As the novel opens, “Verity” has been captured by the Gestapo behind enemy lines. “I wanted to be heroic and I pretended I was,” she begins. We soon learn that she has made a deal with her captor to write down every last detail she knows. As she pens her story, he will return her clothes, piece by piece. In exchange, he will get wireless codes, details about airfields in Great Britain and Verity’s own story.

And what a story it is: Writing on whatever paper is given to her, Verity tells the story of her friendship with Maddie Brodatt, who, as a female pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary, brought Verity to France. As in the tale of Scheherazade, Verity’s captor appreciates her rich storytelling, but in the end he does not hold the power to determine her fate. In the second part of the book, Maddie takes up the suspenseful tale, while the action builds to an unforgettable encounter between the two friends.

Elizabeth Wein is a pilot herself, and her passion for flying and the details of piloting and caring for a small plane add depth and authenticity to this complex, thoroughly researched novel. She also includes a historical note and a bibliography.

As we have learned with books like The Hunger Games, “YA” and “middle grade” may be convenient labels, but they don’t limit the audience for good books. Yes, we can call Code Name Verity a young adult book. But this sophisticated and compelling novel is likely to find a home on the shelves of teens and adults alike.

source from: bookpage

This is a departure from your previous work, especially the supernatural element. What made you want to explore that?
It wasn’t a conscious “departure,” but the original idea can’t be controlled. I should have loved to write an important modern state of the nation book, but I was given this to do instead! I dreamed the house, Sterne—this beautiful eccentric red-brick manor—and then, in imagining who lived in it and what the voice of the story would be, I discovered that there was a supernatural element, and also comedy.

Your last two novels were so specific about time and place. The Uninvited Guests is set more generally, in the pre-World War I English countryside. But the ambiguity felt deliberate.
Yes, it was. The action never leaves Sterne, and I used theatre to heighten the sense of unreality so that the reader might know they were heading off somewhere unpredictable. I was trying to create a magical realm akin to the transforming woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a time and place where anything might happen. It was a tricky piece of acrobatics, and it requires the reader’s trust and willingness to jump in with the book and revel a little.

What research did you do?
There was very little research compared to Small Wars, which was necessarily rigorous. I wandered the Internet, went to the National Gallery and looked at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of Edwardian socialites and read a 1920s edition of Mrs Beeton’s household management. There were wonderful descriptions of how to apply poultices to boils and what to do with a twice-boiled calf’s head that informed the more grotesque elements of the novel. The Edwardian era is a very entertaining mix of the recognizably modern and absolutely not, their delight in gelatin being a good example.

Right now stories set in England around WWI are very hot (all my friends have “Downton Abbey” fever!). Why do you think people are so interested in that time period?
I suppose it’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it? I had no notion, beginning work in 2009, that there would be a wave of fin de siècle drama or literature—or a vogue for literary ghost stories for that matter. I simply needed a time we perceive as beautiful and romantic and yet trembles on the brink of the unknown. Western civilization was at a peak, both culturally and scientifically; to me that generation sits like white icing on the dark slag heap of the century before it, looking blindly toward the new century, the mass suicide of the Great War. My little book doesn’t even begin to cover it.

You earned a lot of acclaim for your previous novels. How do you think that kind of success prepares a writer for whatever comes next?  
The benefits of having a tremendously successful first novel far outstrip any perceived drawbacks. The success of The Outcast gave me a career. I feel now that if I do good work it will be read and have a fighting chance to stand out. It sounds a simple thing, but it is as much as any writer can hope for.

source from: bookpage

It became a pretty good moviestarring Billy Bob Thornton and Tim McGraw. It was made into a far better television series, easily among the most sublime ever produced. The football team’s motto in that show —“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” — percolates through the culture. I’ve heard grown men chant it only half-ironically in beer gardens, as a prelude to an evening of assiduous consumption.

This is a rare kind of success for a nonfiction writer, and you might think it would bring a measure of calm and satisfaction to the book’s author. If you suspect that’s the case, you don’t know much about Harry Gerard Bissinger III, who is universally known as Buzz.

His new memoir, “Father’s Day,” is ostensibly about his relationship with his son Zach, now in his 20s, whose brain was deprived of oxygen at birth and who has an I.Q. of about 70. (His twin brother, Gerry, was born without serious complications.)

