And the Mountains Echoed

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And the Mountains Echoed

Riverhead Books, May 2013

 

I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us. 

The first time we met Khaled Hosseini was ten years ago when he took us to a place called Afghanistan, which most of us knew only as a foreign enemy, not a country. In The Kite Runner we walked through the door to another world that both opened and broke our hearts. Now after six years, he’s back with his newest novel And the Mountains Echoed and his gift for storytelling is still growing.

There are two key women in And the Mountains Echoed and both are named Pari. One is the sister of Abdullah and the other is his daughter. The novel begins with ten-year-old Abdullah, Pari and their father leaving their small village to go to Kabul, where their uncle and a job await. It isn’t until they meet the uncle’s employer, a quiet man, and his glamorous, high-strung wife that Abdullah begins to sense something may not be quite right. Pari is his closest companion and he, her greatest protector, so when she sold from their family to live with the wealthy couple his heart breaks. Pari is so young that these new parents and life are all she remembers and with each passing year the past fades. Unfortunately, her new mother, Nila, is particularly ill-suited for the role, being solely concerned for herself and as Pari grows, but fails to morph into the acolyte daughter she demands, she begins to toy with Pari’s reality, cruelly hinting at her true past.

To intentionally unsteady and upend her, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to heave the weight of doubt on her mind, on all Pari thought she knew of her life, to make her feel as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive… forever moving, receding. 

The other Pari is Abdullah’s daughter, named for the sister he loved and lost. As soon as he is old enough, Abdullah leaves Afghanistan and moves to Pakistan where he meets his wife with whom he eventually settles in San Francisco. Pari is born late in life to him and his wife and is a much cherished child, but as she reaches adulthood and wants to embark on her own life she realizes how difficult it may be.

It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down on me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free, or you stayed and withstood its rigor even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself. 

And the Mountains Echoed spans decades, generations, and cities around the globe. The Pari connection may be as tenuous as neighborhood children who played together when young, a jealous sister, or the tenant in what was once a glorious mansion and yet, each has a story to tell, and each is explored in intricate and poetic detail. All are connected. The novel is a wide flung story of love, sacrifice and loss and encapsulates the striving between who we wish to be and who we really are. Hosseini’s ability to fill the reader with the voices of his characters and expose the innermost corners of their hearts without judgment is unparalleled.  As the novel ends we are taken back to Abdullah and Pari, his daughter and Pari, his long-lost sister. Lives have been lived and more is forgotten then remembered but Hosseini creates an ending of hope tempered with reality, the kind that resonates deep within the heart.

 

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The Star Attraction

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The Star Attraction

Hyperion, May 2013

 

Sophie Atwater is the earnest, hardworking PR agent at the heart of The Star Attraction. The job doesn’t pay well but the perks include leftover celebrity swag, going to A-list events and restaurants as a business expense, and hobnobbing with Hollywood royalty. She is one of the most valued agents at the firm Bennett/Peters and when the opportunity to work with rising star and heartthrob, Billy Fox, she grabs it, despite having an already full work and personal life. When she decides that her boyfriend of two years, Jacob, is moving too slowly towards commitment, she lets her relationship with Billy become less professional and more personal, little knowing that a colleague who wants her spot at the agency is watching. In short order all of the pieces of Sophie’s carefully constructed life come tumbling down and she’s single and on ‘vacation’ from her job. What’s left for a CrackBerry addict, Jimmy Choo wearing, hopped-up-on-caffeine publicist? Sophie decides to get back to basics and regain her rightful spot in her life.

Debut author Alison Sweeney is an actress on daytime television and host of The Biggest Loser. Her experience gives her an insider’s knowledge, so the novel rings true with all its nuances on the jargon and etiquette of Hollywood, not to mention lightly concealed details of real life actor antics.  What can’t be bought is a sense of humor and the little human details that keep a romantic comedy real. These Sweeney has brought to the table herself. If you need a break from the depressing reality of recent news then The Star Attraction is a good bet. Plot and dialogue move as quickly as Sophie’s fingers over her ubiquitous Blackberry and readers will stay entertained. Don’t wait for beach season, curl up with this novel and some popcorn now and let the show begin.

