converted to Islam) with bread dough in her hand in the shape of Mary. He gently acknowledges her need for Mary. She says:

Yet for me the idea that Jesus was not a son of God but a servant of God wasn’t that hard to believe. What I found much harder to do was to abandon Mary...sometimes I yearn to see Mary’s kind brown eyes. Her gaze always had a soothing effect on me.

What was less successful in my mind was the modern-day love story, which I know is a conceit that is popular today--a modern day story and then a back-in- time story. The problem with this conceit is the stories have to carry equal weight. If they don’t, one of them starts to feel trivial and that’s not good for a storyteller who wants you to keep reading. And speaking of modern-day love stories, here is Shafak’s Instagram post showing a bride and groom displaying her book at their wedding

In my opinion, the modern-day love story didn’t add much to the main narrative, which was about Shams and Rumi. My other disappointment was that the novel did not include more than a couple of lines of the poetry of Rumi. This is understandable if he didn’t start writing poetry until after Shams disappeared from his life, but surely a novelist could find a way to plant some of Rumi’s poetry into her novel. For example, why couldn’t Ella, in reading the manuscript, research and fall in love with some of Rumi’s poems?

Here are a few candidates:

Out Beyond Ideas.

trans Coleman Barks and John Moyne

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about ideas, language,

even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.

The Great Wagon

trans. Coleman Barks and John Moyne

Today like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The following poem shows both Rumi’s love for Shams and his grief.

Where did the Handsome Beloved Go?

translated by Brad Gooch and Marya Mortaz

Where did the handsome beloved go?

I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?

He spread his light among us like a candle.

Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me?

All day long my heart trembles like a leaf.

All alone at midnight, where did that beloved go?

Go to the road, and ask any passing traveler — 

That soul-stirring companion, where did he go?

Go to the garden, and ask the gardener — 

That tall, shapely rose stem, where did he go?

Go to the rooftop, and ask the watchman — 

That unique sultan, where did he go?

Like a madman, I search in the meadows!

That deer in the meadows, where did he go?

My tearful eyes overflow like a river — 

That pearl in the vast sea, where did he go?

All night long, I implore both moon and Venus — 

That lovely face, like a moon, where did he go?

If he is mine, why is he with others?

Since he’s not here, to what “there” did he go?

If his heart and soul are joined with God,

And he left this realm of earth and water, where did he go?

Tell me clearly, Shams of Tabriz,

Of whom it is said, “The sun never dies” — where did he go?

Translated from the Persian

Despite my misgivings about the book, I loved “The Forty Rules of Love” for the vibrant picture of Konya, Turkey, and Shams and Rumi ‘s life together. Think of it: had Shams not found Rumi, we might never have the poetry of Rumi, a sobering thought.

Eagerly anticipating the publication of “In One Brief Moment All Eternity.”

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Maria loved to give me things. I mentioned I’d been looking for a cabinet to display my collection of small Steuben crystal animals purchased in honor of my mother. I have two puppies entwined, a frog, a horse. I noticed a wooden cabinet on her wall in which she had stored small glasses that looked perfect for Prosecco. It was dark wood, top and bottom carved in an intricate pattern, with three shelves and a glass front. And a lock, as if I’d need to lock in crystal animals. “I love that little cabinet. My Steuben animals would look so cute in it,” I said. Maria, replied, “Then you must have it. Please take it.”

“But it’s attached to the wall. If you pull out the screws, it will damage your walls.” Each time I visited her she reminded me. “You know that little cabinet is yours. Don’t forget.”

Now it shifts uneasily in the backseat of my car, the two long screws that held it to the wall loose inside, making an odd music, not like wind chimes, but in almost-words like eagle or wings or wind. My Steuben animals have rejected it as their resting place, now that Maria is dead.

As I said at her memorial poetry reading, I recall asking Maria if I could borrow her a white nightgown from her for a presentation I was doing dressed up as Emily Dickinson. My own nightgowns, clingy and see-through, would not have been appropriate. Here’s a photo of Maria wearing MY nightgown, which I gave her when she became bed-ridden.

I first met Maria in the year 2000 when I was a new professor at the University of Hartford in the legal studies department. I had taken my first writing class in 1998 at Wesleyan with Anne Greene, who has also recently died. I was exploring whether after a long career as a lawyer I wanted to start writing creatively.

I’d been a legal writer for many years. I had given presentations on legal writing in law firms and law schools. I had written materials on grammar for lawyers. But the major difference between creative writing and legal writing is that in legal writing, you work to a formula based on logic. First you tell the reader what your position is with what rule of law backs it up, and then you build your argument from there. At the end of your document, you summarize by saying pretty much exactly what you said at the beginning. You make a clear footprint for where you’re going and then you go there.