Zach’s mental capabilities are restricted in many ways — he can barely understand the concept of money, for example — but limitless in others. He’s a savant, with a startling memory that sometimes resembles Dustin Hoffman character’s in “Rain Man.” Still, Mr. Bissinger declares about Zach in a typically blunt formulation: “Why sugarcoat it? My son is mentally retarded.”

“Father’s Day” takes the form of a road trip that father and son make across America. Its real journey, though, is interior. It’s a barely guided tour through Mr. Bissinger’s own roiling anxiety, his depression, his narcissism and his profound insecurity, not to mention what he sees as his failings as a man, as a father, as a son and as a writer.

He sometimes tamps down his freakouts, as well as what he calls his “mild bipolarity,” with “a morning cocktail of Klonopin, Effexor, Wellbutrin and Lamictal that my wife Lisa makes sure I have taken, terrified of medicated-less consequences.”

He’s such a pitcher of fits, tormentor of editors, haranguer on Twitter and overall basket case that he also declares about his third wife: “Lisa has told me several times that she is determined to die first to avoid the misery of taking care of me.” He’s like a garrulous Saul Bellow protagonist with Tourette’s syndrome.

“Father’s Day” is riveting and a bit frightening; Mr. Bissinger wears his emotions close to the surface. I’m not sure it’s a good book, but it’s a brutal and vivid one, the work of a writer with an unflinching gift for honesty, and impossible to put down. I read it in two short gulps, occasionally through the cracks in my fingers.

Among the places Mr. Bissinger and his son visit on their road trip is Odessa, where “Friday Night Lights” was set. Some there still haven’t forgiven Mr. Bissinger, for portraying open incidents of racism among other things. But that’s not what sends him into a tailspin.

Being there reminds him, he says, “that after almost 20 years, I still have not topped” that book. It feels like a curse. He worries he is played out as a writer. Worse, he fears he used some of Odessa’s young men’s lives for his own gain.

In a line that’s as slashing as anything in Janet Malcolm’s book “The Journalist and the Murderer,” he says: “All writers silently soak up despair for our own advantage; like dogs rolling in the guts of dead animals, the stink of others makes us giddy. We deny it but we lie in denying it.”

He has attempted to expiate his guilt. He tells us he’s given, over the years, some $70,000 to Boobie Miles, an Odessa football star whose career-ending injury is explored at length in “Friday Night Lights.” (He has written an e-book follow-up on Mr. Miles.)

His journalistic insecurity is so great, even after the success of “Friday Night Lights,” that he writes: “I had pathetically stopped reading The New York Times Book Review five years earlier because of my raging jealousy of other writers getting rave reviews. Without hyperbole, the nonfiction best-seller list sent me into hours of depression and bitterness so I could not look at it either.”

Mr. Bissinger approaches his son through a portrait of his own childhood. His father was a bond-firm president and his family was wealthy, with an apartment in Manhattan and a summer house on Nantucket. The author attended Andover and the University of Pennsylvania. But his mother lacked warmth, he says, and placed exorbitant pressure on him. “I vowed,” Mr. Bissinger writes, “that my children would never have to dance for me.”

Nothing prepared him, however, for Zach. His medical troubles ripped Mr. Bissinger’s first marriage apart. “I didn’t feel like crying,” he says. “I just felt like walking away.”

He feels he’s largely been in flight from the realities of his son’s life ever since.

The road trip is a chance to reconnect, but there’s an element of forced catharsis to the whole thing. Zach doesn’t like car travel or sightseeing very much. He’d rather be in an airplane. But the pair have some wonderful moments and an opportunity to bond as Kerouacian hombres on the road.

Some writers do their best thinking on the open interstate; Mr. Bissinger appears to be among them. He regularly writes things as good as this: “If you deliberately look for surprises and significance in life, all you find is an old box of cassettes by America and Heart and Peter Frampton you bought when you were alone and very drunk, and nobody else was watching.”

About Zach, Mr. Bissinger writes: “There is no rose-colored ending to any of this. There is no pretty little package with a tidy bow. He will never drive a car. He will never marry. He will never have children. I still fear for his future.”

Yet when Mr. Bissinger stopped looking for epiphanies with Zach, he says, “I found something far better.” I’d call it a measure of peace.

source from: nytimes

That’s how I felt, anyway, 50 or 60 pages into “Oblivion.” I nearly put it down. But you can detect a subterranean thumping early in this book — the way that, beneath some pop songs that initially sound as dead as chamber music, there’s a faint promise of liberating noise just around the bend, if you’re patient enough to hold on.

“Oblivion” does deepen and expand. And, in its second half, it emits a primal yet articulate howl. The author finds himself quite buried beneath an avalanche of tragedy and loss, and buried too beneath the senseless beauty that sometimes attends emotional disaster.

Mr. Abad, who was born in 1958, is a prolific Colombian writer and essayist. He’s well known in Latin America, yet few of his books have made the leap into English. If “Oblivion” is any indication of his talent, that situation is probably going to change.

This book is a memorial to the author’s father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a prominent doctor, writer and human-rights campaigner. He was gunned down and killed in the streets of Medellín in 1987, by motorcycle-riding thugs, almost certainly for his criticism of the repressive Colombian regime.

“Oblivion” provides a complex assessment of the author’s father’s vibrant public life, but it’s his private life that Mr. Abad is most keen on evoking. His father believed that children should be indulged, loved without reservation and buried in what the author calls “vast hugs” and “excessive kisses.” He was what “people in Medellín call un alcahueta, a pushover,” Mr. Abad writes.

He was not wealthy, yet he left his wallet open to his children. If they wished to stay home from school for a day, that was fine. He never hit them; he never forced them to eat anything they did not want to eat.

“The best form of education is happiness,” he liked to say. This method of child rearing worked for him. He and his wife had five daughters and one son, and they grew to be — perhaps against certain odds — happy, cultured, beautiful people.

It’s possible that no father in literary history has so stood on the right side of this dictum from Calvin Trillin: “Your children are either the center of your life or not, and the rest is commentary.”

There’s a certain amount of candied stickiness — of hagiography — in the early chapters of “Oblivion.” There is perhaps one vast hug too many.

Mr. Abad doesn’t stop to consider that his father’s smothering love may have been his way of compensating for being gone so often for his work.

Mr. Abad’s prose, in this translation by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, is elastic and alive. But once in a while he’ll utter a sentence that, like a third baseman’s wild throw to first, sails into the stands and beans a civilian. One such line: “Memories are like timeless seashells scattered over a beach of oblivion.”

This memoir begins to percolate, thanks to its offbeat humor. The author’s father was a doctor who loathed “blood, wounds, pus, pustules, pain, entrails, fluids, emissions and everything that is inherent to the everyday practice of medicine,” Mr. Abad writes. Instead he was passionate about preventive medicine, about things like clean water, good sanitation and the eradication of poverty.

Driving with him was like riding shotgun with Mr. Magoo. “Every time he had to perform the heroic act of entering a roundabout in the midst of traffic,” Mr. Abad writes, “he did so with his eyes shut.”

The author is amusing about the weave of his own moral fiber. In what may be my favorite sentence thus far in 2012, he writes: “I have never felt like a good person, but I think that, thanks to my father’s influence, I have sometimes managed to be a nonpracticing bad man.”

An element of neo-magical realism sneaks into “Oblivion.” Part of this comes from the sheer number of women who swirl around the author, often preventing him from getting a word in edgewise. (He became a writer, he suggests, so he could finally squeak out some words.) Boys came from across the region to stand outside the family’s house and serenade his sisters.

Then there are moments like the time the author’s father helped lead a campaign against intestinal parasites. This campaign was so successful, Mr. Abad writes, “that all the pipes in the village were blocked with the huge number of tapeworms the villagers expelled in one day.”

Surely, you think, this is lush exaggeration. But then Mr. Abad adds: “There is still a photo in my house of a sewage pipe blocked with a knot of tapeworms, like a clump of purplish-black spaghetti.”

I’ve put off, you may have noticed, talking about the awful events that choke this book’s second half. The father’s death is horrific enough, a coldblooded murder the author leads us toward by calmly compiling evidence of this man’s brave deeds.

But there’s another tragedy in this book, one I won’t give away, that blindsided me. It led in some ways to the author’s father’s no longer caring about his own life, increasing his willingness to take political risk. It was an event that was, Mr. Abad declares, “the dividing line between my family’s past and present: the future would never be the same for any of us.”

In Spanish the verb “to remember” is “recordar,” the author reminds us, a word that derives from “cor,” the Latin for heart. This memoir is extravagantly big-hearted. It will be stocked, in good bookstores, in the nonfiction or belles-lettres sections. A wise owner might also place a copy under the sign that more simply reads: Parenting.

source from: nytimes

The premise is this: Amina, a determined young Bangladeshi, meets an older American man named George on an online dating site; they e-mail for 11 months before meeting, and she eventually moves to America and marries him. It is more like the arranged marriage of Amina’s grandparents than like her parents’ love match.

Not all that surprisingly, there is little chemistry between the newlyweds, and during a trip home Amina realizes that she still loves Nasir, a family friend and her teenage crush. At the same time her new suburban life in Rochester represents the American dream she and her parents have spent years fantasizing about, and she wages a fierce campaign to bring her mother and father to the States.

The novel grew out of a story called “An Arranged Marriage,” which appeared in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” fiction issue in 2010 and was originally inspired, Ms. Freudenberger said in a New Yorker interview, by a young woman she met on an airplane who had just come to the United States from Bangladesh to marry an American man she’d met on the Internet. In the acknowledgements to this novel, Ms. Freudenberger thanks Farah Deeba Munni for sharing her story (and making introductions to her family in Dhaka and Haibatpur and her husband in the States) and for “giving me the freedom to make something entirely different” from it.

Ms. Freudenberger dealt with similar cross-cultural themes — Americans abroad, or foreigners visiting the United States — in her debut collection of stories, “Lucky Girls,”and her first novel, “The Dissident.” Here, she avoids sentimentalizing her characters, but she also initially fails to give us much insight into their inner lives. As a result they emerge in the first part of the novel as brittle stick figures who are more annoying than compelling.

Amina comes across as a calculating fortune seeker, willing to marry a man with whom she enjoys no emotional or sexual connection simply to get to the United States, while George comes across as a fussbudget loser, whose chief appeal rests in his ability to help a poor foreigner get a green card, and eventually, an American passport.

Amina finds sex with George unpleasant or tolerable at best. She often thinks that he doesn’t know who she is, and she comes to believe that much of his past will always remain a mystery. For that matter, both Amina and George turn out to be keeping major secrets from each other — secrets about earlier romantic attachments that they have not completely put behind them.

Although Ms. Freudenberger’s account lacks the precision and emotional detail that, say,Jhumpa Lahiri has brought to her descriptions of Bengali immigrants adapting to life in the American suburbs, she works hard to chronicle with sympathy and humor Amina’s efforts to master the new protocols of daily life in Rochester.

Amina learns to shovel snow, passes her driver’s test, gets a job at Starbucks, studies for her citizenship exam. She talks to her mother nearly every day and thinks about trying to put off having a baby until her mother arrives to help her.

She also thinks about making plans for a proper Muslim wedding — which she’s promised her parents she would have, in addition to the civil ceremony — but keeps putting it off. She has a hard time understanding the American concept of sarcasm, of meaning the opposite of what the words suggest.

Where “The Newlyweds” comes alive is in the second half, when Amina returns to Bangladesh to try to obtain American visas for her increasingly unstable mother and her hapless father, who has had one business disaster after another. Writing about a foreign country seems to kick Ms. Freudenberger’s gift for observation into high gear, and she does a visceral job of conjuring the place where Amina grew up: the countryside “so green that you almost expected to look up and see a green sun in the sky; the city streets, hazardous with mobs and rickshaws and pools of black sewage.

Here there are roaches in the hospital corridors and the danger of violent assaults in which acid is thrown at an enemy. But here there is also a dense network of extended family, family friends and neighbors, a support system in the face of the swirling whirlpools of fortune.

More important, Ms. Freudenberger captures in these later pages Amina’s confusion, her sense of being caught between two cultures, of having become someone who is regarded as an outsider in both her new adopted country and the country she still thinks of as home.

In America she is seen as uptight and overly worried about propriety and appearances; in Bangladesh she is seen as the headstrong one “who’d done everything her own way.” She is nostalgic for her girlhood but suffocated by her gossipy, competitive and overprotective relatives; flooded with fond memories of her youth, but also newly aware — as a now cosseted American — of the inconveniences, dangers and frustrations of life in Bangladesh.

A cousin congratulates Amina on escaping the provinciality and poverty there and achieving “the dream life in America,” and yet when Amina sees her teenage crush, Nasir, she feels all the ardor and intensity that is lacking in her marriage to George and wonders what sort of life she and Nasir might have had together — might still have, if he reciprocates her feelings.