 

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Seating Arrangements

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Seating Arrangements

Vintage, paperback release May 2013

 

Seating Arrangements is the weekend long drama of the Van Meter family, gathered in their house on Waskeke Island, off the New England coast. For the family patriarch it is a time largely viewed as a disturbance to the normal stately pace of his life. The tiny minded Winn Van Meter, lives up to his last name by meting out every penny and every action as receivable or payable and he is always being shortchanged. The bride is seven months pregnant so there is no possibility of a virginal, new-beginnings theme to the wedding and his other daughter has just had an abortion and been dumped by the man she thought, in the wisdom of her twenty-one years, to be the love of her life. All of this pales in significance to the fact that Winn has still not been admitted to the local country club, an honor he feels is long overdue.

As family members and guests congregate at the house, author Maggie Shipstead introduces us to a full cast of stereotypical nouveau riche. There is hardly a real emotion among them, from the bride’s friend, Agatha, who is so empty inside she lives solely off her looks to charm men, any man, into a sexual encounter, despite the fact that she has no liking for the act, just the attention. One of her prey is Winn himself, which is not a stretch as he has been fantasizing about her for years. Then there is poor Livia, the bride’s sister, whose ignominious fate has been compounded by the fact that in a drunken fit she announced her pregnancy to everyone at their college’s social club. Despite her former boyfriend’s tepid commitment to their relationship and the ease with which he ultimately breaks it off, she is a die-hard romantic who believes he still loves her. Either that or the quintessential entitled child, with a belief that if she loves she must be loved back and if not, she has only to wait and push and the love will be reciprocated. The matriarch of this family is the matriarch of forbearance, the queen of calm, Biddy. Biddy, who has some idea of exactly what is going on around her but chooses to sail on and regard everything through the lens of propriety and make-nice.

Shipstead seamlessly slots each character into their predetermined position, arranging them with a precision and skill that leaves no work for the reader but to read and enjoy. The pages turn almost by themselves as the actions of all involved (with the exception of the oh-so well-bred Biddy) devolve. Seating Arrangements is the mirror no one wants held up, a social satire that evokes embarrassment, dismay and laughter. There are a few well-constructed moments of honesty and a character with a soul here and there, but the novel works best as it is—a subtle but knife-sharp look at people pretending.

 

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On Sal Mal Lane

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On Sal Mal Lane

Graywolf Press, May 2013

 

Where does one begin with Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane? On the surface it is the story of the Herath family and their lives in their new home on Sal Mal Lane. They are a traditional Sinhalese family, with a mother whose beliefs on what is right and proper leave her children little room to maneuver in their lives. The oldest, Suren, is a gifted musician but is expected to become an engineer as musician is not an acceptable life. Rashmi, the oldest daughter, is the exemplar of Sri Lankan maidenhood: perfect grades in every class, modest in her dress, and with the proper demeanor and manners. Nihil is the youngest son and yet, in his mind, tasked with the greatest responsibility in the family, that of protecting his baby sister, Devi, a mischievous fount of boundless energy and sunshine but born on a most unlucky date and therefore a source of concern for all.

Within the neighborhood, the Herath’s meet a varied group of people, from the Bollings with their twin daughters, Rose and Dolly, who are Rashmi’s age but who run around in ragged clothes and unclean hair, and their brother Sonna who is viewed as the criminal element in the neighborhood. The Silvas live next door with their two sons, Jith and Mohan, and their not so secret prejudices against the Tamil population whom they see as the cause of most of Sri Lanka’s problems. Across the street are the Niles and Joseph families, one Tamil and one Sinhalese. Kala Niles lives with her older parents and teaches piano lessons to the Hareth children. She becomes especially important to Suren:

What Suren did know, however, was that in Kala Niles he had an adult who embraced him fully, who was ready to support him as well as let his talent guide her. 