In creative writing, by contrast, I begin with a thought or an idea and frequently I don’t know where I’m going. I have some ideas about a topic to explore, but I often find myself surprised by what ends up on the page.

I told Anne Greene, at that workshop “I don’t have any stories to tell,” and ended up writing about Theresa of Avila. (I knew how to research!) However, once I gave my right brain full reign, it turned out I had a lot of stories.

After that creative writing course, I got interested in poetry and decided to offer a poetry workshop at the University of Hartford. I asked the chair of the Women’s Entrepreneurial Center if she knew anyone who could be a good leader for a poetry workshop, and she said “well I have someone, but I don’t think you’re going to like her.” I asked “why do you think I’m not going to like her,” and she said “because she’s kind of flighty. “

This said something about the three of us. It said that this woman, who was extremely serious, thought that I was also extremely serious, which I could understand given my job in teaching paralegals the law, but she also felt that Maria as a poet was not serious. Maria was extremely serious about the craft of poetry. The poetry workshop was well attended and successful and led to a long poetry friendship between us for the next 26 years.

At the workshop, Maria handed out postcards to all of us and asked us to write about what was on the postcard (which is very helpful if you are staring at an empty page with no ideas) My postcard had a very stern looking man in a tuxedo.

Before I could begin to write, Maria somehow managed to let me know that the postcard was actually of a woman--Georgia O’Keeffe. (yes, the skull should have been a tip-off.) So that was one of my first lessons in poetry —that sometimes what I think I’m looking at is not actually what I’m looking at. Poetry can bring a change in perspective. Maria had complete control of her workshop and did not strike me as being flighty in anyway. But she was imaginative and enthusiastic.

Maria sponsored poetry readings at the Noah Webster House in West Hartford, Connecticut, for many years. I was privileged to be asked to read there twice. She believed that poets should be paid for their work, and she wrote out checks for $150 to each poet who came to read in her series.

In 2005, Maria became the first Poet Laureate of the town of West Hartford. My friend Ginny Connors and I approached Shari Cantor, then a Council Member, with the idea and she enthusiastically agreed. Maria set the tone for all the subsequent town laureates: spread the love of poetry around our town. She will be missed.

Maria and Bill Sassi at installation as Poet Laureate, 2005.

***

Here is a piece I wrote in one of my workshops this week:

She didn’t give it to me. I found it underneath a pile of papers after she died—a 4 inch crystal vase. The exact item I wanted for my birthday—and here it was, just waiting for me. Hidden, as I was cleaning out her house under piles of paper, pillows and poetry books. I’ve put it on my desk, stuck an azalea blossom in it. “Thanks Maria,” I say, even though she’s dead.

She was 98 when she died—the same age my mother would have been had she not died of breast cancer at the age of 50. Maria was a poet who thought highly of herself. But come to think of it, if poets don’t think highly of themselves, who will? She wrote two books of poetry. The first one is dated 1998. The last 2015. A total of 108 poems, that’s 6.35 poems per year between publication dates. She didn’t count. She’d be annoyed to think I did.

She gave me a painting on a mirror of an old fashioned girl holding a parasol. I hung it in my bathroom. Then I asked for an oil painting of her from years ago, when she posed for the Art League. She was holding a cup of coffee, her ubiquitous libation. She was happy to give it to me. But her son Billy got wind of it and made me give it back. Did he want it? No. Did he resent me? You bet. We didn’t talk about Billy.

Then she gave me a belt buckle—It said “Moxie” on it, which was, according to the internet is, “one of America’s oldest continuously produced sodas, known for its bold, bittersweet, and highly polarizing herbal flavor.” That was Maria—she had moxie, descended into the lexicon as the word “spunky.” And she needed spunk, after both sons and her husband died, when improbably I became her ersatz daughter.

I threaded the buckle on a belt, wore it for a while until I stopped wearing belts—why accentuate my middle, as it morphed from the center of an hourglass to a chunky salt shaker? And then I lost it. Maybe in a move. Maybe just careless. Now, I regret I didn’t treasure it, didn’t mount it on a velvet ribbon and place it next to her two poetry books. Now that neither of us is filled with Moxie.

Please click the heart if you enjoyed this post. It would make me happy.

A bit of background. Jan Harayda, who writes a Substack called “Jansplaining” ( it’s great) frequently presents the first paragraph of a New York Times book review for editorial critique. In her opinion, they are often misleading, overblown, or poorly written. In one example, she manages to skewer both the misuse of a semicolon and the overuse of an exclamation point.

“Why is it so hard to write a good opener for a book review? All you need to do is to have something to say about a book or its author or topic. Then you say it in a line or two of clear and correct English that makes people want to read more. If you have nothing to say, you can quote the best line in the book or the smartest thing you’ve read about the author and use it as a springboard for the rest of the review.”

