Review: 'My Life in Middlemarch'

My Life in Middlemarch
By Rebecca Mead
Memoir/literary criticism
January 2014
Crown
ISBN: 978-0-307-98476-0

Some books are too full, too layered and so rewarding that they cannot be reduced to a blurb. That's true of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which will enrich a reader in different ways through a lifetime of re-reads. It's also true of Rebecca Mead's look at Middlemarch, its author and the ways they have affected her life in My Life in Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is one of those novels that can capture a reader and never let go. The ups and downs of the fate suffered by the first main character we meet, Dorothea Brooke, so determined to do the right thing and so blind as to the downfall of her own impulse, the way the novel doesn't focus only on Dorothea but takes up the stories of other residents of the bucolic town, the way things don't necessarily turn out the way a reader would suspect but rarely ring false -- Middlemarch is a huge, sprawling, heartfelt and wise book.

Mead, a writer for The New Yorker, encountered the novel while young and fell under its spell. For anyone else who has done the same, her deep love for the book will set off an echo of memory for any sympathetic reader to the first time those pages were opened. The feeling of being where I was when first I read Middlemarch has been hard to shake off for days, and it's because Mead took me there with her own memory. That is powerful writing.

Mead does a wonderful job of reporting on her own reactions to the novel at different stages of her life, noting the ways in which what has happened to her have changed the way in which the book resonates for her. This is a wonderful sort of memoir because it shows that how a person changes can affect other aspects of life, such as the way in which one regards a revered part of one's life (and, yes, devotion to a book can indeed be that strong).

There is more to the novel than the ways in which a reader reacts to it, and there is much more to Mead's book. She also weaves in parts of Eliot's life and philosophy to specifc parts of the novel. And Mead is a discerning literary critic in comparing Eliot's goals with how they can be seen in her writing. She even makes cogent connections between Virgina Woolf and Eliot, which matters because Woolf's review of Middlemarch is the one that is still most often-quoted -- as the book being "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

Mead also puts Eliot squarely in the novelist's own time and shows how she was regarded during her lifetime and afterward. The way in which Mead brings this back to herself and her life to conclude My Life in Middlemarch is so satisfying that it's hard to decide which to do first -- read Middlemarch again or read My Life in Middlemarch again.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: George Eliot

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without added commentary:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

-- George Eliot, The Natural History of German Life as encountered in Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch

Review: 'Someone'

Someone
By Alice McDermott
Literary fiction
November 2013
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0374281090

Life has the capacity, even if we don't seek thrills and constant activity, to be hectic and stressful. Personal, professional and societal/cultural concerns can all add up to a cacophony of discord that can crowd out the accomplishments, the positive interactions, the planning for something better.

Which is partly why fiction is so important today. It can put the reader in another world, in another viewpoint, in another situation. Often, just that ability to step out of the ongoing noise and think about something else can be restful. Sometimes it can even be invigorating.

Reading Alice McDermott is downright peaceful. Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner, is the work of a powerful observer of the small moments in life that matter. Her latest novel, Someone, is not a wild rollercoaster ride of a read. Thankfully.

Marie goes back and forth in time to recount vignettes of her family from her childhood to old age. As a child in between the two world wars in an Irish-American neighborhood of Brooklyn, Marie has bad eyesight, a beloved father who drinks, a mother who appears stern but is filled with love and a brother destined for the priesthood. She has a lifelong friend, Gerty, whose mother is expecting yet another child in middle age, and talks to a neighborhood teenager who laughs at her own clumsiness.

The teenager, Pegeen, was born of parents with a lovely story -- a woman from Ireland and a man from Syria managed to find themselves in an American bakery and married. She's not a beautiful girl, she has a bit of the hunchback to her and always seems to be coming undone. She's always leaving things behind and calls herself "amadan" -- a fool.

In the midst of her scraps, Pegeen, says, she's not alone:

"But there's always someone nice," she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. "Someone always helps me up."

After a first-love heartbreak, Marie and her older brother, Gabe, now a failed priest, walk for miles in the summer heat:

"Who will love me?" I said. The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers. "Someone," he told me. "Someone will."

And that's all this book is about -- someone. Marie lives a quiet life that makes no waves. She is there for others in small, quiet ways just as others are there for her. Other characters take on importance because they are noted, because they are always where they belong, such as blind Bill Corrigan. A young WWI veteran, his mother irons his white shirts and escorts him down to the street every day. They walk arm in arm as a couple would. Bill sits in a chair on the street and settles streetball arguments as a referee whose authority is not questioned.

Bill does not perform other actions that make him the nexus of anything, yet he is one of the vital threads that hold the community and the story together.

This is the quiet brilliance of McDermott's work. The characters weave in and out of the narrative as their lives go on. What was noted as it happened earlier is recalled in passing later, and the world remains connected. McDermott also is masterful at making the small moments count, because they are such a large part of life, as when young Marie is slipped an extra sugar cube by her father and she puts it in her evening tea:

I listened (to her brother reciting poetry), my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, the desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger.