The Amina-Nasir relationship and Amina’s relationship with her aging parents are the nucleus of this novel and reveal the contradictions deep within Amina’s own heart. Unlike her synthetic partnership with George, these are real, complex, deeply felt connections that have both endured and changed over time, and in depicting them Ms. Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love and the mathematics of romantic passion.

source from: nytimes

Be that as it may, this gripping and difficult novel remains a story of imperfect triumph for those former slaves and for the handful of whites who try to help them in this dangerous and bewildering postwar world. The protagonist is the former slave Sam Freeman, a Philadelphia librarian when the book opens. Though his job is relatively safe and his white employer is kind, at the end of the war he resolves, Odysseus-like, to return to the south and find his wife, Tilda.

Others are also determined to go south, either to find loved ones or right wrongs. One of them is Prudence Kent, the good-hearted but stubborn daughter of a passionate abolitionist and her “sister,” African-American Bonnie, who was raised with her. The two wind up in Buford, Mississippi, where they have the noble plan to open a school for freedmen in defiance of the white townsfolk. But even the denizens of Buford have nothing on the monstrousness of Captain James McFarland, the book’s Simon Legree. “Marse Jim” has no problem hunting down and murdering his ex-slaves who have the temerity to think they’re free. He doesn’t hesitate to blow away anyone who tries to help them, either.

A good story written by a good writer will keep you turning the pages and staying up past your bedtime, whether you want to or not. Pitts, a Pulitzer-winning columnist and the author of Before I Forget, keeps the reader hooked through outrage after outrage. The ending does not satisfy. It doesn’t slake one’s rage against the injustice of the whole ghastly era. Still, the ending Pitts gives us is honest and true. This, too, is the mark of a very good writer and a very worthwhile book.

source from: bookpage

In the sublime Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Quindlen, 59, clearly is embracing middle age (with just the tiniest bit of help from the dermatologist). From facing an empty nest at home to facing wrinkles in the mirror, she writes incisively about her life now and what she owes to the generations of women who came before her. One of her columns at theTimes was called “Life in the 30s,” in which she wrote about being a working mom with three young children. Her new effort could easily be subtitled “Life in the 50s.”

“The title of this book says it all. I find this a really satisfying and ultimately joyful time of my life,” Quindlen says by phone from her brownstone in New York City. But let’s not get too crazy with the “I love middle age” talk—Quindlen is quick to admit she’s not above what she calls her “annual pilgrimage to the Fountain of Botox” to erase the worry lines between her eyes.

“I never colored my hair. I haven’t had any surgery,” she says. “But I guess more than anything else I want to look like I feel and by that I don’t mean young, I mean happy. Just for the record, I love Botox. I do it once a year and I have no qualms about it.”

“The title of this book says it all. I find this a really satisfying and ultimately joyful time of my life.”

In one of the most thought-provoking essays in the book, “Mirror, Mirror,” Quindlen delves into our society’s cult of youth and its disproportionate impact on women.

“We don’t really have any idea of how we ought to look anymore, just how we’re told we ought to want to look,” she writes. “Women were once permitted a mourning period for their youthful faces; it was called middle age. Now we don’t even have that. Instead we have the science of embalming disguised as grooming. A lot of plastic surgery is like spray tan. It doesn’t look like a real tan at all. It looks like a tan in an alternate universe in which everyone is orange. It’s a universe in which it seems no one has gray hair, except for me.”

It’s the kind of funny and sharp writing for which Quindlen is known and loved. She isn’t afraid to go below the surface, though. In another essay, Quindlen admits to an uneasy relationship with moderation, which culminated with her quitting drinking when her youngest child was a baby. That she considers herself a recovering alcoholic is a somewhat startling revelation for someone who has put so much of her personal life in print.

“It was a really big chunk that I was not sharing with readers who have gotten used to knowing things about me,” Quindlen admits, adding that it was something she needed to make sure her family was comfortable about sharing. “It is one of the few things I could share with readers that might be helpful. To the extent that people think of recovering alcoholics as deeply flawed, I wanted to communicate that there are many who are just fine.”

She said no major event led her to stop drinking (for the record, her last drink was a Heineken). “It’s just in any face-off with alcohol, I lost,” she says.

Quitting drinking was just one of the ways that motherhood changed Quindlen, and in Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, she does a lot of thinking about the challenges of modern motherhood.

“Compared to some of the mothers I see today, we were remarkably relaxed,” she says. “I do have to say, in defense of young mothers today, we were kind of the test batch—first pancakes on the griddle. We all thought we were going to combine motherhood and work, and did it in a seat-of-the-pants way. We were relaxed to the extent that we didn’t know what we were doing. Suddenly, there’s a right way to find a nanny and there’s a right way to stimulate infants. Here’s how I believe you stimulate infants—you have another child and you lay the baby on the floor and have them watch him! Suddenly we’ve made motherhood a job that’s so overwhelming, it astonishes me that anyone could do it. When women score freedom, they somehow have to pay for it, and right now that is being an über-mom. Not only is this not good for women, it’s not good for kids either. This ‘helicopter mom’ [trend] cripples them.”

