Review of Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple

Last weekend, Seattle was supposed to experience an epic windstorm. We had one ten years ago, and it knocked out power for a while and made us all uncomfortable. Plus, my kids’ preschool was cancelled, and that meant that I was paying money for them to sit in my house with no electricity and nothing to do.

So my plan for this storm was to BE READY. The laundry was done. The food was prepared. I made sure the kids showered and wouldn’t smell for the duration of the event. I had batteries lined up for the flashlights and lots of candles (with matches!). I had blankets and warm pajamas. I also had liquor and a library copy of the new Maria Semple novel, Today will Be Different.

I imagined myself curled up, sipping a cocktail, wiping tears of laughter from my face. After all, I thought that Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? hit mostly all the right funny notes, and I expected nothing less from this follow-up. 

But then, after all that work to get prepared, the storm never raged. The local news sent all of its reporters out to various street corners to get blown around. They were supposed to say, “Look at everything being destroyed by this terrible weather! Look at me, barely able to stay upright in the gusts!” But, instead, the wind just went

*Puff *

and then died out.

One of the things that Semple does is parody Seattle and its left-leaning, often hypocritical hysteria. This kind of preparation-for-Armageddon is probably exactly the kind of craziness that makes her roll her eyes.  And certainly, the daggers she throws at Seattle (and left-leaning white people in general) in Today Will Be Different caused me to snort in appreciation.

But like the storm that didn’t happen, my enjoyment of this book never fully took off. The premise is that Eleanor, a middle-aged artist/animator/tv writer/graphic novelist (what did she do? It remained a little unclear to me), finds herself in a sort-of struggling marriage and a sort-of crumbling career. Over the course of one day, she stumbles toward getting her life together.

The thing is, however, there’s a darkish underbelly to Eleanor’s life. Her mother died when she was a child, leaving her and her sister to fend for themselves. Their father was often drunk and/or neglectful, and there was great pain around that. Now, as an adult, the estrangement Eleanor feels from her sister and the unresolved feelings she has about her parents seem to contribute to her inability to manage her life.

And that’s not really funny.

But instead of telling this more complicated story, Semple tries to dress it up in “comedy” (including an odd diversion to a sub-plot about New Orleans high society), which made me feel weird rather than wildly entertained.

This is still a good book. I’m sure many of you will read it and laugh at all the truly funny parts. I can see it as a satisfying novel to read on a long flight. However, I do wish that Semple had trusted us to be OK with the painful side of the story she wanted to tell.

Review of The Past by Tessa Hadley

On the good news front, I enthusiastically read and finished The Past by Tessa Hadley. It has been quite a while since I was able to get into a zone while reading. And oddly, I think that in any other year I would have complained that this book did not have enough plot to carry it along. But somehow this story of a British extended family gathering at their crumbling summer home hit the spot for me at a time when no other book has been able to satisfy me.

I do like books where siblings or old friends reunite after a time away, and I also like books about secrets (as long as the secrets aren’t too terrible). In this story, four adult siblings, a few children, and a couple of “outsiders” converge at the old family summer estate to decide whether to sell it. While there, they find that they are forever impacted by their past and yet transitioning beyond it. And beneath this family’s story, there is a larger commentary on the way that Britain itself is changing (via immigration, urbanization, etc.).

This is what I pictured. It was featured in an article about dirt-cheap "doer-uppers" in Britain.

I really enjoyed these characters, and I enjoyed the author’s easy prose. Mostly, I appreciated being able to sink into another world after so many weeks of ennui. It didn’t hurt that I had a nice, long weekend away from the tension and traffic of my everyday life. This was the view from my vacation deck, where I spent several hours with my book and a gin and tonic:

For the first time in a long while, I feel optimistic about my reading life.

Review of The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen has all the hallmarks of a book that I would ordinarily devour: quirky characters, a deep social critique, and moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity.  But in this case, there is just too much of everything – to much quirk, too many critiques, and too much humor that only sometimes lands on the right note.

One quirky thing is the placement of little photos in the text

The story involves a couple in Palo Alto, California that recently became engaged. But the reader soon learns that not all is not perfect between the two main characters, as exemplified by the fact that squirrels can be heard in the walls of the house they share. And while the husband-to-be abhors squirrels and tries to trap and kill them, the bride-to-be loves them. In fact, she talks to them, and they talk back.

