Sunday Sentence: George Saunders

Author David Abrams has started a marvelous idea on his blog, The Quivering Pen. Each Sunday, he posts, without explanation, the best sentence he has read during the week.

Here is mine:

"He'd been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there could
still be many-many drops of goodness, is how it came to him -- many drops of happy -- of good fellowship -- ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not -- had never
been -- his to withheld.
"Withhold."

-- George Saunders, Tenth of December, from the collection with the same title

Review: 'Z'

Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
By Therese Anne Fowler
Literary fiction
March 2013
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 978-1250028655

Of all the members of the Lost Generation, the one who claimed the biggest piece of hearts of certain readers of a certain age was Zelda Fitzgerald. After Zelda, Nancy Milford's biography was published in 1970, F. Scott Fitzgerald's denounced wife regained sympathy and, for some, admiration for surviving Fitzgerald's alcoholism and decline while she battled mental illness and the inability to care for her daughter, Scottie.

Therese Anne Fowler is one of those readers. And she's taken that restoration of Zelda's image to the next step by imagining her life in a new novel, Z.

The prologue, set in the year before she dies, is one of the strongest sections in the novel. She posts a letter from her hometown of Montgomery, where she has gone after hospital stays, to her husband, who is in Hollywood once again chasing the end of the rainbow, and wishes she could mail herself as well. In it, she wishes to mail herself to Scott and to their "next future", as if they could revise their lives as easily as letters and novels are revised.

Zelda, or at least her life, underwent revisions after she met Scott near the end of WWI in Montgomery. He was dashing, she was swept off her feet, she did not want a conventional, staid life. In that respect, she got her wish. She and one of her sisters took the train to New York City, where she and Scott married, and they began the live the lives of the unconventional. They partied, they drank, they danced. Scott wrote short stories that paid a fortune that they used to party, drink and dance.

Off and on over the years, Zelda wrote as well. But much of her work was either published under both their names or even Scott's.

And while Fitzgerald practically invented the unconventional flapper, he was as staid and conventional as any patriarch in Fowler's novel. He wanted Zelda to worship him, to emotionally support him, to back him whatever he wanted to do, whether it was write, party all night, go meet friends or not put up with resistance when he mentored Ernest Hemingway or starlets, or slept with other people. When Zelda develops a serious crush that she mistakes for love with another man, and plans to run away, Fitzgerald embarrasses her, brings her back and takes her back.

The relationship with Hemingway is fascinating in both reality -- even considering what we don't know and what Papa may not have reliably reported (such as a certain incident that Hemingway relates took place in a restroom and involved Fitzgerald's anatomy) -- and in fiction.

Hemingway's charisma is related in full force in this novel. Zelda's distrust of him is brought in quietly and carefully. She doesn't come across as a shrew or unreliable or mentally unstable. Fowler creates an incident in which the origins of Hemingway's turning against first Zelda, then Scott, could be explained. It's an all-to-human incident in which a man who either thinks a lot of himself or who overcompensates because he doubts himself so greatly (both of which I've thought about Hemingway at times) could initiate. And take revenge for when he doesn't get his way.

Later, it is intimated that Zelda may have evidence that Scott and Hemingway slept together. There is nothing definitive in the historical record, and it is easy to imagine their varying times appearing jealous of the other's acclaim as more than that of fellow writers, but imagination is what it appears to be. In the case of the fictional Zelda, it is easy to imagine her jealousy of losing her husband's attention.

All of this sent me down rabbitholes of Google and unresolved determination as to what may or may not have happened.

And then it hit me: Is that not part of what literary fiction might do? Consider possibilities that fit with human nature? Is this a reasonable way to puzzle through what certain real people or any person might do? Is a novel a reasonable way to think through how a person with certain characteristics might respond to certain situations?

These questions are a breakthrough for me as a reader, because I've long held an animus against real people being featured in fiction. For this alone, I'm grateful to Fowler for her ideas as she's expressed them in Z.

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

Review: 'The Nightmare Affair'

THE NIGHTMARE AFFAIR
By Mindee Arnett
YA contemporary fantasy
March 2013
Tor Teen
ISBN: 978-0765333339

Sixteen-year-old Dusty has nearly reconciled herself to needing to attend Arkwell Academy, a private school for creatures closer to her nature than normal people, but as a Nightmare whose talents increase just as murder takes place on campus, she would really rather have been human.

