The Top 5 of 2017: #3

If this 800 page novel had stopped after the first half, it would have been my favorite book of the year. I read it during the last week of December, basically non-stop. I had even planned to title this post, “You have never even heard of my favorite book of the year!”

You haven’t heard of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron because it’s a first novel with a clunky, weird title and way too huge for anyone’s book club. I stumbled upon it on a independent bookstore aisle end cap with a sign underneath it that said, “Read this. Now. I mean it.” And I’m really good at following directions.

The story follows the lives of four brothers, and the reader knows they will meet at some point over the course of the novel.  Two are black and come from Maryland. Two are white and come from Alabama. All four live in segregated contexts – but it is the nuance of these contexts that makes the author’s exploration so interesting. What did friendship across race look like, feel like? What did it mean to go to separate schools but to play together in the afternoons?

Ultimately, this is a book about dignity. What happens when we don’t treat people as full human beings? And this story is not, magically, simply black and white.

Now for the bad news. Corthron wanted to write an epic novel here, and ultimately, her story loses itself somewhat in that ambition. You know how yesterday I compared Sing, Unburied, Sing to fine dining? Well, The Castle Cross... is a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet after a long hiking trip. So tasty, but by the second half, I began to bloat. There’s just too much, and the push to cover every intersectionality (e.g. the history of the gay rights movement, disability history, etc.) strains the plot. And the issue that pulled this novel to #3 from its perch at #1 is a giant, GIANT (and unnecessary) coincidence at the end.

Still, this was an amazing read. I recommend it with all of my ringing bells (though if you have problems reading about violence of any kind – warning!). This would be fantastic for a long (very long) plane ride. I was riveted.

The Castle Cross… won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and as a side note, Corthron is in her 50s. Who says youngsters have all the fun?

You can read an interview with Corthron here.

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 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.

Review of The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer

In The Children’s Crusade, Ann Packer gives us the long history of the Blair family. The father, Robert, purchases a piece of land in what is now Silicon Valley and builds a home for his future family. As his children grow up, the house becomes the family’s anchor and also the wedge between its members.

The story switches back and forth between the 1970s and the 2000s, when the family’s four adult children are deciding whether to sell the house after Robert’s death. The reader’s task is to figure out how and why the family comes to this particular crossroads.

As each child’s story unfolds, the reader begins to see how separate the mother is from the center of the family. In fact, the mother essentially moves out of the house into a shed on the property. But at the same time, her self-isolation becomes a new center around which the family begins to orbit. The “Children’s Crusade” in the title refers to the plan the kids hatch to get their mother’s attention. Packer wants us to consider the psychological dimensions of family roles.

I really did want to enjoy this book, and while it was very readable, I did not love it. For one, there’s not a lot of action here. This is a slow, meandering story. The chapters are long, with multiple changes in narrative perspective happening within each one. Finishing this novel required a surprising amount of perseverance.

But my biggest issue with this story was the development of Penny, the mother. For all of the attention Packer gives each character, rooting out each person’s shame and secrets and motivations, Penny remains rather one-dimensional and unsympathetic. And while Bad Mothering is a fascinating topic, I would have liked Penny to have the same complexity as the other characters.

(For fun, I just googled, “Bad mothers in literature,” and it turns out that Penny is not the only one! Who’s your favorite Mommie Dearest?)

I do tend to seek out and enjoy novels about dysfunctional families. Recent favorites in this broad category include The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, and We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. The Children’s Crusade is the second novel I’ve read in the last few months that has a “What should we do with the family house?” question as its centerpiece. Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread also follows adult children navigating their relationships with each other and the family legacy. In both cases, I struggled with the books’ pacing and structure and, ultimately, with the heavy hand of the house metaphors.

Most of the interviews with Ann Packer focus on her older work. Here’s one current article, and here are her tips for successful writing.