The fact that one of the main characters in this book is a talking squirrel might represent one of the novel’s themes: the struggle between nature and progress. But there so many other themes: the struggle between tradition and innovation; the seduction of fame and money; the uneasy and often blurry lines between science for the social good and science as commodity; and my favorite --  families are hard.  If you asked me to tell you what this book is “about,” I’d have trouble giving a clear answer, because the author takes on so much here.

Another quirky photo

The main character’s name is Veblen, named after the economist Thorstein Veblen, who is famous for discussing “conspicuous consumption” and for critiquing the idea of production for profit. Veblen the character is kind of a free-spirit and loves the “old” Palo Alto. Her fiancée, Paul, is more representative of the “new” Palo Alto and is trying to market the medical device he created. As the characters try to resolve their differences, the reader gets to meet their family members, many of whom have different versions of mental illness.  Why, exactly, they are all struggling with mental illness is kind of unclear, and I’m not fully sure if this is part of a critique or if it is supposed to be funny (it isn’t).  Perhaps it has something to do with what the meaning of insane is – is that another theme? Gah!

Ultimately, I finished this book feeling confused and somewhat dissatisfied. However, I get the sense that this author will have a bright future. There is something so smart about this book, even as I came away feeling like I just ate an entire pie when a single slice would have sufficed.

Here’s an interesting Q&A with McKenzie.

Review of Days of Awe by Lauren Fox

I broke a serious reading resolution last week. I followed up Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, which was SadSadSad, with Lauren Fox’s Days of Awe, which ended up being SadSadSad. Remember how I was going to stay away from literary despair in 2016? Oh well. I’ve already lost that battle. I seem to be drawn to depressing stories in the same way that I am to containers of Nutella (I polished off a full tub yesterday. So sorry, arteries).

Days of Awe is a novel about the way that grief can crack the entire foundation of your life. Isabel is a middle-aged woman whose best friend dies suddenly. Isabel’s grief winds like a tendril around her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, and she can’t quite fit all the pieces of her life back together again. Moreover, she sabotages herself left and right, because she is SadSadSad.

The author has made her name as a writer of women’s fiction, and her snappy prose certainly makes her a good fit for that genre. In fact, the strength of this novel is that the hilarious writing can fool the reader into thinking that this book isn’t a tragedy. But be forewarned: this is NOT a beach book, unless you are looking for a way to draw some heavy, dripping clouds to your sunny days.

That said, there are some scenes at a middle school that are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Isabel is a teacher, and in addition to her grief, she has to navigate workplace politics, mean girls, and field trips. It made me wish for a companion novel that focuses exclusively on the people at the school.

This is a worthwhile book, with some great elements. I’m “glad” I read it, and I bet that I will continue to follow this author in the future. It’s a difficult novel to recommend, however, since I’m not sure who would be the right audience. Readers who like their Nutella with a side of tears, maybe?

Review of My Name Is Lucy Barton By Elizabeth Strout

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Strout is not a typical novel. I kept waiting for the gimmick that would make this fit some genre or category I’d recognize, but the gimmick never came. I guess I’d call it a novella, but it also feels a bit like a journal. In any case, the book is a reminder that families can be sources of epic, lifelong pain – or, really, that they are the sources of everything.

The book starts when Lucy is in the hospital, suffering from an infection. Her estranged mother shows up to be with her. I thought, “Mom’s a ghost! This is going to be a ghost story!" Then I thought, “Lucy is really dead! She’s on her way to heaven!” And then I thought, “Lucy’s really in a psychiatric hospital!” None of these things is true. She is really in the hospital with an infection, and her mom is really there.

The reader sits at Lucy’s bedside with her mother and gets glimpses of the deep poverty and abuse and neglect that characterized Lucy’s childhood. Strout only gives us little flashes of this past, however, and her restraint somehow makes reading about Lucy’s experiences all the more difficult.

The mother sits at the center of the back story, and it is devastating to watch Lucy --as an adult-- keep asking, “Do you love me? Do you love me?” We also get to watch Lucy’s relationships with her own daughters and her acknowledgment that she can (and does) cause THEM the kind of pain they will carry forever, too. 