Here is the first paragraph of Maggie Shipstead‘s review today of “The Things We Never Say:”

A loss of innocence is possible at any age, but the pain of disillusionment can have a silver lining: the opportunity to live with a deeper understanding of reality. Artie Dam, the 57-year-old protagonist of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, “The Things We Never Say,” is depressed yet outwardly genial, blind to a secret buried in his own past -until he isn’t.”

I don’t know what Jan Harayda would say about this opening. I’m guessing that she would object to the opening sentence about the loss of innocence and the pain of disillusionment. See my discussion later of Jeannine Ouellette’s concept of “aboutness, “and her view that in talking about what a novel is about, a writer should avoid general themes, such as the loss of innocence or the pain of disillusionment.

In addition, the first paragraph of Maggie Shipstead’s review makes it sound as if this novel is primarily about a secret to which Artie Dam is blind but then finds out. From this we assume that the secret will change something fundamental in his life and that our job as the reader is to find the secret.

I disagree. I don’t think that this novel is primarily about a secret. (Although there is a doozy—also check out my essay last week about Anna Quindlen’s latest—similar secrets) I recognize that this is a common way of introducing books to hook the reader into solving some kind of mystery, but that is not what this novel is about.

Which brings me to “aboutness,” a somewhat clunky phrase. Jeannine Ouellette, one of three teachers of an online program I am participating in called Craft School, recently gave a lecture on what she calls “aboutness.” Her major point is that in pitching a novel, or writing jacket copy for it, or encouraging a friend to read it, one should avoid general themes, such as grief, or heartbreak in parenting, or searching for home, and should instead follow one of a number of formulas that are much more specific about the plot. In her view, one formula to discuss aboutness includes what the protagonist wants, the obstacles to the protagonist getting what they want, a false belief that affects the outcome, and the consequence of not getting what they want.

You can see below Oulette’s illustration of the difference between theme and “aboutness.”

Theme: Grief and resilience

Aboutness: A widow in her 60s must sell the house she raised her children in — or lose everything — and has only 90 days to decide whether to fight or let go.

Now to the “aboutness” of this novel. The protagonist, Artie Dam, is a 57-year-old school teacher who is depressed. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife Evie. We learn early in the novel that their lives have been affected by an automobile accident in which their son Rob emerged unscathed but his girlfriend Heather was killed. What Artie knows but others don’t know is that Heather was giving Rob oral sex and therefore her head was crushed by the steering wheel whereas he was protected by the airbag. This secret results in Rob’s guilt, depression and distance from his father. But this is not the main secret to which Shipstead refers.

After the accident, Evie has gone back to work and become a counselor and has also become less loving and more brittle. Artie is trying to figure out a way to kill himself. You may recall that this is also a theme in the novel, “A Man Called Ove,” by Fredrik Backman.

We can assume that Artie, like Ove, will not kill himself.

So what does Artie really want? Does he really want to die or does he want to be relieved of his depression and sense of hopelessness? Does he want to be married to a woman who loves and understands him, rather than Evie? Does he want to be in his son Rob‘s life and give him fatherly advice that Rob appreciates? Does he want to be acknowledged as the brilliant teacher that he is? These are all possibilities.

I think the novel is about how Artie finds a reason to want to live. In the process he becomes obsessed with two things: “Free will,” (or its opposite—fate) and precognition. He has a dream in which he falls off his sailboat, almost drowns and is rescued.

Jeremy Bishop on unsplash.com

This actually occurs a few days later, resulting in a friendship with the man who rescues him. They meet frequently at a bar. Artie confides things about his life that he either does not want to or cannot tell his wife or son. Precognition? Fate?

Jan Harayda wrote about the book this week too, quoting an article in The Atlantic by Adam Begley, who appeared to call Strout “schmaltzy”:

“Whether she’s schmaltzy is trickier,” Begley writes. “More interested in virtue than vice, she likes to show what appears to be vice vanquished by the revelation of hidden virtue. Are you a schmaltzy writer if you shy away from depicting evil, if your baddies turn out to be merely misguided?”

Surely Begley isn’t saying that good novels need to have an evil character. I didn’t find any character in this novel who appeared evil but was revealed to have a hidden virtue. I think the line between being sentimental and genuine is one that only a really good writer can discern. This novel wasn’t sentimental at all.

So if Artie’s deepest desire is to find a reason to keep living, how does he overcome this obstacle? Part of it is his relationship with Kenneth Moynihan, the man who has saved him from his boating accident, because he tells the truth and is met with acceptance. Perhaps the more important relationship is with his son Ron, with whom he finds he is finally able to be honest. Their conversations begin tentatively with discussions about “free will,” and finally reach the level where Ron asks Artie for advice on how to break up with a girl.