The Joseph’s are Raju and his mother. Raju is in his early thirties and without a job. His passion is weightlifting but being ignored and mocked for his odd looks and mannerisms has left him a quiet observer. The arrival of the Herath children, with their polite ways of dealing with everyone, opens new doors for him. He becomes Devi’s steadfast companion when Nihil is not around, listening to the tales of woe and secrets of the seven-year-old as if she carried the weight of the world.

Year upon year upon decade of nothing but the same, the same dashed hopes, the same slights and injuries, had emptied hope from Raju. Until the Heraths moved in, until Nihil talked to him, until tea was served to him by their mother, and until Devi visited him. His cup was brimming over, and nothing that anybody could say or do could diminish that. 

This is the surface of Sal Mal Lane, moving at the same idyllic summer-afternoon pace of the childhoods being described. But beneath this normalcy, we are privy to the increasing agitation of political upheaval in Sri Lanka, as it is often the subject of the adults. When freedom of the press is curtailed, the conversations in each home become more divisive and removed from the space the children inhabit.

Within such parameters, there was no venue for the airing of grievances or passions, all of which were now tucked away inside homes and hearts that, built as they were for other pursuits, could not contain them for long. 

 Instead, as the storm gathers, we linger in the disparate hopes, longings and inner voices of each of the children, from the lonely anger of Sonna to Rashmi’s waning desire to be the perfect daughter to the release of Nihil’s anxiety for Devi in pursuit of his own dreams. In the five years the book spans, Freeman immerses us in the innermost hearts of each with their thoughts large and small. It is only in bits and pieces that we slowly see the forces outside their lane working to change them all.

On Sal Mal Lane is an exquisite composition of the intimacy of everyday life juxtaposed against the larger world. Initially, the families are able to interact despite their ethnic and religious differences but as the external tensions of the country increase so do divisions appear amongst the characters. For some this time will bring out the best in them but for others, the weight of their past and their sense of injustice and otherness is too great and cannot be escaped. Freeman captures the complexity of the internal struggles of youth in all its confusion and yearning with the greater forces of family and country, forces far beyond their control but that will shape them irrevocably.

 

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Is This Tomorrow

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Is This Tomorrow

Algonquin Books, May 2013

 

In 1956 there was plenty to worry about- the Communists and nuclear missiles, but missing children were an anomaly. In Waltham, Massachusetts, people didn’t even lock their doors and children moved from one house to another, playing and eating snacks until the call home for dinner. When twelve-year-old Jimmy disappears one afternoon this quiet neighborhood is turned upside down and suspicion falls on anyone who doesn’t fit the traditional mold. One such person is Ava, a Jewish divorcee. Both are enough to make her suspicious as is her voluptuous figure and distinctly untraditional way of dressing. This is what people see, not the Ava who works, in a desperate effort to pay the rent on her house and to keep her philandering ex from seeking custody of their son, Lewis. She is the last person to see Jimmy alive that afternoon.

For Lewis, Jimmy’s disappearance is traumatic. A gifted child, he is a puzzle and annoyance to his teachers because he asks too many questions and sometimes knows answers they don’t. In an effort to fit in he finally stops trying and begins to bring home poor grades. Jimmy and his sister, Rose, are the only two friends he has. They were all supposed to meet up that afternoon but Lewis and Rose got distracted and did not return home until later in the evening. Out of fear and embarrassment they lie to everyone and start themselves on a path of guilt that follows them through their lives but with very different results.