Dusty, as a Nightmare, has to feed off the dreams of others. Crawling on top of them while they sleep to enter their dreams, she gets her energy as the daughter of one of the strongest Nightmares around, her estranged mother. But this time, she's entering the dreams of Eli, a very cute normal guy who she went to school with before her powers kicked in. The dream is located at the cemetery, and there's a body. It's another student.

And, for the first time, the dreamer knows she's there. Dusty is able to make a getaway, but not before Eli wakes up to find her on top of him.

It turns out they're a fated pair, and Dusty and Eli are maneuvered into trying to find out more about the student's murder. The victim was supposed to be part of a protection against a force that threatens the existence of all the creatures at Arkwell Academy.

The set-up is a combination of mystery sleuthing as Dusty, Eli and Dusty's best friend and roomie, a siren, hunt for clues, and a romance as Dusty and Eli get tingly around each other. If only Eli wasn't so infuriating and if only another boy wasn't so nice to Dusty all the time. And there's Dusty's issues with her mother, who got away with everything while Dusty cannot sneeze without getting in trouble.
But then Arnett's over-use of mythology kicks in. It's not enough to have Nightmares (succubi, basically), sirens, demons, vampires and werewolves. We also get Merlin and Excaliber. But not Arthur. And sudden violence that feels out of place.

It's a mindless enough entertainment if fluff is the goal. For older teens and up.

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

Review: 'Beneath a Meth Moon'

BENEATH A METH MOON: An Elegy
By Jacqueline Woodson
YA contemporary realistic
February 2012
Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin Young Readers Group)
ISBN: 9780399252501
                                                                                                                                                                   
Laurel has been through a lot in her 15 years. She, her father and her younger brother lost her mother and grandmother when they wouldn't leave Pass Christian when Hurricane Katrina came. They've moved to a small Midwest town after living with her aunt for two years in Jackson.

To say she misses her mother and grandmother, M'Lady, is understatement. Their loss is a deep pain that is with her always. It's not enough that she dearly loves her baby brother, who was three months old when they left Pass Christian, and that he deeply loves her. It's not enough that she adores and respects her father, a good, quiet, God-loving man. It's not enough that she has found a good friend, Kaylee, who is the reader to her writer (and Woodson's recounting of their dialogue in this regard is a gorgeous homage to the joys of reading and writing).

It's when the cute boy on the basketball team, the one with a tattoo of gumbo, kisses her and offers her meth, that she thinks she has found something that is enough. Meth dulls the pain of loss, makes her giddy and makes her want more. And more. And more.

Woodson tells Laurel's story by weaving back and forth in time without preaching, but by showing what Laurel is thinking and feeling throughout her descent into drug addiction and living on the street, through attempts at rehab and believing she can handle it. Laurel is fortunate that even on the street, she meets a wonderful person. Moses is a teenager who is paid by grieving parents to paint portraits of their meth angels, the teens they lost to meth, on buildings.

For both Laurel's story and Woodson's strong, lyrical, heart-deep writing, Beneath a Meth Moon is a very good book for teens to discover. The publisher recommends for ages 12 and up; it's going into my middle school library next to Woodson's other books.

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

Review: 'A Killing in the Hills'

A KILLING IN THE HILLS
By Julia Keller
Crime fiction
August 2012
Minotaur Books
ISBN: 9781250003485
                                                                                                                                                                 
A woman returns to the place where a family tragedy took place years ago. Everyone else is gone. She decides there is nothing here for her, either.

That woman is the prosecuting attorney of Raythune County, West Virginia. Bell Elkins has brought her teenage daughter, Carla, back to her hometown when her husband wanted a high-flying career that didn't seem to include them. But home hasn't been a sanctuary. Carla is in full teenage-rebel mode. She also could have been hurt the day a gunman walked into a local restaurant and killed three old men in the middle of their morning coffee meeting.

Bell and Sheriff Nick Fogelsong, who was a young deputy when the tragedy in Bell's family took place and who took her under his wing, seek to find the killer. They also deal with other cases, the people they work with and the rest of the town where everybody seemingly knows everybody else. As is normal in a small town, not everyone is as they seem.

One of the cases appears to be an easy prosecution but shows Bell's determination for precision and doing right. A developmentally disabled young man plays with a much younger boy. One day, the younger boy dies. On its own, this case could have taken center stage in showing Bell's character, the ins and outs of small-town prosecutions and a decent plot.