Another teacher I studied with named Wendy Dale talked about leaving “breadcrumbs” in chapters of a book so that the reader, when they eventually get to the end, will recognize the earlier hints. Shipstead refers to this idea as follows.

“The Things We Never Say rewards rereading, as the whole story is present, though disguised, from the beginning. Curious details and offbeat observations in the early chapters are pieces of a puzzle, their significance clear only after viewing the whole.”

I was intrigued by this statement and will take her advice to reread with this in mind.

Strout uses another device that in the hands of a lesser writer might seem to be gimmicky. In the later part of the novel, she tells us what will happen to Artie and the secret. This is a risk. A reader might decide, “well OK now that I know how Artie is going to end up, why should I keep reading the novel?” The answer, for me, is that I was invested in Artie, his deep desire to be a good teacher, his estrangement from his wife, his growing attachment to his son, to say nothing of his relationship with the man who saved him.

My only complaint with the novel, which Shipstead also comments on, is that the novel veers into outrage over politics. “The election came and went. Half of the country was stunned, the other half jubilant.” And then Artie thinks about Alligator Alcatraz and President Trump‘s military birthday parade. We know far worse is to come. This points up the difficulty of writing about political events. There are a couple of poets in my monthly poetry group who write frequently about politics and their views of the current government. I think as a writer, these are important topics to explore, but many of these poems will be difficult to decode in the future if they are wedded to specific events that may not resonate in years to come.

I really loved this book. It braided together many interesting ideas and I loved the character of Artie. He’s a teacher. He’s devoted to teaching history. He teaches the Civil War by asking his students to read letters written by a civil war soldier from Massachusetts or from the person to whom the soldier wrote. His school principal tells Artie there’s a parent who wants confederate soldiers to be included. Artie says, “There were no confederate soldiers in Massachusetts,” but he acquiesces because he realizes there are some things that just aren’t worth the fight. He has two students with whom he particularly engages. Both of them are damaged, and we see Artie reach them with concern. This could have been “schmaltzy,” but it isn’t. Artie knows he has made an enormous difference in these students’ lives.

Evie accuses Artie of having gone “soft.” I’ll leave it to you to decide if you agree.

In Anna Quinlan‘s latest novel, she sets up a number of familiar storylines, and we are pretty sure from the outset how they will turn out.

The question is “Does this rob us of our enjoyment of the story?” I’ve written before about the distinction between “literary fiction” and “women’s fiction.” This novel in my opinion falls into the category of “women’s fiction,” except there is a third category: “bestseller or popular fiction.” That’s for novels, like those written by Jodi Picoult, that readers buy and love even if the story is predictable. Although with Picoult, she can throw in an unexpected twist. Remember the ending of “My Sister’s Keeper?” No one saw that coming.

In “More than Enough,” the protagonist, Polly, has been trying unsuccessfully with in vitro to get pregnant and longs to have a child. These stories pretty much always end the same way —a child somehow comes into the woman’s life. It’s possible she will come to terms with infertility, but that’s not our expectation. Often, the woman gets pregnant unexpectedly.

Polly is one of four women who meet in a book group that doesn’t read the book. They buy the book, they bring it to their discussion group, but they don’t talk about it. They make their peace by congratulating themselves for having “supported” the writers by buying their books.

One of the members of Polly’s book group is Sara, who is a philanthropist. Excuse me-- how many people do you know who are philanthropists? Sarah had breast cancer years ago, which has recurred. She tells Polly but not the other members of her book group that she is dying. The trope of a woman dying of cancer and its effect on her close female friends has been explored in many novels, most recently in “Some Bright Nowhere,” by Ann Packer, where the dying woman asks her husband to move out so that her girlfriends can move in to support her. In both that novel and this one, we expect that the person with cancer dies. No miracle cures. Any of us who have been through end stage cancer would be appalled by an author who saved the victim.

Quindlen’s opening storyline involves a DNA test done through an knockoff “23 and Me” site, which Polly’s book group bought for her as a gift. It supposedly shows that a young woman who couldn’t possibly be related to Polly is her niece. Those us who know about how DNA tests work know that eventually it will turn out that Talia, the young girl, is in fact Polly‘s niece. This could only occur if Polly‘s mother had given birth to Talia‘s father, which again doesn’t take much cleverness to sort out.

