Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

A caveat for members of Val de Saire Book Club for whom this title is the November read: this review contains Spoilers

I had a love hate relationship with this novel as I read it. I started to read it rather grudgingly; it is a book club choice and my respect for the code of conduct in a book group means that I will read it.  Even though the person who chose it has left the group! 

It is described as a tale of morals and motherhood and there is an awful lot of Anne Tyler about it.  I have read most of Tyler's novels and I could feel that I am somewhat played out on small town American domesticity and family sagas.  Tyler has written about different families but I sometimes feel, and especially with so many books out there that I want to read, that once you have read one you have read them all. 

Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, one of America’s first planned communities, order and harmony are prized. The author spent some of her formative years growing up there and this helps to reinforce a sense of time and place -the 1990s. 

Someone has burned down the Richardson's house, the youngest of four children is blamed. We wait until the end to find out who the culprit is and what motivated the act of arson. 

Because the novel is more about babies and the extremes of busybodiness and meddling which can be an overarching part of the lives of some self-righteous people. Namely Mrs Richardson. There is the matter of an abandoned baby, an adoption which might not have taken place as it should have done,  through the proper channels. There is a custody battle which goes to court. During this process I found some of the writing on motherhood overly sentimental and cloying. I allowed myself to be irritated by this and then I questioned my ability to feel compassion. (I had to question myself on this when I read Eleanor Oliphant)  Was I being unfeeling? I think it is within the power of writers to connect with the feelings of their readers and extract the reactions that they themselves recognise and feel to be appropriate. Or to fail in that and leave the reader cold. Certainly though as Ng writes about the custody issue she left me feeling ambivalent as to for whose plea the judge should find favour, the birth mother or the adoptive parents. 

There are many aspects to the narrative: race, class, privilege, teenage sex, abortion, surrogacy. It's all in there. It is a rich list of ingredients but I did not ultimately find it a tasty dish.

A Duo of Police Procedurals

The Whistler by John Grisham

We expect our judges to be honest and wise. Their integrity and impartiality are the bedrock of the entire judicial system. We trust them to ensure fair trials, to protect the rights of all litigants, to punish those who do wrong, and to oversee the orderly and efficient flow of justice.

     But what happens when a judge bends the law or takes a bribe? It’s rare, but it happens.
     Lacy Stoltz is an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. She is a lawyer, not a cop, and it is her job to respond to complaints dealing with judicial misconduct. After nine years with the Board, she knows that most problems are caused by incompetence, not corruption. 
     But a corruption case eventually crosses her desk. A previously disbarred lawyer is back in business with a new identity. He now goes by the name Greg Myers, and he claims to know of a Florida judge who has stolen more money than all other crooked judges combined. And not just crooked judges in Florida. All judges, from all states, and throughout U.S. history.
     What’s the source of the ill-gotten gains? It seems the judge was secretly involved with the construction of a large casino on Native American land. The Coast Mafia financed the casino and is now helping itself to a sizable skim of each month’s cash. The judge is getting a cut and looking the other way. It’s a sweet deal: Everyone is making money.
     But now Greg wants to put a stop to it. His only client is a person who knows the truth and wants to blow the whistle and collect millions under Florida law. Greg files a complaint with the Board on Judicial Conduct, and the case is assigned to Lacy Stoltz, who immediately suspects that this one could be dangerous.
     Dangerous is one thing. Deadly is something else.

My notes:  This is yet another typical procedural thriller.  We know the villain, it is a matter of how to set about catching them.   It introduces a feisty female detective, there is a Native American angle, and corruption on a mega scale set, as it is, in the current Trump era.  A body fairly early on, tells the reader there really is something to chase.  The very convenient paper tissue with the blood sample sets the investigation rolling.  But is rather boring, disappointing, procedural with no suspense or twists. All too real in these days where corruption prevails and if you are one of the powerful elite you get away with it.  I am reading this at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  Nothing surprises me.  The greed of the judge is huge - emeralds, rubies, all that cash.  Greedy women.  Epilogue, with no twists but the character Myers who disappears early on turns up.  convenience of blood sample on tissue.

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Detective Renée Ballard works 'The Late Show', the notorious graveyard shift at the LAPD.

It's thankless work for a once-promising detective, keeping strange hours in a twilight world of crime.

Some nights are worse than others. And tonight is the worst yet.

Two shocking cases, hours apart: a brutal assault, and a multiple murder with no suspects.

Ballard knows it is always darkest before dawn. But what she doesn't know - yet - is how deep her investigation will take her into the dark heart of her city, the police department and her own past...

A new thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD.

Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she’s been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

But one night she catches two cases she doesn’t want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner’s wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won’t give up her job no matter what the department throws at her.

What I thought:
Call me a reading snob but I would never choose a Michael Connelly, this was the choice of fellow reader in my Splinter Book Group.  I did not want to read the book in truth, and I laboured through yet another police procedural as I saw it.  But there were some interesting slants, our protagonist Renee Ballard is banished to 'The Late Show' - the so-called Graveyard Shift, for making a complaint against a colleague.  And in Ballard we have a principled feminist, charismatic, her passion for surf-bording, her attachment to her dog Lola, staying at her grandmother's.   I can see she might get a champion's following as a for example has Jack Reacher.  The book closes on a subtle cliffhanger , that is a clever device.  I listened to this title on Audible, it was useful adjunct to ironing bed linen and gardening. 