The promotional material for this novel calls it a book about mothers and daughters, but it is not the kind of book that will turn into a Hallmark Channel movie of the week . Note that the cover of the book does not feature flowers! The father in the story is also key, as are siblings and partners and children. I think that ultimately this is a book that intends to remind us that family permanently shapes us, and what happens to us in our families becomes, as Lucy learns, our one and only story to tell.

You can find an interesting article about Strout here.

A Review of Some Luck By Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is one of those books that pulled me out of myself. I read it when I was 23 and on my first cross-country road trip. I don’t remember many of the details of that novel, but I remember the fact that the world on the page and world outside my car window blurred together.

Despite being a big Smiley fan, It took me a over a year to get to Some Luck, the first in her trilogy about a farm family. I think I put it off because its size was intimidating (and I guess that means that I have already broken my resolution to read only short books in 2016). It is over 400 pages and written in the tiniest font imaginable.

But now that I’ve read it, I also know that Some Luck is really a 1200 page novel broken into thirds. Talk about a long book! It’s Smiley’s joke on me -- Now I’m on the hook for reading another 800 pages to find out “what happens” to the Langford family, a regular farm family in Iowa. Some Luck follows every family member from the 1920s to the 1950s, and each of the next books in the trilogy takes on a new thirty year time period.

I was completely captivated by this first book in the series, but it is not the kind of book that will appeal to everyone. In a way, nothing really happens in the story. People grow up and die. Dinners get made and cleared. People get married, and babies are born. There’s a matter-of-factness about the family’s experience, evoking a culture of survival and restraint. Of course, as the family makes dinner and plants the crops, the reader also experiences two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the McCarthy Era through the eyes of typical people. Smiley’s writing is subtly brilliant.

But, to enjoy this novel, you have to appreciate subtly. There is not much flash and bang. There’s no zombie apocalypse. You will not find this book under the heading, “Page Turner” or “A Book That Will Keep You Up All Night.” This is a book about small, quiet changes -- the stuff, really, of every day life.

Doesn't it seem like “every day life” literature is on the wane? I first noticed it when my kids were in elementary school. The books of my childhood were all largely “realistic fiction,” but my kids had a steady diet of dragons and evil and the imminent end of the world. Has our expectation of what makes for a good story changed over the decades?  Does it take more “action” to captivate us? And if so, why?

You can find good interviews with Smiley here and here.

Review of The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora

I’m not the biggest fan of short stories, because I always feel cheated by their shortness. Just at the point where I’ve come to invest in a character, the story ends. Happily, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora is an exception, largely because characters recur throughout the collection.

Also, the subject matter of this book hits me right in my nerd zone. I’m a sucker for an exploration of dysfunctional suburbia. Each of the stories focuses on a different household in the fictional town of Old Cranbury (Connecticut?). Behind the stately houses lie relationships in disarray. In some cases, the houses themselves reflect the human crumbling within. In other cases, no one but the reader could imagine that things are not what they seem. The themes are many: the tension between old and new; the tension between fantasy and reality; the tension between image and truth.

I think I like books about dysfunctional suburbia for a couple of reasons. For one, my own suburban childhood was full of families like those portrayed in these stories. I only saw the polished side – the manicured lawns, the made-up faces. Stories like these let me open the doors the houses I never got to enter. I also think that there’s something reassuring about witnessing all of these fictional dirty little secrets. Maybe money doesn’t ensure “The Good Life” after all.

I’m not sure that Acampora breaks new ground here, but I had a surprisingly enjoyable time getting to know the various families she creates. I’m looking forward to more from this author!

Here’s Bustle’s list of the top 10 portrayals of suburbia in fiction.  Do you have a favorite?

(Goodreads has a giveaway of this book in January! Free stuff is always fun.)

Review of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow is a novel that explores the experience of a biracial teenager in the 1980s. Rachel’s father is African-American, and her mother was Danish. She is living with her grandmother in an African-American community in Portland, Oregon, where she stands out because of her blue eyes. Much of the story follows Rachel as she grapples with becoming a person who is both black and white, and yet, in the eyes of society, neither one.

There is also a tragic premise that surrounds this identity story.  Rachel, her little brother, her baby sister, and her mother all fell (or were pushed?) from the roof of their apartment complex in Chicago. Rachel was the only survivor, and her father has vanished. The reader slowly learns what really happened to the family and why, and in the meantime, gets to play around with Durrow’s big metaphors about birds and flying and freedom.