Polly thinks the DNA test is simply wrong, but I can tell you from having taught forensics for years in the paralegal program at the University of Hartford that DNA does not incorrectly identify anyone. DNA tests 13 sites along a chromosome called alleles. These alleles are called “junk DNA” because they don’t carry any known inheritable characteristic. If even one allele does not match, the two samples are not related. It would show no match. A DNA sample lifted from a crime scene may be so sketchy that it would show no finding at one or more alleles. A profiler might try to call a match with fewer than 13 sites present, but all present must match. DNA home tests contain all 13 allelles by definition. A DNA profile is never going to identity the wrong person. This is a matter of science and mathematics which I could go into here, but I won’t. Even though Polly decides that the DNA match is “wrong,” that’s impossible.

And once we met Talia’s father, who shares an unusual physical feature identical to Polly, Quindlen has tipped us off. They will be related. We are pretty sure from the very beginning of this novel that the only explanation for why the DNA test says Talia is related to Polly is that Polly‘s mother has a secret, which in fact she does.

“Women’s fiction” is known for complex female characters who reach some kind of realization or change by the end of the novel. This could be said of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, but a lot more than a change in the main character elevates those novels to critiques of time, place and patriarchy. And Quindlen gives us many characters in addition to Polly who are ripe for discovery.

One of the most interesting storylines is the somewhat fractured relationship between Polly and her mother, who is a judge. Polly‘s childhood was marred when her mother went back to school to finish her education, leaving Polly feeling abandoned and estranged from her mother. This plot line was intriguing because it could lead to some revelations about the character of Polly‘s mother, how Polly is actually a lot like her mother, and an eventual reckoning between the two of them. This could have been the heart of the story, but because there are so many other plot lines going, the resolution where Polly confronted her mother with the secret is in my opinion unsatisfying.

There are three main male characters in the book. The first is Garrison, Polly‘s gay brother, who is much more forgiving of Polly’s mother than she is, but who also skips town when any confrontation is looming. Second is Polly‘s father, who is in an assisted living facility with dementia. This storyline will be recognizable to many readers. Polly is losing her father with whom she felt very close and blames her mother for having put her father in an assisted living facility at the stage where he was not debilitated. We know that dementia will not improve. We know we can’t have Polly‘s father suddenly recover from dementia. Even if Polly’s relationship with her father might be altered by the DNA test, he would not be able to comprehend it. The book’s ending is tender and touching, a testament to Polly’s love for her dad.

Finally, there’s Mark, Polly’s husband. Mark is a big animal vet at the Bronx zoo. He’s a fascinating character. He obviously knows a lot about science and he could have weighed in earlier on the DNA issue, but he seems to have held back. Mark strikes us as the perfect husband-- the husband that we all want and suspect is a bit of a fairytale. He isn’t angry or despondent about the failure of IVF. He is endlessly supportive of Polly. However, it is Mark who finally tells Polly that she must confront her mother.

Because there are so many different plot lines spinning, we are deprived of seeing a level of understanding between Polly and her mother, which is where I would have opened up the plot. This novel is about family—who constitutes a family and how they help or don’t help each other. It’s also about “mothering,” the mothering Polly feels she didn’t get and her yearning to be a mother. We can’t expect Sara not to die or Polly’s father not to succumb to dementia. We can’t expect DNA to lie. But Quindlen could have avoided a predictable ending about Polly getting pregnant and opened up her relationship with her own mother.

None of this is to say that I don’t recommend this book. I do recommend this book. I love all of Anna Quindlen’s books. This is only to say that the book is predictable. I recall Amity Gage talking about her latest, “Heartwood.” She said, “I don’t want to write a happy ending, but I do try to write a hopeful ending.” It’s tricky, that.

Finally, I have to say that Quindlen has a number of what I call “set pieces” that are delightful, including an alpaca farm. I will leave it to you to see how alpacas fit into this story.

I’ve loved Quindlen’s fiction and nonfiction. When I gave myself a weekly deadline almost three years ago to write on Substack, it was Anna Quindlen’s weekly columns I was thinking of.

I’m now reading “More Than Enough” by Anna Quindlen and although I haven’t finished it, I want to talk about the book group to which Polly, the main character, belongs. In this book group, they buy the book, they bring the book to the book group meeting, but they do not actually read or discuss the book. They feel they’re doing their job of supporting authors by purchasing the books, but they don’t want to talk about them. More about this novel soon.

My book group, on the other hand, is very serious about the books we choose. Each member on a rotating schedule presents two possibilities and then we vote on which one we want to read. Then the sponsor of the book researches the author of the book, the backstory of the book, etc., and does a presentation before we discuss the book itself.

As sponsor, I tend to make a list of questions. In part this avoids the “I have a cat phenomenon,” a term coined by a fellow teacher at the University of Hartford to explain the phenomenon that when students read a novel with a cat in it, they want to discuss their own personal cat. My book group knows that I am famous for saying “let’s get back to the book,” when I feel that the conversation has strayed into areas that don’t have anything to do with the book. This week, we are discussing “No Two Persons” by Erica Baurmeister. I’m the presenter, so I’d better get cracking.

