Leaving Home, by Anita Brookner

A young woman leaves home and grows up. I think one might summarize the book this way, but it really isn't a "coming of age" book in the usual sense.

Emma Roberts, 26, heads from her home in England to France to complete her dissertation on formal gardens. Living in small tight quarters, she works daily in the library, lives almost monastically. At the library, though, she meets Francoise, a young French woman whose life is almost the opposite of Emma's. Emma listens to her friend's tales of one-night stands and her stories of her weekends at home with her mother. After some time, Francoise invites Emma to join her at her home one weekend and Emma accepts.

The house is large and stately, a bit run-down but still beautiful. Emma is entranced by it. She is also deeply affected by her encounters with Francoise's mother, who, while reserved and hardly friendly, seems to like her.

In the months to come Emma visits the house a few more times, and also visits her own mother back in England. She also starts to take up a small friendship with a young man, Michael, who lives in the same hotel. The two go on quiet walks and occasionally have coffee. They share a desire for distance, a companionable distance. Emma is happy with the lack of expectations of her.

The student life in France is abruptly interrupted when Emma receives bad news about her mother, and relationships slip a little. She reluctantly accepts invitations to visit Francoise's house again, and ultimately learns more about her friend than perhaps she wants.

There is growing up going on here, but it's clear that in some ways Emma has been grown for a while. She is so introspective that she almost lives doubly - in real life and in her mind. The book is small but the writing is "literary" - "lyrical". Simple actions are written in expansive prose that sometimes almost obscures what actually happened. At times I found the style irritating. As a rule, I like writing to be more straightforward, direct.

IT's a curious book. I didn't love Emma. Or her friends, particularly. Yet I found it interesting enough and ultimately it left me thinking, which is a good thing. 

The Ministry of Special Cases

A Jewish family in Argentina during the Dirty War suffers an unimaginable loss. Kaddish and Lillian and their son Pato are managing to get by with Lillian's work and with Kaddish's occasional work when the police arrest Pato and take him away. Kaddish's work consists of destroying family names on tombstones in the disreputable part of the Jewish cemetery, so that persons with those names can claim to come from a better class of citizens. Kaddish, "son of a whore" himself, has long accepted the division of the cemetery so taking money to erase the past is not a moral issue for him.

There is nothing straightforward about Pato's disappearance. No police station will claim him. Nobody will file a report on his disappearance. Neighbors look blank when Kaddish and Lillian ask if they saw what happened. It is as if Pato never existed. This because everyone knows that anyone who aids a family that has been somehow marked by the present regime will be marked themselves. People cannot afford to help, for by doing so they may lose their lives.

Lillian and Kaddish disagree on how to help their son. They try some things together and other things apart. Finally Kaddish comes to believe Pato is dead while Lillian believes it is against their religion to believe so until they have seen his body. This difference in belief tears them apart.

The story is written with wry humor in spite of the dark subject matter. The Ministry of Special Cases, for example, is a classic bureaucracy and is justly skewered. Kaddish is drawn with a warm sympathy for his failings.

A revealing portrait of Argentina's Dirty War from the inside.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin

 The title refers to a ditty used to teach Southern children how to spell Mississippi: M - I - crooked letter, crooked letter - I - crooked letter, crooked letter...

It's a story that had to happen in Mississippi or a similar southern state.

Two boys, growing up in the 70s, one black, one white, become friends. But secret friends, because such a friendship was not acceptable then. The two meet under curious circumstances and ultimately find they are connected by more than geography.

Larry Ott, the white boy, is a quiet bookish boy who is thrilled when the neighbor girl asks if he wants to take her to a drive-in. The date does not go as planned and the next day the town is out looking for the girl. Suspicion centers on Larry because he was the last one to see her. For years he carries around this suspicion and his future is changed forever.

Meanwhile, a thoughtless comment by Larry pushes his friend Silas away. The two grow up and get on with their lives, separately. Until another incident pushes the two together and at least some of the mystery of years before is solved.

It's a beautifully-written story that goes back and forth from the past to the present, letting the tension build slowly and the characters develop. To me it feels very real and very sad.

Fearless, by Rafael Yglesias

 I never know, when I buy a book by an author I have not heard of, whether it will be just okay or something more. Every now and then I get excited. That's the case here. I loved this book and I will be looking for more by this author.

Max, an architect, is in a plane crash that kills his partner Jeff. In the minutes before the crash he moved from his seat to be with a young boy who is traveling alone, who is facing death alone. After the crash he leads this boy, Byron, and carries a baby out of the plane, earning him exaggerated kudos as a hero. Formerly fearful of flying, of eating strawberries, of many things, he suddenly finds he has no fear. He believes he has already faced death and is now immune. More than that, he is not afraid of saying the truth and in fact can't seem to help himself even when it hurts himself or others.

Meanwhile, Carla, also on that flight, loses her baby and finds herself fighting her guilt, lashing out and retreating into herself. Eventually she can't face even going outside. How do you make sense of such random deaths? She tries, through her religion.

Max alienates some and scares others as he becomes this other Max. He decides that the man he was before the crash was a fiction and the world had better get used to this new one. He fights with his wife and ignores Byron, who has taken to visiting him. He shuts down his business. He takes up with a less-than-stellar attorney. He does not lose his humanity or his compassion, however.

Ultimately it is this compassion that brings Max to meet the housebound Carla, where he proceeds to work what appear to be miracles. In most interesting ways the two lead each other out of the new world they have created.

Preston Falls, by David Gates

Yet another writer from upstate New York. Like Joyce Carol Oates and Richard Russo, Gates takes us to a workingman's world - but not quite.

Doug Willis is somehow dissatisfied with his life. He mocks his work and makes unfunny, often bitter remarks to his wife, and he spends more time away from home than he does there, giving his children a sense that he hardly lives there. Finally he reaches a point when he just wants to be away for a while to think things through. He uses the excuse of fixing up the cabin he bought in Preston Falls, four hours away from home near New York City, and takes a leave of absence.

But that isn't all. Willis reimagines himself as some sort of down-to-earth blue collar worker, communing with the truck. And he does get himself a truck to match.

And thus the novel begins with Willis in his truck with the dog, and his wife and two children in the Cherokee, following, driving to the cabin. It is a holiday weekend but the children have to be back at school the following Tuesday, and Doug's wife Jean has to be back at work. Doug, however, has two months to work through whatever is going on inside him.

Things don't quite go as planned. After Jean and the kids leave, a day early, Doug decides to follow them, join them at a campground between Preston Falls and their home down south. He gets into an altercation with the park ranger and before he knows it he has been arrested. This clever move is compounded by his follow-up relationship with the lawyer who freed him. Complication follows complication.

The story is about Doug and Jean. They cannot seem to speak to each other without biting sarcasm or defensiveness. Every comment either makes is received in the worst possible context. At times I just wanted to slap the both of them, tell them to grow up and learn to listen.

The story is even more just about Doug. His attempts to figure himself out, to justify his existence. His every move is punctuated by his efforts to be somebody else, and those efforts don't succeed particularly well. Because he can't seem to figure out what he stands for, he is "neither fish nor fowl". He can't seem to take a stand. He hardly knows his own mind. Is this because he is overthinking everything? Possibly. But more likely he just can't get there, can't figure it out.

That's the bare bones. The writing is often so very funny, so real I could hardly stand it. Particularly when we peek in on a scene or two featuring Jean, I wondered how could this man Gates understand women as well as he does? His command of Willis is greater, is richer, of course.

A rich, rewarding, funny and sad story.
 

Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro

Another set of terrific short stories by this remarkable Canadian writer. The title story is actually a fictionalized version of a real life, and it sits at the very end of this volume. The rest are intimate glimpses into important episodes of several lives.

So what does it mean - Too Much Happiness? It may be that there is no such thing. Maybe that just when we think all our wishes have been granted - they aren't. Or perhaps the stories are about unexpected things in a life. But that's too simplistic to describe these stories.

They are pieces of lives of ordinary people. Real pieces, unexpected journeys and unexpected actions. People who find parts in themselves that may have been lost. People who simply lose. People who accept, then don't.

All of the stories held my attention, as each character made its way into me, became some sort of friend or acquaintance. And their stories are vivid and real. 

Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee

This is an unusual book. I don't know what to make of it, and I feel like I am not fully qualified to read it, frankly.

The main character, Elizabeth Costello, is an elderly - but not really old - writer, who finds herself invited to various functions where she delivers rather obscure speeches. Much of the import of the book lies in these speeches, or in conversations at dinner. In a sense that feels odd, forced, yet not really, because she is so well-drawn. I cared about her even when I could not entirely follow her reasoning.

If I had read the list of chapters ahead of time I wonder if I would have started the book. They are called "Lessons".

Lesson 1: Realism
Lesson 2: The novel in Africa
Lesson 3: The lives of animals...

And so on. I am glad that I did not read this and get put off, though, for this is a beautifully written book. And the main theme really is about caring. About empathy, about giving a damn. I am always up for discourse on this subject.

Where I fall short is in the classics, particularly the Greek and Roman classics. I have never read them. So when the various characters discuss them I can only take them at their word, or try to make a whole from the parts. I feel a bit undereducated. Not unusual, I suspect, for an American from a middle-class family.

We meet Elizabeth as she travels to Pennsylvania to receive an honorary award from a university there. She meets her son there, because he lives nearby, and he feels obligated to accompany her and to watch her speak. Wherever she goes she has a tendency to ruffle feathers, not because she is a glutton for controversy but simply because she speaks what she feels and she tries to explain.

Thus she discusses "realism" - or maybe the inability to determine what is real and what is not. Or maybe her regret that she can no longer be sure what a writer really means. There is a core there, a thought worked out, and I can't say that I fully understand it. In this I am joined by the fictional audience, which clapped somewhat hesitantly.

But then we move on to other subjects. Elizabeth dissects the contention by an African writer that African writing is all about listening, community, being a part of the story, rather than offering a story to be read alone. Rather furiously she takes apart the theory and throws it into the dust bin. Then she moves on to what is my favorite subject: animals.

In the next two chapters she talks of how animals are treated in factory farms today, how no animal is safe from human appetites, and she dares to make the comparison with the Holocaust, saying that there is a holocaust every day for farm animals. Through the rest of the book these words are thrown back at her, but she does not retract them. Good for her, I say. The essence of her discussion here, I think, comes when she is pressed for what she wants or believes and she says she is at sea here, that she knows so many good and kind people and she does not understand why she herself is unable to forget or accept the horrors that happen to animals while others can. She simply does not understand. She does not set herself up as better than others, just as somebody trying to understand.

Her empathy for others permeates the rest of the book as well. She travels on a cruise ship, where she is one of the "entertainers", giving a talk and a short course on the novel. She travels to Africa to be with her sister when her sister receives an honor for what she has done in an African hospital, as a nun. She is invited to other illustrious events, in large part, she knows, because her name has become synonymous with controversy. She does not mean this to be so. She is only letting others know how she thinks, and she does think.

It's a thoughtful book, full of ideas that catch at the mind. It isn't too hard to see why the author would have won the Nobel prize in literature.