I have said in several reviews that I get frustrated with books that are organized around a “message.” I often find that plot developments that serve the “message” are both too complicated and too convenient, and distract me from interesting characters. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, which won the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, is another one of those books. The shifting perspectives and diary entries and the volume of characters in this novel pulled me away from the really good coming-of-age story that was at the center. Ultimately, I don’t think that Rachel and her family needed to fall from the sky in order to be compelling.

I do think that this novel, though marketed to adults, is an even better book for teens.* Rachel’s experience in school, in her social life, and in her extended family offer a glimpse into what it feels like to navigate expectations about race and also to develop a sense of self that incorporates complexity. It would shine as a YA title in a way that it doesn’t as a mainstream literary novel.

You can read an interesting interview with Durrow here. She also writes a blog called Light-Skinned-ed Girl.

*Involves sexual situations and domestic abuse. I’d say it’s best for 13 and up, but choose with your own kid in mind.

Review of Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

My first piece of advice when approaching this book: Do not read reviews (except for this one).  You can read this one because I am not going to compare it to any other book, and I am not going to tell you about the plot. But don’t go to Goodreads. Don’t read the review in the New York Times. Ignore the Washington Post. All I can say about those reviews is that spoilers abound. Come to think of it, don’t even read description on the book jacket.

Here is what I will say:

It took me 7 days to read the first 200 pages. I thought the story was very arty farty, meticulously crafted, gorgeous, but pretentious.

It took me 1 day to read the remaining 200 pages. Suddenly, the story became gripping. My heart raced. I couldn’t put it down.

This is a novel about a marriage. Lotto and Mathilde meet in college and grow together into middle age. They act like partners in his rise to creative stardom, appear to be joined in every way. But a question emerges about how well one person can ever know another person. Can you really share your truest self?

This book could spark a thousand conversations about art and love, about the function of childhood pain in creative work, and about role-playing in relationships. All of these things could bring very literary readers to this novel, and they would be satisfied. But this book could also attract more general readers, people who like to rise up from their beach chairs between sips of tropical beverage and holler, “WTF! Did that just happen?” The problem is that the beach chair readers would need to wade through 200 pages of deep thought, and the literary readers would need to be able to relax and let go of deep thought.  In a way, the beginning and the end are two separate books, married to look like one.

This novel is a 2015 National Book Award finalist.

Here’s an interview with Groff (But spoilers! Don’t read it until you’ve finished the novel.  I mean it!).

Review of Purity by Jonathan Franzen

I don’t even know where to begin with this review. I guess I’ll start by saying that I (usually) love Jonathan Franzen novels. I (usually) love his dysfunctional characters and the way they bring their crazy to the table.

In the years since he first made it big, Franzen has become less adept at concealing his…er…prejudices. First, he caused a ruckus when he didn’t want an Oprah sticker on his book when Oprah picked The Corrections for her book club. His resistance had something to do with his perceptions of what kinds of readers Oprah followers were (women?).  Then he angered lots of internetters by disparaging the internet. He also got into it with author Jennifer Weiner (on the internet) about the superiority of his work vs. “chick lit” when she questioned the fact that “domestic fiction” written by men is taken more seriously than books about similar topics that are written by women.

Purity, his newest book, is about the internet. (Red flag goes up!)

And the female characters in the book, with a few exceptions, are unpleasant people who holler irrationally at nice men about oppression, or they’re young and sexually exploitable. (Warning! Warning!).

There is a question of whether an author’s politics should influence how you experience a book. Last year, for example, Orson Scott Card made some inflammatory negative statements about gay rights and there was considerable discussion about whether readers should still read/appreciate/admire/buy Enders Game. Franzen has not been as clearly bigoted, but he has definitely scooted over to the side of the school yard where the jerks hang out.

And knowing that, I embarked on my reading adventure of this book with anticipation (because I have loved Franzen’s previous books) and also with trepidation (because I don’t like jerks).

Franzen's latest accomplisment: a story on a Chipotle bag

On the surface, Purity concerns a girl (named Purity) who does not know who her father is. She has a ton of school loan debt and is mired in a stupid job. She can’t seem to get herself together socially, and she has a complicated relationship with her mother. She has this thought that if she could find her father, he could help with her debt problem and clear up some of the mysteries about her past.  She also happens to be corresponding with the leader of a cultish group that leaks classified information and finds herself poised to become the group’s newest intern.