Anyway, I started thinking about my book group because I read an article this morning in The New York Times Book Review about a new book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, called “Into the West,” by Andrea Wulf, which introduces many of the ancillary characters who took part in the expedition, including, of course, Sacagawea. I had never heard of Sacagawea until I joined a book group. Not only was she a guide, but she also helped to make peace with Indian tribes they met in their journey. In Clark’s words, Sacagawea “reconciles all the Indians as to our friendly intentions. A woman with a party of men is a token of peace.” Historians have reclaimed her role as much more than a friendly face.

And that led me to think about all the other powerful women I have learned about from books that we have read in our book group. The first is Olga Ivinskaya, who was the mistress of Boris Pasternak, the author of Dr. Zhivago. The book “Lara” was written by Anna Pasternak, a grandniece of Boris Pasternak.

Her stated goal was to reclaim the Pasternak family’s image of Ivinskaya as a seductress or a homewrecker into a woman who supported Pasternak’s work and was persecuted for her connection with him-- to the point of being sent to the Gulag because she would not testify against him. According to the author, Olga was a model for the character of Lara in Dr. Zhivago. (hence the title) In order to discuss this argument, I both read Dr. Zhivago and watched the film.

Lara did not seem to me to be similar to Olga at all. First of all, the love affair between Lara and Yuri in Dr. Zhivago was relatively short-lived. It was not the major theme or plot point of the novel, whereas Olga was the mistress of Boris Pasternak for many years. She began as an editor and ended up as a first reader and collaborator, even writing letters for him to the Russian authorities. Second, Lara was never persecuted for her connection with Yuri, who was apolitical. I couldn’t have made these points to refute Anna Pasternak’s view without having done my research.

My book group also read “The Empress of the Nile,” about a French woman named Christine Desroches-Noblecourt, who curated the Egyptian collection at the Louvre during World War II and eventually became an archaeologist excavating important sites in Egypt.

She is credited with the successful effort to save Abu Simbel from flooding by the Aswan Dam by organizing fund raising and a massive feat of carving up the massive sculpture and moving it. Christine charmed politicians, managed to get funding for the rescue effort, and became beloved of the workers whom she treated as real people. And we had never heard of her!

We read a number of books about the Irish troubles, which was not news to me, but the book “The Woman Who Stole Vermeer,” by Anthony Amore, introduced me to Rose Dugdale, who, although she was British, wanted to be accepted as a freedom fighter by the IRA,. The IRA decided she was somewhat unhinged and disavowed her but that didn’t stop Dugdale from daring exploits to free Irish prisoners.

We learned from one member of our book group who had lived in London in the 70s that Rose Dugdale was involved with terrorism on the homefront in England, including setting bombs at railway stations. We didn’t like Rose, but admired her ability to engineer an art theft of major proportions.

Finally, I just finished listening to “Undersong,” by Kathleen Winter, historical fiction about Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth’s ‘s sister. It’s told mostly through the point of view of James Dixon, a handyman hired by William to both take care of the gardens and oversee his sister, who William said could be mentally unbalanced. Winter in an interview said that Dixon was a real character who worked for the Wordsworths, although no one knows what he thought or felt.

In the novel, William asks Dixon to secretly read and decode Dorothy’s journals for any lines or phrases he might use in his poetry. (In fact, Dorothy did offer observations for her brother’s use.) Dixon in the novel is sensitive to the natural world, which was important to Dorothy Wordsworth, and is tender and solicitous towards her care, including taking her outside in a cart he made for her when her legs failed. He yearns to be acknowledged by her, but says he is only a “servant.” He searches her journals hoping to find his name.

The novel is told in three voices. The first voice is a sycamore tree in the garden where the Wordsworths live. (This reminded me of Elif Shafak’s novel, “The Island of Missing Trees,” where a fig tree is a character in the plot. It’s not as weird as it sounds.) The major voice is Dixon’s. Then, at the very end of the book, we hear Dorothy Wordsworth‘s words from her “red journal,” which was of no interest to her brother, who dismissed it as holding only Dorothy’s feelings.

After a lively childhood as an equal with William and Sam Coleridge, Dorothy becomes relegated to being a “woman,” which she resents. She believes she has talent but recognizes that the world of literature is reserved for men. She acknowledges she has “suppressed rage.” Dorothy’s desire to be acknowledged mirrors that of Dixon’s.

Such a human desire, to be acknowledged. Like my friend Dianne did last week when an elderly woman I’d been helping for years died. She thanked me, asked me what she could get me. Then she brought me what I asked for--a donut!