The main story is told from the investigation side as well as the first-person account of the shooter, who is fairly standard-issue small-town nobody who wants to be known for something. The interesting part of the case has to do with Carla as she struggles with growing up and wanting to make her mother proud of her even if she wants Mom to just leave her alone.

Keller's first novel is an interesting attempt to showcase the struggles of people who live in beautiful country and high poverty, where drugs can offer an easy way out and a way to make some money. It isn't the strongest novel, as a few Too Stupid to Live moments are employed to raise the stakes in finding the killer. A contractor wanting to stop by a house after 10 p.m. also can easily take a reader out of the story. But the novel is an honest attempt and shows the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's considerable admiration for West Virginia and her people.

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

In progress: 'Yellow Birds', ties to 'Fobbit'

Having just finished the midway part of Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, the big chapter with the big sentence where the young narrator who has survived a tour of duty in Iraq drifts through life and partway down the river, one of those "aha!" connection moments between books occurred.

The Yellow Birds is one of the three Iraq novels published last year. The first I've read, David Abrams' Fobbit, succeeded for my brain and my heart, as well as my sense of humor. It was a smooth, stunningly clever novel in which the total nonsense of war came together.

Powers's novel is completely different. In style, it veers between the extremes of Hemingway admiration and Jamesian twists and turns. One sentence, in the above-mentioned Chapter 7, takes up about two pages. It reveals a great deal of the narrator's character, his motivation, his heart and why his mournful inertia is so hard for him to get past.

And that's when I realized the difference between the two novels. Fobbit is told from an omnipresent perspective that shows the interior and exterior portions of several characters. It's grown-up. It knows war is supremely ridiculous and tragic at the same time.

The Yellow Birds reads from the perspective of a sensitive young man who is just seeing how bad life can be, and has learned this lesson in the worst way possible -- by seeing and causing the taking of life in service of powers that take but never give.

This difference in the two novels is one of the reasons to celebrate the breadth of contemporary fiction. It takes more than one voice, one story, to try to convey the scope of something like war, especially Iraq. I'm looking forward to adding my reading of Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to my cumulative knowledge in hopes of understanding more.

Review: 'Brooklyn Bones'

BROOKLYN BONES (An Erica Donato mystery)
By Triss Stein
Crime fiction (traditional mystery)
February 2013
Poisoned Pen Press
ISBN: 9781464201202
                                                                                                                                              
Erica Donato is making a life for herself and her daughter, going to grad school, working part-time in a museum and renovating their Park Slope home. She misses her husband, who died too young, but she treasures her friends and family. What was a quiet life is shattered when the renovaters, including her daughter, discover the bones of a teenage girl, cradling a teddy bear, hidden in a wall of the house.

Soon, Erica and her teenage daughter, Chris, are encountering strangers threatening them in the street and on the phone. Retired cop Rick Malone, friend of Erica's father, has been a surrogate parent to both of them, but now he's not answering phone messages.

Meanwhile, Erica's friend introduces her to dashing and rich Steven Richmond, who offers her consulting work. He represents developers who want to be highly regarded when they change the neighborhood. Erica is not certain how her historian credentials work into this, but as a grad student and single mother welcomes the extra money to look up material about where she lives. The search is also to try to find out about the early 1970s, when that girl's remains were walled up inside Erica's home.

To help with the historical record, Erica befriends a crochety retired newspaper reporter who broke stories about the gentrification of part of Brooklyn. Leary's old clippings and notes of the days when runaways crashed in Park Slope homes and landlords wanted them out are interesting not just to Erica the historian and homeowner where a skeleton was found, they also attract the attention of those who may not want the past brought to light.

Stein does well in setting up both the main characters -- Erica and her daughter, their friend Joe, the contractor who is renovating the house, and other characters -- and the whodunit. There are times when the story threatens to veer into romance rather than mystery, but it's intentional for both the plot and for the character development of Erica the young widow. The groundwork laid in this novel should provide a sturdy foundation to further books in the series.

One area in which Stein particular excels is in bringing Erica's Brooklyn neighborhood to life. Readers see what it was like back in the day, as well as the vibrant district it is now. Families have roots of several generations or as newcomers make a block their own. The interactions play a key role in solving the mystery of the skeletal remains, but also show what makes Brooklyn a special place to the author and her main character.

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