Under the surface, Franzen is asking questions about autonomy and freedom in the face of totalitarianism. He looks at the East German Ministry for State Security, which spied on and kept files on ordinary citizens, and compares/contrasts that institution with the current domination of the internet over all aspects of modern life. The way he pulls together all the pieces of this complicated topic is genuinely masterful.

I can say without hesitation that this would be a good book to discuss with others. Though there’s lots of family dysfunction here, this book is not a book about family dysfunction. There are Big Ideas to play around with, and for me, Big Idea Books are most fun if you read them in community.

However, there is something about reading this novel that resembles spending a really long holiday weekend with your sexist Uncle Fred who won’t stop talking about Hillary Clinton. Franzen has issues with women, and he explores those issues over the nearly 600 pages of this book. It’s true that the male characters are pretty awful, too, but it’s often because they can’t quite get over the problematic women in their lives.

If you like books that will get you riled up, this will fit the bill.  I’m glad I read it. I’m also glad it’s over.

Here’s a great interview with Franzen from The Guardian.

Review of Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum

original cover

Somewhere between the original publication of the hardcover version of Hausfrau and its paperback release, marketers decided to capitalize on the main character’s numerous extramarital affairs. In case the book jacket didn’t let you know that there would be Sexy Times in the novel, the blurb on the front references Fifty Shades of Grey. But let me be clear, this is not a sizzling beach book AT ALL. This is the story of a very depressed, disconnected woman spiraling downward into despair.

paperback cover

The book jacket also compares Hausfrau to Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.  I can see how it's a modern mash-up of both of those classic novels (trains and adultery!). The housewife in question is Anna. She lives in Zurich with her unpleasant Swiss husband and three young children. Her isolation is almost complete. She doesn’t speak the language. She doesn’t have good friends. She doesn’t have a job. What she does have is a hunger for fulfillment, which she seeks in vain through numerous lovers, and a profound ability to spin a web of lies that adds to her distance from others.

I did not enjoy this book for a single minute. BUT I did find it truly thought-provoking. The story asks the reader to think about the ways women sacrifice for family life. Anna sacrifices her country and her language. She sacrifices her ambition. You get the sense that she is sacrificing her ability to love other people. But this isn’t the nineteenth century, and the reader also gets to consider how much Anna is causing her own pain. Is she a victim of social convention or the architect of her own destiny?

The poetic writing is also worth noting, particularly the interludes where Anna is in German language class. The author connects Anna’s struggles to the framework of language itself (the role of the passive verb, for instance, or the significance of the future perfect tense). This meta discussion, along with Anna’s conversations with her analyst and with a priest, present the larger philosophical questions the author wants to explore.

In these respects, Hausfrau would be a good book club book. There are plenty of issues to tackle – women and sexuality, autonomy, parenting, honesty in friendships, being “true to yourself,” feminism. I can’t imagine that anyone would come away unmoved. But this book is a tragedy from beginning to end, and I think it will leave many readers sour (or, at the very least, sobbing on a bench in the middle of the night along with the main character).

You can find a good interview with the author, Jill Alexander Essbaum, here.

As a side note, I decided to type “depressing books” into google, and this is what I found:

Thoughts on Candy Bar Books and a Review of The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore

Every once in a while, I need a Candy Bar Book.  And I don’t mean a book that’s an artisanal truffle made of Fair Trade organic cacao. I mean a book whose chocolate is made from corn syrup and chemicals and tastes like Happy Halloween and the best moments of childhood.

Different people have different ideas about what constitutes a good Candy Bar Book. For some of you, it takes a significant amount of blood and a brooding hero. For others, it requires a ninja or two or six.  Still others of you need the word “shopping” to be in the title of the book in order to be satisfied. The common denominator is that the book is straightforward and predictable in a completely satisfying way. You get what you expect, and what you expect is exactly what you want at that moment.

The Admissions by Meg Mitchell Moore was a fun end-of-summer Candy Bar Book for me. In it, we get to live with the Hawthorne family, whose members are over-achieving upper-middle class people trying to climb the endless ladder to success. And guess what? The endless ladder to success is endless. Each family member does some dumb things while climbing that ladder, including lying, cheating, and stealing (and then lying some more).