Ruthie was a child in the neighborhood where Flo was first married and played the role of daughter to Flo. They’ve lost touch in person because Ruthie now lives across the country in California. It’s not clear where Flo lives, but we get an east coast feeling.

The letter is designed to acquaint Ruthie with certain items in the house that she might treasure in the way that Flo has treasured them. As anyone who’s attempted to interest their grown children in their “antique furniture” knows, the younger generation is usually not all that interested in your mahogany side table, even if it is inlaid, even if it is elegant. After all, IKEA doesn’t do inlaid mahogany.

Called “heartwarming,” by reviewers, the novel is predictable, which is unfortunate because my early experience with Elizabeth Berg in her novel “Talk Before Sleep (1994) was a very different rendition of a friendship between women, one of whom was dying of cancer.

I wouldn’t call it “heartwarming.” Although Flo is also dying of cancer, her condition is sanitized. We see her hopping into the local library, baking bread, visiting with Theresa, meeting Theresa’s new boyfriend. Anyone who has witnessed death from cancer knows you aren’t hopping into libraries at the end. Flo has a couple of stomach pains, but that’s pretty much it. Where is hospice? Where is the morphine? Where is the emaciated body? We saw all of this in “Some Bright Nowhere” by Ann Packer. Anyone accustomed to the suffering of the final days of cancer, would feel that Berg did Flo a great disservice by treating her death as a moment when, in the middle of writing to Ruthie, her pen just drops.

Flo’s husband is dead. He apparently had a secret. It doesn’t take us too long to figure it out, as we are told early in the novel that on Armistice day in World War II, he was in Paris for a couple of weeks. We all know what goes down in Paris. Although this information is withheld to the end of the novel, it’s no surprise.

The novel alternates between the letter to Ruthie and a third person narrative about Flo’s life as she makes friends with her neighbor, Theresa, who she has decided needs to get out more.

The novel isn’t really about whether Ruthie wants the house or any of the items in it or even if she values them. It’s really about Flo telling Ruthie her life story in the context of objects in her house (and buried in the back yard). Although this might be profound, it came across as being precious. It reminds me of a workshop the poet Thomas Lux held in which he told a [new] writer, “Your title seems a bit precious.” She asked, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

I wanted more spunk in Flo. I wanted her to have her own secret (she does have one) but for Berg to push it a bit farther than burying letters in the backyard.

I love the genre of the 80-something female narrator, particularly if they’re a bit cantankerous, and they have packed a lot of drama into their life. I’m sure you’ve all read “The Correspondent,” by Virginia Evans, which is currently on the best seller list and is written entirely in letters to and from Sybil Van Antwerp.

The Correspondent addressed similar themes to “Life: A Love Story” [precious title?] such as secrets, forgiveness, and discovering family members you didn’t know you had. But perhaps because Flo is trying to “sell” her household items and her life to Ruthie, she tries too hard. My favorite sections were about the young Ruthie, who had the spunk I wished for in Flo.

Another book with a protagonist in her 80s is “Fellowship Point,” by Alice Elliott Dark, a novel about two longtime friends who have an ownership interest in a wildlife sanctuary on the coast of Maine.

The son of one of them wants to take it and develop it. Agnes Lee is adamant that it remain undeveloped. Her best friend Polly Wister defers to her husband, which annoys the dickens out of Agnes. I thought the novel was going to be about a fight over the land, [it does return satisfyingly at the end] but the novel veers into the quagmire of a long friendship that is threatened, not by the land issue, but by long-held resentments which finally come to light and force a wedge between the women. Dark has said she wanted to write a novel in the style of Dickens (lots of characters, subplots, big themes, etc.). I’m not sure she succeeded, but this is a fascinating story, which I highly recommend.

This takes us, of course, to “Tell Me Everything,” by Elizabeth Strout.

The main character is the fictional novelist Lucy Barton, who has appeared in many of Strout’s novels, but the surprise guest is Olive Kitteridge, of “Olive Kitteridge,” Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner. Olive is now living in a retirement home and invites Lucy Barton to hear a story about Olive’s parents she has never told. Then she unspools stories of other people she has known and divulges their secret lives. Kitteridge is a quirky character, and I love that Strout circled back to give Olive Kitteridge a platform for her unique view of loves, losses and secrets in Crosby, Maine.

You know that really fun question that is asked of writers in the Sunday New York Times Book Review “You’re having a dinner party and can invite four guests. Who would you choose?” I think of these fictional characters, I would love to have dinner with Olive Kitteridge, Agnes Lee, the main character in Fellowship Point, and Sybil Van Antwerp, the letter writer in The Correspondent. Plus the author Elizabeth Strout. I would not invite Flo Green, who is not up to their level. But I might set a place for Elizabeth Berg. Even though her latest is not her greatest, I’d love to ask her, “what one object in your house best sums up your life?”