Is This Tomorrow succeeds as a mystery but with author Caroline Leavitt’s sensitive touch it moves well beyond that into a complex portrait of grief, love, guilt and understanding. For Ava, her fear over providing for the son she loves so much often obscures her ability to spend time with him or show him her love; worry occupies her every waking moment. The unsolved nature of Jimmy’s disappearance leaves both Rose and Lewis at loose ends. For a time, Rose assumes her brother’s identity, cutting all her hair off and wearing his clothes. Until her mother decides that a move is necessary for healing, Rose is stuck in a vicious cycle. She does not believe her brother to be dead and so fills notebooks with her own observations of potential suspects and letters to Jimmy. Once she finishes college she becomes an elementary school teacher, devoting her energy to protecting children. Lewis suffers the most, seemingly untethered by his friend’s disappearance. He graduates high school but has no interest in any more schooling and drifts out of town, taking odd jobs, finally ending up as a nurse’s aide where his quiet and soothing nature works well with the patients and keeps the prospect of real interaction with the world at bay. His one attempt at a girlfriend fails when

He stopped at a pay phone and called her, and then he began thinking about what she wanted from him, how he’d have to revisit his past and spread it out in front of her like a poisoned banquet. He had come here to reinvent himself, to start anew, and she wanted to take him back to where he had been. 

When, after ten years, Jimmy’s body is found, all three come back together and struggle to make sense of what happened and what, if any role, they played in it. Is This Tomorrow is a novel set in an age where divorce, women who worked, and disappearing children were all unusual phenomena. Leavitt overlays this gentler past with emotions that do not change with the times, creating a world that is relatable even today. The book is beautifully, simply written, and well-paced with a story that begins with fear and ends with hope. Deeply satisfying.

 

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Gone Girl

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Gone Girl

Crown

 

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a New York Times Bestseller. It is out in paperback now and has already been optioned for the screen by 20th Century Fox with a film adaptation to be produced by Reese Witherspoon. It was last summer’s bestseller and somehow, with everything I was reading, I missed it. Since that moment I’ve been on library holding lists waiting for it. It arrived last Thurs and I stayed up until I finished it Friday night. OK, it’s good. Really good and if you want to stop reading and head out and buy it you probably should, but there is more to it than that.

The novel is about Nick Dunne and his wife, Amy. They are a bright, accomplished couple who, like so many, lost their writing jobs in the economic decline of 2008. As Nick says

Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the internet, blame people who use the Internet. I used to be a writer. I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books. Back when people read things on paper, back when anyone cared about what I thought. 

Amy is the daughter of two authors whose careers have consisted of writing children’s book series called Amazing Amy, largely about her. Wildly popular and profitable they’ve given her a comfortable life where work is a choice and a brownstone in Brooklyn is a wedding present. Whatever else it has deposited in her psyche remains to be seen but at one point she hints

So many lessons and opportunities and advantages, and they never taught me how to be happy. I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why.

Money they thought they had is gone and Nick’s parents, back in his hometown in Missouri are seriously ill. With nothing but an expensive lifestyle keeping them in New York City, Nick decides they should start fresh in Missouri, which will also allow him to care for his dying mother.  Several years later, Nick is teaching part-time at a community college and has opened a bar with his sister. A bar funded by what remains of Amy’s trust fund. Amy continues to struggle with the transition from NYC to small town life. The book opens on the day of their fifth anniversary and before the day is over the reader is plunged into a Nancy Grace world of true crime. Amy disappears and in the days that follow it becomes clear that nice-guy Nick is the prime suspect.

I didn’t say this out loud, though; I often don’t say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to an alarming degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me. 

What transpires in Gone Girl is a game of marital one-upmanship with lives in the balance. Initially, each chapter is either Amy’s diary, dating back to when she first met Nick (a span of almost seven years), or Nick’s voice in present time. In later chapters, both Nick and Amy are present day. The two sides of the truth are constantly being presented but the effect is haunted house mirror combined with Tilt-a-Whirl, guaranteed to leave the reader disoriented and uncertain as to reality. This strategy could backfire and turn the book into a silly farce yet it does not because some of what each character is thinking about the other is valid and true-to-life.  There is a reality.