IV III II I

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

This is the blurb:

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.

As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvellous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.

Review from The Guardian

One of several things Paul Auster shares with the protagonist of his new novel is an admiration for the 18th-century German writer Heinrich von Kleist, whose work (we know from Auster’s letters to JM Coetzee, published in 2013) “overwhelmed” Auster when he reread it seven years ago. “He tells and tells but doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it,” observes the hero of 4321, which might have been written to defy that boring old advice yet ends up confirming its wisdom.

A Bildungsroman, it lays out four parallel lives of Archibald Isaac Ferguson, born of Russian-Jewish descent in New Jersey in 1947. An early chapter ends after an uncle burgles his father’s white goods store; the next chapter rewinds the narrative, with the store burned down, not robbed. Auster replays it a third time – the store burns down with Ferguson’s father inside – before a final alternative shows the business thriving.

We’re lured in by Auster’s fine-grained scene-setting and intrigue at his intentions. The perspective is puzzling: we’re inside the protagonist’s mind but also told of what he was “still too young at that point to understand”. We’re curious, too, as to what Auster means when he says Ferguson’s parents appear “in the all-inclusive, authorised edition of The Book of Terrestrial Life”, a strange-sounding work that remains mysterious when it appears for the fifth and final time some 700 pages later.

By that time, 4321 has long settled into a largely unsurprising coming-of-age tale of sexual longing and literary ambition. Auster gives us heft without density: there are few stakes in this Borgesian garden of forking paths. The hero might sleep with Amy Schneiderman or Brian Mischevski; go to Columbia or Princeton; become a basketball reporter or a movie critic; get killed in a road accident or only maimed, but the story lines cancel each other out instead of adding substance.  

Paul Auster: ‘I'm going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can't live with myself'

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The sentences, plausibly inspired by what Auster has called Kleist’s “great hatchet-blows of thought”, usually run about half the length of this review and often a good deal longer. But Kleist’s model sits ill with Auster’s preoccupations. Where Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas “tells and tells” us about its hero’s bloody rampage, 4321 tells and tells us about Ferguson’s first taste of couscous or about how good he is at “parallel parking, the tight-squeeze operation that was the downfall of so many would-be motorists”. You can fill 864 pages pretty quickly writing like this.

While there’s an everyman tint to Ferguson, Auster is keen to show how special he is, whatever the incarnation. A girl from Brussels with “breasts fuller than might have been expected” tells him he knows “10 times more than any 10 of these idiot Americans put together” when he brings up Leopold II’s atrocities in the Congo (guess what the girl does next?). The “finest literary mind in Princeton” says it’s “a privilege” to meet him after reading his student short stories. When a prostitute says he’s “a good-looking boy with a pretty pecker”, there’s no question she doesn’t mean it.

As the last Ferguson standing makes it into the Nixon era, the novel’s girth guarantees suspense: how will Auster play the hand he’s spent so long assembling? That the novel should hymn the power of imagination is hardly a shock – he’s been here before – but in a book that is longer than his last three novels put together, the finale has the air of a bad joke. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse that he seems utterly sincere.

What I thought:  The critics seem to have been very harsh on Paul Auster.  I chose to listen to this novel on Audible.  All 35 hours of it.  There was good and bad in this decision.  Paul Auster's reading was easy to listen to and for the most part held my concentration.  However it took a while for the penny to drop when a particular section would be announced as "blank" because that incarnation of the young man Archie had died in a previous section.  For this a hard copy of the book was necessary, which I had in fact bought.  It is a fat tome and took, I believe, over 5 years to write.  Would I recommend it to my fellow readers.  Probably not unless you have loads of time to read, leg in plaster and up in traction (?!) and want something sustained to get your teeth into!

Daily Telegraph: "Paul Auster's new novel, 4321, is as big as his ego – review
Los Angeles Times: " For a doorstopper, Paul Auster's '4 3 2 1' is surprisingly light"   

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders


February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/books/review-george-saunders-lincoln-in-the-bardo.html

What did I think?  I chose to listen to this novel as an audio book.  This was not a wise choice.  Even though one had the benefit of a range of narrators for the cast of voices, this is a novel that needed to be in the hand so that the text could be viewed as it is laid out, and absorbed and pages could be flipped back and forth so that the reader could orientate and stay grounded.

American Writers on topics of family conflict, human morality, integrity

American Literature   

The Surface of Earth by Reynolds Price

Published in 1975, The Surface of Earth is the monumental narrative that charts the slow, inextricable twining of the Mayfield and Kendal families. Set in the plain of North Carolina and the coast and hills of Virginia from 1903 to 1944, it chronicles the marriage of Forrest Mayfield and Eva Kendal, the hard birth of their son, Eva's return to her father after her mother's death, and the lives of two succeeding generations.

The Surface of Earth is the work of one of America's supreme masters of fiction, a journey across time and the poignantly evoked America of the first half of our century that explores the mysterious topography of the powers of love, home, and identity. In his evocation of the hungers, defeats, and rewards of individuals in moments of dark solitude and radiant union, Price has created an enduring literary testament to the range of human life.

This was a dense reading experience for me.  The voice and the plotting were authentically American.

A lengthy review has been written by Richard Gilman for the New York Times

Stoner by JohnWilliams

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture.

A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

Both these novels were recommended by an American friend who is an academic man, a keen reader.  Neither, I think, would have come to my attention without that signpost.  Thanks Ty.