And now, dear readers, start your engines and let me know what object in your house best sums up your life. You can see one of mine below. It’s a poem I wrote that my daughter commissioned to turn into art including my granddaughter’s footprint.

Such as the case in Katie Kitamura‘s latest novel, “Audition,” where an unnamed narrator (not naming characters is so annoying—I’m over it, whatever it’s trying to signify) a 40-something year-old actress apparently of Asian descent (race is also only obliquely referred to) is initially confronted in the theater where she’s rehearsing by a young man named Xavier.

He apparently looks a great deal like her and has become convinced that she is his birth mother who gave him up for adoption. He based this on something she said to a journalist that was misinterpreted. Since the narrator, whom I will call “the Actress,” has never had a child, she knows that this young man cannot possibly be her child, which she tells him. Yet he seems determined to work his way into her life and into the life of film and theater, which she is a part of. And he does.

The opening scene of the novel takes place in a restaurant where she has agreed to meet him, even though she’s already told him she couldn’t possibly be his mother. What is the purpose of meeting? We don’t know but it’s a hint that the Actress is attracted to Xavier somehow and that she is not going to tell us why. During their awkward lunch, she flashes back to a scene with her father when she was young.

Her father had met her for lunch and given her an emerald necklace which she opened at the table to her delight. Apparently, the waiter decided that she was a prostitute and handed her his phone number with a note. “Call me when you’re not working,” which spoils the moment. She tells us that she wears the necklace, however. So—not that spoiled. She then wonders if people in the restaurant are looking at her as someone who is preying upon a 20-something year-old man. Then she sees her husband, Tomas, enter the restaurant. Does he see her? She doesn’t know.

This is not a novel about plot. It’s not even about character per se. It’s about the interior monologue of a smart, talented woman who questions almost everything she thinks and does. Looking back, Kitamura plants plenty of hints that the narrator is unreliable.

The actress is preparing a role in a play that is to open in a week and is having trouble finding the right reading for a pivotal monologue.

It falls in the center of the play which is supposed to act as a fulcrum between grief in the first half and action in the second half. We don’t know what the play is about and we don’t see any of the lines. She speaks with the writer to get clarity. None ensues:

She [the writer] had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing, I realized, and wanted to write a different character and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether …. I understood that she had essentially no idea how to fix the rickety transition between the two halves of the play, the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action.

This conundrum underlies the structure of the novel itself. The Actress eventually does find a reading of the scene that works, although we never learn what it is, and shortly before the play opens, Part 1 of the narrative ends. So was Part 1 about a woman in grief? If so, over what? Read on.

And that’s when we know for sure we are dealing with “two different characters altogether.” Part 2 opens with the same three characters, the actress, Tomas, and Xavier, but in this narrative, Xavier is their son and has come back to live with them in their apartment because his rental has run out.

What? He actually is their son? Is this delusional thinking on her part? Or is Part 1 delusional? Can both be true?

The actress wonders

“can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in different directions?”

Is this what “Audition” is doing to the reader?

We discover what I conclude is the source of a grief that the Actress has denied.

She thinks about a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. She recalls her husband Tomas was elated at the prospect of becoming a father, a fact that she discovered by looking at his computer and realizing that he had downloaded one of those videos that shows the different stages of development of an embryo. So the Actress learned something crucial about her husband and his desire to be a father by spying on his laptop but realizes he was not willing to let her know his feelings. Why?

And she herself, despite being self-absorbed and focused mainly on her career, says that for those two months she felt happy, she felt hopeful, and to me this scene was also a midpoint between happiness and grief or resignation if we assume that she never really got over the grief of losing the baby, so perhaps part two can be read as wishful thinking if the child had actually been born.

It’s not neat, the idea that she is a woman of grief in Part 1 and a woman of action in Part 2, although there is plenty of action in Part 2. She unravels having Xavier at home, particularly when he invites his girlfriend, Hana, to stay. The Actress becomes jealous and acts out. There is also a scene where Tomas, Xavier and Hana are all playing a sexually charged game of hide and seek (which may be real or imagined) but causes the actress to blow up, Hana to storm out, and Xavier to tell his mother she is crazy.

I found the novel fascinating because it explored so many different levels of relationship and asks the question: How do we know what is real? How do we know what anybody else is really thinking? What lies beneath our scenes of domestic happiness or the way we present them to other people, or if we’re in a play, the way we present them to theatergoers?

I know some reviewers were tepid about this book. I loved it, but to love it, I needed to accept that the Actress was unreliable. I needed to keep a healthy distance from her and marvel at the intricacies of its structure.