Gone Girl is an extraordinarily well written psychological drama but it is intense. As the plot races so does the reader’s heart and mind. The fact that it is told sharply and honestly from two perspectives means that, up to a point, it’s hard to draw favorites. As the book progresses it plunges more and more deeply into the psyche of modern marriage and it’s not pretty. In fact it’s horrifying but like many things that are, you can’t look away. There is also the element of psychological truth in both Nick’s and Amy’s minds, making the reader feel even more squeamish. Much like the 1980s movie War of the Roses these two highly intelligent people are not going to leave off or back down until one wins. For some, this will be a very depressing look at marriage, especially the final resolution, but if approached from the perspective of fiction and the writing itself, it is brilliant and wicked and, at some points, wildly humorous. It is the perfect antidote to daily life, will rev up your mind to a dizzying degree, and perhaps make you look at your spouse more appreciatively. Either that or avoid the institution of marriage all together.

 

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Call Me Zelda

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Call Me Zelda

New American Library, May 2013

 

With another film version of The Great Gatsby coming out this week, now is the perfect time for new fiction about the life of the Fitzgeralds or, more specifically, Zelda Fitzgerald. There are many stories circulated about her outrageous behavior but it is much like the paparazzi today—what is real and what is exaggerated or fabricated? In her new book, Call Me Zelda, Erika Robuck looks at the last years of Zelda’s life. Gone is the exuberance of youth and new love and now both Zelda and Scott are trying to find a way to survive. As the novel begins she is being checked into the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic near Baltimore. She is assigned a nurse near her age, who is thought to be particularly adept at soothing distraught patients. Her name is Anna and in time we’ll learn that her story is as compelling as Zelda’s.

As the title indicates, Zelda is desperate to forge her own identity and on an even more elemental level, to express herself. Fitzgerald’s use of her as a muse, to the point of taking her diaries and copying sentences from them into his novels, is psychically damaging to both of them. The co-dependence reaches a level where, with his alcoholism and her emotional fragility, they could neither be around each other nor be apart. When Zelda begins to improve at the clinic, Scott decides it’s time for her to return to their life, largely because he cannot seem to finish his latest novel. He succeeds in his efforts to get her released and they move into a home nearby.

“Because he thinks he should be enough for me. He needs me to orbit him. He wishes to pluck me from orbit when he needs me and then send me back once he’s used me up.” 

Anna Howard is Zelda’s nurse and a woman who quickly forges a strong bond with her. She provides a quiet and positive presence for Zelda, allowing her to creatively express herself by writing, something which Scott, in his insecurity, does not wish her to do. Anna has her own demons, her husband went missing during the war and is presumed dead and her five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia. She subverts her grief into devotion to her patients, as if by healing others she will heal herself.

The maelstrom created by the Fitzgeralds affects everyone around them. With the same sudden, unexplained nature of such a storm, Zelda whirls around Anna, dislodging her from her own world. As the book progresses we see both becoming less and less stable. In the case of Zelda this is accompanied by the disintegration of her marriage. For Anna, the battle is more internalized. She continues to help Zelda, going so far as to promise her she will find her long lost diaries, but inside her efforts to move on from her grief do not work and she begins to push away everyone around her. To capture the rawness of a marriage coming undone, in all its brutality and tenderness, is feat enough, but Robuck combines the stories of Anna and Zelda in a way that allows us to see the impact of Zelda on Anna until, in her own way, Anna appears to be coming unhinged herself. It isn’t until Zelda is readmitted to the clinic and all contact between them ceases, that Anna begins to find her way back.

Throughout the book Robuck writes with such skillful and passionate prose that the unfolding tragedy of the Fitzgeralds leaches off the page. The tension is enervating, as if one were witnessing these horrible private moments, made all the more egregious on Scott’s part because Zelda is already so damaged as to be out of her mind at times. Anna’s pain is palpable at not being able to help any of them and watching the utter mental destruction of a woman she has come to love. All seem doomed, but as Anna moves slowly back into her old life, she releases ghosts and moves on, yet never forgets her promise. Ultimately she returns to Zelda, and now Anna is the calm after the storm, giving her friend a much needed sense of peace and closure. Like Zelda, we are grateful.