Whenever "the sand of Syria" is mentioned again in the novel, I go back to that dining room table and the girl Marie was, because it says so much about the woman she became.

And while he is not the focus, or the sole focus, of the novel, her brother Gabe is, like Marie, a character who in other hands would have a far more dramatic arc with huge episodes and long-winded speeches. McDermott's restraint in showing how life turned out for Gabe makes his journey all the more realistic and worthy of consideration.

All the characters in McDermott's fiction have such lives. And so do people we know -- the ones who won't be memorialized in New York Times obits, who won't be the subject of biographies, unless we make them ourselves. Which is what one family does for a son killed in World War II:

They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond andd what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.

Not remarkable at all, Florence, not remarkable at all. There should always be someone who knows.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy'

OPHELIA AND THE MARVELOUS BOY
By Karen Foxlee
Middle grade fantasy
January 2014
Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 978-0385753548

Ophelia is an intrepid tween who prefers science to magic, fact to fantasy and, right now, the past to the present. The last is because her mother died a few months ago of cancer.

Her father has buried himself in his work as a sword expert, taking Ophelia and her older sister, Alice, away from their London home to a European city filled with snow. They're to spend their time ice skating while their father puts together an exhibition of the greatest swords ever gathered together.

The girls are bored as well as in mourning. Ophelia explores the vast corriors and twisty exhibit halls of the museum where the exhibition will be held. The nooks and crannies of the museum are far preferable to the company of the museum curator, a vaguely menacing young woman named Miss Kaminski. She may be beautiful, and her father and Alice may think she's spiffy, but Ophelia wants nothing to do with her.

Ophelia soon has her hands full with a quest. In one of the locked museum rooms, she discovers, is a boy. He has been there for a long, long time. Ages ago, the king who he was met when he was sent across the water to defeat the Snow Queen had him locked up at the behest of his new wife. As Ophelia battles fantastical things she knows cannot exist, but which do, the boy fills her in on his story.

As Karen Foxlee's new novel, Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, picks up speed in an action-filled adventure, her heroine finds she has also embarked on a personal journey that involves honoring the spirit of her mother, a fantasy writer who loved to spin tales about frightening things. Foxlee knows just when to switch scenes to what Ophelia's father and sister are up to, when to tell the reader more about the marvelous boy and when to move Ophelia's quest forward.

One of the great aspects to this story is that it is not sad. It is filled with life and making time count. Foxlee knows how to spin wisdom into her tale with light and laughter. She also has a masterful touch at description.

Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy is a fabulous fantasy for middle grade readers who love fairy tales, adventure and stories of courage and love.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Sunday Sentence: Kevin Barry

As inspired by Fobbit author David Abrams at The Quivering Pen, the best sentence(s) I read this week, presented without added commentary or context:

This is the story of a happy marriage but before you throw up and turn the page let me say that it will
end with my faced pressed hard into the cold metal of the Volvo’s bonnet, my hands cuffed behind my back,
and my rights droned into my ear – this will occur in the car park of a big-box retail unit on the Naas
Road in Dublin.

-- "Wifey Redux" by Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island

Review: 'Hunting Shadows'

HUNTING SHADOWS
By Charles Todd
Crime fiction
January 2014
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0062237187

Returning for his 16th novel, WWI survivor and Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge is on the road again, solving murders in the appropriately named Hunting Shadows.

This time, the story begins with an old soldier who largely keeps to himself but feels he needs to pay his respects to another soldier by attending his funeral in the Fens country. He stops short of entering the church upon seeing an old enemy, a former officer. He waits until the man returns to the area for a wedding and, drawing on his sniper experience during the war, kills the man in front of the bridegroom.

The public slaying horrifies the area. People are even more scared when another man, a quiet country solicitor running for Parliament, also is killed by an unknown assailant in public.

En route to the small villages where the murders took place, Rutledge is lost in the fog one night on the Fens, guided by a ghostly presence who leads him to eventual safety. As with many people Rutledge meets in his investigations, people are suspicious of the police yet expect them to solve crimes, preferably before they happen.

Mixed in with the prickly characters are those who intrigue Rutledge as people, whether they may know much about the murders or even be suspects. There are at least two who would be worth seeing in subsequent novels in this series.

One of the highlights of this novel is the focus on the role of snipers in WWI. Although they saved many lives, their ability to blend into their surroundings to kill was seen by many as cowardly, as not forthright or sporting. The snipers often keep their past a secret, to avoid being shunned. It's an interesting commentary on warcraft and the needs of the battlefield.

The novel also does a wonderful job of bringing the bleak, blandly treacherous Fens to life. This is the landscape in which Lord Peter Wimsey got lost in The Nine Tailors, and this Todd novel recalls that classic tale as well as tells its own strong story.

Rutledge remains haunted by Hamish MacLeod, although the corporal whose execution Rutledge ordered does not disrupt the narrative. He serves as Rutledge's inner guide, asking the right question at the right time and being a bit of a worrywart. Rutledge still suffers from being in the trenches. As his investigation brings back the horrors of those times, he relives them as well.