As I’ve spent the year reading about grief, mixed in with some despair and oppression, The Admissions offered some much needed relief.  It had just enough humor in it to make it digestible all in one sitting.  I’m reminded a little bit of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission, which is a story that (almost) shares a title and a theme with this one. This novel also reminds me of the documentary, Race To Nowhere, which similarly concerns the upper-middle class climb toward achievement. But the book, unlike the film, is pleasingly dipped in a vat of the above-mentioned corn syrup and chemicals and comedy.

There are things that aren’t perfect about this novel. The structure is a bit choppy (short chapters focusing on different characters). There are moments when the author tries to club the reader over her head with THE MESSAGE (ladder = endless). There are also moments when some of the characters express some stereotypical views about race, which is off-putting. But this was definitely a novel that hit me at just the right time – a SUMMER READ, just a tiny bit little late in the season.

You can find an interview with the author here and here.

I received an electronic copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review of After You'd Gone By Maggie O'Farrell

This will probably not come as a surprise, but I just read another book about grief. The book jacket promised family secrets and intrigue, and yes, those things are part of the story. But boiled down, this is yet another book in my string of books about sad sad sad sad.

That said, I enjoyed this book quite a bit (assuming “enjoy” is the right word for sad sad sad). Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I particularly love two of her books -- The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and The Hand That First Held Mine.  I think that O’Farrell is notable for her spider web writing. The reader is held at a distance at first but is quickly pulled tighter and tighter into the center of the drama.

After You’d Gone was O’Farrell’s debut novel, published in 2002. The story focuses on Alice, who begins the book by getting hit by a car and falling into a coma. The reader knows that something bad has happened in her life, that she has witnessed something difficult. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, allowing the reader to learn about her family and her marriage and the events leading up to the accident. In addition to being a book about grief, this is also book about loyalty and deception. For whom would you sacrifice yourself? Does the truth set you free?

It took me a while to ease into this story, mostly because the time and narrative voice switch often – in the same chapters and without warning. I struggled in the beginning to figure out who was speaking, and the organization felt a bit clunky.  In those ways, the book definitely seemed like a debut. But as much as I didn’t want to be reading about grief, I think that O’Farrell nailed it. I felt every aching minute. The tangible quality of one character’s pain gave me a good glimpse of what a fantastic writer O’Farrell would soon become.

When you find an author that you enjoy, do you tend to go back and read his or her entire catalog? Do you find that satisfying? I think that I would have liked this book even more if I had read it before I had read all of her others. Here’s an old column from the New York Times Book Review about backlists in the book business.

And you can find an interview with O’Farrell here and here.

After You’d Gone is on my 2015 TBR Pile Challenge list.  I’m making slow and unsteady progress toward my goal of finishing (and freeing!) 12 books that have been sitting on my leaning stack for too long. Of course, if I succeed at my challenge, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to reward myself by putting new books on the stack. 

Seeking the Dysfunctional Sweet Spot: Review of Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald

When my kids were little, there was a flood of shows on TV featuring British nannies that helped ineffective parents improve. Remember these shows? The allure was that the families in question were just a little bit more insane then the average family (mine). The parents’ decisions were just a little bit more questionable. The kids’ sleep issues were just a little more pronounced. The tantrums were just a little bit louder. The nannies’ advice was usually straightforward (“Don’t give your kids so much candy!”), but my main takeaway was, “At least my parenting isn’t as bad as that!”

For me, a good novel about a dysfunctional family has the same payoff (“At least my family isn’t as bad as that!”). The reader gets to live a while under the roof of a house where things are familiar but just a little bit crazier than life under her own. However, if the dysfunction goes too far – where events are too painful – the novel can be oppressively sad. At the same time, if the dysfunction doesn’t go far enough – where events are too common – the novel can be dull.  I guess I’m saying that there’s a dysfunctional sweet spot, a reading experience that is riveting but that doesn’t break my heart all the way to pieces.

Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald features a solidly dysfunctional family, but it doesn’t quite find the sweet spot. The novel features Mary Rose, who is a successful Canadian author with two beautiful little kids. But she feels that she’s coming unhinged – she’s forgetting things and finding herself inexplicably filled with rage. On top of that, she is feeling some significant pain in her arm, at the site where she had surgery years before.