 

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Helga’s Diary

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Helga's Diary

W.W. Norton, April 2013

 

Helga Weiss is an eleven-year-old girl living in Prague in 1939. The words above are hers as are all the words in the book, Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp. Czechoslovakia has been invaded by the Nazis and in a few short months Helga has seen her carefree life change to one of rules and regulations. By 1941 she and her family are on their way to a concentration camp called Terezin, a camp in Czechoslovakia that given the fact that it was once a fortress town, gave the appearance of normalcy with a school, sleeping quarters, and a park. They are served meals with dessert and have bathrooms but this is as far as the Nazis go. Men and women sleep in separate dormitories and the camp is operated as a slave labor base used to populate German war effort forces in digging ditches and building roads.

For the next four years Helga lives here with her mother and the ability to see her father and other family members with some regularity. When the last of the original Aryan citizens vacate the town their houses are used and Helga moves into a dormitory for girls where she is able to create a circle of friends who study together, write plays and poetry and act as most thirteen-year-olds do. At the same time, she witnesses young men forced to dig their own graves before being hung and watches various extended family members loaded onto “transports” to other destinations. In September 1944 her father is conscripted for one of these transports. She will never see him again. Later that year, both she and her mother are put on a train that ends up in Auschwitz. By adding years to her age and subtracting from her mother’s they are able to stay out of the line for the gas chamber and to stay together but this is as far as their luck goes. Now there are no beds, their heads are shaved, there is no real food, and there are new sadistic routines such as standing for 6 hours in freezing rain, ostensibly for a roll call that never comes and moving to a new barracks every night.

We were always hungry; hope sustained us. We were no longer living off that quart of water and slice of bread; you can’t live off that. Now we live off the strength of our will. And we will survive! Someday, after all, the end must come. 

After a month they are moved to a new camp, Freiberg, where they begin working twelve hour shifts in an airplane factory. With the approach of the Russians over 500 of them are loaded onto open coal cars and depart for German territory. After sixteen days, they arrive at Mauthausen, their final destination. On May 5, 1945 they are liberated and by May 21st Helga and her mother are back in Prague, where Helga lives to this day. Of 15,000 children in Terezin who were later deported to Auschwitz, Helga is one of 100 survivors.

Helga’s Diary is unique in that it one of the few pieces of written material to give a day-by-day account of life in a concentration camp as it was happening. At Terezin, Helga’s uncle worked in the records department and when she was shipped out he took her handwritten pages and drawings and hid them in a brick wall. He survived the war and returned later to find them and give them back to Helga, at which time she reconstructed the rest of her journey. Like any Holocaust memoir this is difficult reading but it is oddly counteracted by Helga’s indomitable will to see the best in her situation. At Terezin she decides that it doesn’t matter that they can’t go to the movies anymore, at least they have beds. No matter how bad it gets, she understand that it could be worse, an unusually mature attitude in one so young. At the same time the pathos of her situation and her joy over the barest of necessities were almost impossible for me to comprehend.

I have never been nor will I ever again be, so pleased with anything as I am this coat. I’m so beautifully warm in it; I’m so happy.

There are many works out there by Holocaust survivors and each deserves attention.  Helga’s Diary feels like the continuation of The Diary of Anne Frank, in that both are young girls, looking to the future, eager, falling in love, full of all that makes teenage girls a marvel and a trial. Anne’s words are stopped when her family is discovered but Helga’s only begin when she is deported, making them a more complete portrait of a time that should never have happened. And while it is a very different world from the 1940s, the increase in religious intolerance and terrorism means that reminders of where fanaticism leads are worthwhile reading.

 

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