In her book, Quindlen pays tribute to the more laid-back parenting style of her own mother (who died of ovarian cancer when Quindlen was 19) and ponders how it influenced her child-rearing.

“I’m keenly aware of maybe something my mother knew, too, which is that a lot of the raw material was there already,” Quindlen says. “For example, my kids are really smart and pretty confident, and a lot of that was already built in. Could I have encouraged that or tamped that down? Probably. But some of what being a good mom meant for me was to get out of the way. Given how naturally inclined I am to micromanage everything, I’d give myself about a B-plus.”

These days, she and husband Gerry Krovatin, an attorney she met in college, have an empty nest (mostly—their three children all live “within, like, a few subway stops”). But Quindlen says not too much has changed.

“We live in a house in New York which nominally is occupied only by Gerry and me,” she says. “However, all three bedrooms are maintained as shrines. Once you do it with one of them you have to do it with all of them. All three of our children live elsewhere in their own places, but it is not uncommon for them to drop in for dinner or for me to come home from errands and find a cereal bowl with an inch of milk in it.”

The kids may have grown and graduated, but Quindlen follows the same writing schedule she had back when she was juggling motherhood and a career. “I still write during school hours,” she says with a laugh. “I’m really a creature of habit. I’m still always a little shocked I don’t have kids to pick up.”

Another habit she can’t—and likely won’t—break is New York. She attended Barnard College, and never left.

“My metabolism and the metabolism of New York City are the same,” she says. “It’s like what they say about the amount of salt in the ocean being the same as amniotic fluid. What drives New York City is the same thing that drives me. The car culture . . . something inside me just shuts down. I grew up in the suburbs, but this is my natural habitat.”

Perhaps the biggest shift for this creature of habit was giving up her role as a leading opinion writer. After two columns at the Times (and one Pulitzer) and nine years writing the popular column “The Last Word” for Newsweek, Quindlen says it was time to hand that role to a new generation.

“I feel that columnists need to leave while they’re sharp. I felt I still was, but it was time,” she explains. “You need a much younger woman to do this. We need more of those younger voices out there. The pundit class in America today is very white and very male and very gray. I want to know what younger people are thinking and talking about.”

Gracious as this may seem, don’t count Quindlen out yet. With this provocative, moving new book, Quindlen proves she may be at the midpoint of life, but she’s at the top of her game.

source from: bookpage

Carry the One begins with Carmen and her spur-of-the-moment hippie wedding. She is unexpectedly pregnant, yet eager to begin her life with Matt. However, Carmen’s sister Alice and their stoned brother Nick (along with his postal-worker girlfriend Olivia) manage to take the night in a different direction on their ride home, when Olivia (the driver) accidentally strikes and kills a young girl. The ensuing, interlocking stories follow each of them in the aftermath of this catastrophic event.

Readers will become invested in Alice, the soon-to-be-famous painter who not only struggles with emerging from the shadow of her misogynist, famous father, but also carries an endless torch for Maude, Matt’s sister. Their battle of a love affair rises and falls over the years, as their careers—Maude’s as an actress and Alice’s as an artist—take turns eclipsing the other person’s role in their lives. While Olivia—after taking the rap and being sent off to jail—becomes straight edge, it is Nick who is most haunted by the death they inadvertently caused. He squanders his genius in astronomy with endless cycles of alcoholism and addiction. And the eldest, Carmen, struggles to remain true to herself as a political women’s activist in her faltering marriage.

These stories perfectly capture the changes within the characters as they grow older, shedding their more light-hearted attitudes toward sex, drugs and work. Tied together by that roadside tragedy, this makeshift family struggles to protect and support one another through heartbreak, addiction and even violence.

Anshaw’s prose in Carry the One is delicate and effortless, flowing from one beautifully believable scene to another. Its quiet power lies in her observation of how easy it is to destroy something and how much effort it takes to focus on keeping everything—and everyone—together.

source from: bookpage

Jake Guevara/The New York Times

 

GODS WITHOUT MEN

By Hari Kunzru

369 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Michael Lionstar

Hari Kunzru

source from: nytimes

source from: nytimes