The story lasts a week, and, slowly, the reader learns that all was not right in Mary Rose’s past. Her parents had several children who died at birth, but these tragedies were rarely talked about. Her mother was sent away for a while, and when she returned she seemed disconnected. Mary Rose wonders if the source of her current unraveling might lie in childhood experiences she can’t clearly recall. The catch is that her mother, who should hold the answers, is in early stages of what seems like dementia. She is forgetting just at the moment that Mary Rose is trying to remember.

MacDonald has an amazing way with words. Individual paragraphs are gorgeous and witty. But this book suffers from too little plot – we watch Mary Rose walk back and forth to the preschool and the park. We watch her buy flowers, twice. We go with her to Starbucks. All of these little events are important (e.g. putting on boots becomes a meaningful thing), but they pull this much of this book into the realm of “too common dysfunction.” The other part – the part that she can’t remember – is more gripping (and also possibly more terrible), but the reader can mostly see what’s coming from the outset.

I have noticed recently that I have been reading bundles of books with similar themes. I was struck by the commonalities between this book and Toni Morrison’s God Help The Child, which I finished last week. Both of these stories concern the replication and endurance of childhood wounds. But Morrison’s novel has the benefit of connecting to larger cultural trauma – racism and its legacy – to give it relevance.

Oprah Winfrey chose MacDonald’s first novel, Fall On Your Knees, for her Book Club in 2002. Here's an interview from back then. Her current book is largely autobiographical, and you can find a current interview with her here.

Review of The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

I don’t mean to keep reading about big family houses. I’m honestly not searching for house-centered domestic dramas, but The Turner House by Angela Flournoy is the fourth in two months. In addition to this one, I’ve tackled Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread; Ann Packer’s The Children’s Crusade; and Garth Stein’s A Sudden Light (review forthcoming). In each case, adult siblings have to make a decision about whether to sell or keep the home where they grew up. The Turner House, in my opinion, is the best in the bunch – and it’s a debut novel!

The book involves the thirteen Turner siblings, whose Detroit home sits abandoned and falling into ruin. The family patriarch, Francis, has died, and the matriarch, Viola, is frail and living with her eldest son in the suburbs. The story follows Francis and Viola’s path from the South to Detroit in the 1940s through 2008. We see several of the siblings negotiate their own failings – in particular, Cha-Cha (detachment from his marriage) and Lelah (gambling) – and find the empty house both a safe haven from and a reflection of those failings.

What I liked about this novel is that it is at once a story about a typical American family (secrets and longings and misunderstandings), a story about an African-American family (with southern cultural roots and a racialized history), and a story about a changing city (which has witnessed a Black migration, White Flight, economic abandonment, and potential rebirth). In an essay about writing the stories of Black neighborhoods, Flournoy says,

"[This novel is] set in Detroit during opposite ends of a community’s lifespan: from the initial struggle for homeownership in the 1940s, to the latter days of foreclosure and abandonment in the early 2000s. Of course, what makes Detroit’s story different from Brooklyn or say, San Francisco, is that the disappearance of neighborhoods is starker than one population moving in while another moves out. Houses, businesses and even people have vanished from parts of the city and nothing has replaced them. I hoped to capture what it felt like to be aware of the dynamic as a resident of such a community."

The layers of the book make it stand out from the others I have read recently, but this is not a perfect novel. I wished that the Turner family were smaller so that we could learn about each sibling in equal measure. It was also difficult for me to jump through time with the characters, especially in the beginning when I was having trouble keeping everyone straight. It took a while for me to invest in these characters, and this is a very character-driven story. But still, this is a very strong first novel, and I can only imagine how fantastic this author’s books will be as her career develops.

I grew up in the Detroit area and have a keen fascination with its transformation(s). I’m sure that curiosity and familiarity is part of what drew me to the book. Though it has been more than twenty-five years since I called Detroit my home, the internet keeps me watching -- especially through stories of regeneration. Here’s a link to a list of books about or set in Detroit. And here’s a link to King Books, which is a truly fascinating bookstore (in its size, scope, and general weirdness).

Speaking of the internet, here’s a great interview with Flournoy from the Kirkus Review.