But he also is soldiering on in that he shows signs of trying to move on by doing his job with diligence, wishing happiness for those he cares about and showing a wee bit more of his human side in his consideration of people he comes across in this outing.

Hunting Shadows is a superb entry in one of the most consistently entertaining historical mystery series around.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Benediction'

Benediction
By Kent Haruf
Literary Fiction
January 2014
Vintage Paperback edition
ISBN: 978-0307950420

When the big things in life happen, people often take stock and realize what really matters to them -- what people, what events, even what principles. When a big thing happens to a character of a novel, bringing the perfect tone to that taking stock -- and being able to show, rather than tell what really matters -- can make a sad story transcendent.

That's what happens in Kent Haruf's Benediction. Dad Lewis has owned and operated the hardware store in a small high plains town for decades. He is now dying of cancer. His wife Mary is overdoing it and ends up in the hospital. She's one tough cookie -- she walks home after the enforced bedrest. But the Lewises are pragmatic and are the kind of people who naturally do the right thing. In this case, it's sending for their daughter, Lorraine, to come home from Denver to help and be with them.

As in other Haruf novels, there are other small families and groups of people who enter the orbit of the main characters. Next door, Berta May's young granddaughter has come to live with her after the child's mother dies. Alice is a quiet little girl. Lorraine, who lost a daughter, is drawn to her, as are Alene, a teacher probably ready to retire, and her widowed mother, Willa.

Also coming into the Lewis circle is the new preacher in town, fish-out-of-water Lyle, who has an unhappy wife and teenage son. He is a fascinating character -- someone who believes deeply in doing the right thing, but who is unable to communicate that belief or put it into action effectively. He was sent to the Lewises's small town after mucking things up in a bigger church. He's destined to repeat his mistake here.

As Dad Lewis grows more ill and loses his strength, the biggest regret of his life is the estrangement of his son. Frank turned out differently from his father, and his father cast him aside in hurt and anger. Although Dad and Mary saw Frank after he left home, it's been years. Lorraine was in contact with him for a bit, but she also has lost touch.

The depth of Dad Lewis's failure with his own son contrasts with the way he treated an employee who was stealing from the store. Dad fired him and told the man to leave town with his wife and kids. His wife offered herself to Dad in lieu of paying the money back and he turned her down. Months later, the man kills himself. Dad later found the young widow and kids, and helped them financially until she made a new life.

It's the kind of punishment and assistance Dad was never able to give to his own son.

The other characters also find ways in which to make up for the people who were taken from them, and for the things they were not able to do in the regular course of family events.

There is a quiet strength in Haruf's prose that gives the smallest acts the grandeur of epic movements. One afternoon, Mary and Lorraine grant Dad's wish for a last drive around town. They park in front of the store and watch the normal business going on inside the store. A customer buys something and leaves:

 ... and then the man swung around and came out through the open doors onto the sidewalk with the paper sack in his hand, coming directly toward them in the car, so near that they could see the buttons on his summer shirt, before he turned and went up the block in the bright sun.
   Who was that, Daddy?
    I can't think of his name. But I know him. I'll think of it, he said. His voice sounded odd and then suddently he began to weep.

Dad then has them drive him out to the country, where the reader learns what happened to the main characters in Haruf's beautiful novel, Plainsong. It resonates even for someone who hasn't read the novel since it first came out in 1999.

This quiet strength works to great advantage in a major setpiece in the novel, when Lyle tries to deliver a homily about the Sermon on the Mount, and loving one's enemies. With the war on terrorism in full bloom, his sermon does not go well. Although Lyle's sermon does a wonderful job of explaining how there can be such a thing as a progressive believer in Christ in guiding how an individual can feel about both foreign and domestic policy -- ""And what if we tried it? What if we said to our enemies: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. ... But what if we say, Listen: Instead of any of these, we are going to give willingly and generously to you. We are going to spend the great American national treasure and the will and the human lives that we would have spent on destruction, and instead we are going to turn them all toward creation. We'll mend your roads and highways, expand your schools, modernize your wells, and water supplies, save your ancient artifcats and art and culture, preserve your temples and mosques. In fact, we are going to love you." -- the preacher's speech has a point about the way people act in everyday life as well:

 And so we know the satisfaction of hate. We know the sweet joy of revenge. How it feels to get even. Oh, that was a nice idea Jesus had. That was a pretty notion, but you can't love people who do evil. It's neither sensible nor practical. It's not wise to the world to love people who do such terrible wrong. ... what if Jesus wasn't kidding? ... What if he meant every word of what he said? What would the world come to?

In Haruf's novel, time and unsought opportunities provide the chance to many of the characters perhaps not love their enemies, but to do good despite the evil or sad things that have been done to them. That characters in small towns living lives, but not of quiet desperation despite setbacks and heartache, would choose to carry on and do kind things for others, is in itself a benediction to the idea of a life well-lived. It is a way to seek goodness rather than evil, to seek the things that matter.

©2013 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission