→ April 5, 2024
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This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

I’m about as big a fan of Ann Patchett as you’ll find – I’ve read every one of her novels, including the Pulitzer Prize contender Tom Lake, made a pilgrimage to her bookstore Parnassus Books before the pandemic, and was even scheduled to do a talk and signing there in May 2020 that obviously never happened. Somehow in all my fandom, I’d never read any of her nonfiction, even though that’s where she got her start; I just loved her fiction so much that I couldn’t imagine reading her voice in a different milieu.

My wife recently got me a copy of Patchett’s 2013 essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and, yeah, of course it’s great, because Patchett could write about a ham sandwich and make it interesting. It’s her first essay collection and includes works published from 1996 through 2012, including her essay “The Getaway Car,” which was also published as a separate book. That essay alone was worth the time spent reading the whole book, as it’s one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on writing as a craft and a career, although the book has many, many other highlights across a range of subjects.

One of the most frequent topics is her marriages – the current one, yes, which in her telling is a happy marriage, but also her first, brief marriage, which ended barely a year in and which turned her off the institution for some time. She married young and unwisely (I can relate), but to her credit, realized it early and got out, a history she describes in “The Sacrament of Divorce,” which makes what was probably a painful period in her life wryly funny. Karl, her current husband of many years (and partner of 11 years prior to that), comes up often in the book, both directly as in the title essay and “The Paris Match” (the story of a fight), but also in the two stories about their dog Rose, “This Dog’s Life” and “Dog Without End,” the latter about Rose’s death. Karl certainly comes off far better than husband #1, at the very least. Also, the stories of women throwing themselves at him after his own divorce are hilarious, as if they came from a bad made-for-Netflix film.

“The Wall,” one of the longest essays in the collection, tells of her abortive plan to go through the Los Angeles Police Academy and write a book about it. Patchett’s father was an LA cop for a long time, and derisive of the people who led the department during the aftermath of the assault on Rodney King and subsequent acquittal of the four cops who beat him. Patchett took and passed the test, but didn’t go into the academy, in part for fear of taking up a spot that would have gone to someone who really wanted to become a police officer, but the essay itself also shows us quite a bit about her relationship with her father without her ever addressing the topic head on. It’s a masterful piece of writing, with a bit of a humblebrag mixed in.

Two essays deal with Truth & Beauty, Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with the late author Lucy Grealy, whom she met when they were both 21. Grealy had cancer of the jaw as a child and was left disfigured by surgery to remove part of her jawbone; her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, told of her life with the emotional and physical consequences of the cancer and surgery, and was met with wide critical acclaim. One of those essays here is about an attack on the book by religious zealots in/around Clemson, South Carolina, when that university assigned the book to its incoming first-year class. An alum named Ken Wingate, who was a lawyer, a member of the state’s Commission on Higher Education, and a Presbyterian Bible teacher, said the book was pornographic and launched a campaign to get the requirement removed. Ain’t a damn thing changed, folks: Orange County, Florida, banned two of her books, including her greatest novel Bel Canto, from its schools.

There’s some filler in here, like her intro to the edition of Best American Short Stories that she oversaw, and an essay from Gourmet called “Do Not Disturb” about what amounted to a staycation in the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles, but they’re short and unobtrusive amongst the gems that litter the collection, not least of which is “The Getaway Car.” If someone told me right now they wanted to be a writer of any stripe, I would tell them to go read this essay. I don’t think it tells you how to write or how to be a better writer, nor does it try to dissuade the reader from writing (a cynical response I hear too often from journalists – our industry is a mess, but the world needs journalists, period). And, not to put words in Patchett’s mouth, she doesn’t seem to have that sort of concrete advice. She offers no dictums like “write every day” or “write what you know” or any of the other bromides that you hear from writers; if anything, she writes for the reason that I write – because she has to. She does describe a more arduous writing and editing process than I imagined for her, given how beautiful and lyrical her writing is; I just figured this was how she wrote, and how she speaks (which we get an example of in “Fact vs. Fiction,” a convocation address she gave at Miami of Ohio). It’s an essay about her life in writing, how she saw herself as a future writer, how her career unfolded, how she had to work at a lot of things unrelated to writing – including building her relationships in the writing world – to get to be a writer as a full-time profession. It’s a marvelous piece of storytelling that, if you have a writing bone in your body, will make you want to grab a notebook and start. What more could you want from an essay about writing? This is the Story of a Happy Marriage does indeed have that story in it, but more than that, it is the story of a brilliant writer over the first forty-odd years of her life, and it is beautifully told even in its disparate pieces.

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→ September 29, 2023
→ By

Tom Lake.

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she’s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it’s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain through a fictionalized version of the Túpac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run she’s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys.

Patchett’s run of success continues with Tom Lake, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she’s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara’s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids – the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father – to grill their mother.

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I’m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara’s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.

At a certain point in your life, if you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It’s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what’s come before, although it’s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara’s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara’s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara’s memories, although that’s also clearly part of the point – he’s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.

I’ve read all of Patchett’s novels, and Bel Canto is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth second, The Dutch House third, and Tom Lake fourth over State of Wonder. At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that’s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.

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→ July 9, 2020
→ By

The Dutch House.

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing the top honor to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. The honor was long overdue for Patchett, who received a Pen Faulkner award and what is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Bel Canto and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Commonwealth. She’s in the uppermost echelon of American novelists, and worthy of more critical acclaim than she’s received. The Dutch House isn’t her best – that would be Bel Canto, a more ambitious novel that Patchett says was her attempt to write her take on The Magic Mountain – but it’s something different from her, a return to the narrower character studies of her earlier career but with greater emotional depth, informed by the wisdom of a quarter-century of living.

 The Dutch House tells the story of Danny, the narrator, and his older sister Maeve, who live in the colossal estate that gives the book its title, in the northeast Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother left the family several years earlier for unknown reasons, leaving them with their real estate mogul father, who, as the novel opens, is about to marry Andrea, a much younger woman, and then brings her and her two daughters into the house. Andrea loves the house and the status it confers, but has little use for Danny or Maeve, and eventually casts them out when the opportunity presents itself, starting the siblings on decades of acrimony and grief for what they lost, emotions and memories they process by parking outside the house, often for hours, over the ensuing years.

Danny tells us the story, but Maeve is just as much a central character here, better developed than Danny is, and the most influential figure in Danny’s life. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but picture Maeve as Emma Mackey, who plays the character by that name on Sex Education.) Maeve has the memories of their mother that Danny lacks, and has just enough of an advantage of age to be wiser and more perceptive than her brother, which serves them both well when Andrea arrives on the scene. She’s a diabetic, which becomes significant at multiple points in the book, and appears to sacrifice some of her future to help Danny – although it’s possible her motives are mixed up with nostalgia and an unwillingness to leave the area where she grew up.

The story jumps forward and back in time, so we see Danny as an adult, after medical school, then find out how and why he ended up pursuing that academic path from the point where we first saw him as a kid who played basketball and loved going around with his father once a month to collect rent and see properties, but didn’t have a ton of use for school. The relationships between the siblings and their distant father, and the siblings and the two older women who work in the house and end up helping raise the kids – at least until Andrea kicks them out –  form part of a foundation for both Danny and Maeve as they mature into adulthood. The problem they encounter is that the void left by their mother’s departure, which they’re told was so she could go help the poor in India, leaves the foundation incomplete, and their obsessive, nostalgic attachment to the house, even after there’s no one living there who truly matters to them, seems both symbolic of what they’ve lost and a sad testament to how the past can prevent us from moving into the future.

I had a hard time reading Danny’s voice for at least a solid third of the book, continually ‘hearing’ the narrator as a young girl, probably because I know Ann Patchett’s style so well (and know that she’s a woman), and can’t recall her writing in the first person for a male character before. That sensation faded as Danny grew up in the first half of the novel and his voice became more distinctive, while he also felt like more of a participant in the action rather than a passive observer (to whom many things happen, however). I think this also arose because Maeve is a much more clearly defined character from the start of the book, while Danny starts out as unmolded clay and grows into adulthood before the reader, a maturation that comes in fits and starts and doesn’t end up where you – or Maeve – expect it to finish.

Of all contemporary authors whose work I know, Patchett might have the most empathy toward her main characters, no matter how flawed; only Andrea, who is a bit of a one-dimensional plot device here, misses out on this, while her two daughters, Maeve and Danny’s mother, and the nanny who was fired when Danny was just four all reappear in some form before the novel is out to get resolution, if not actual redemption. You can probably see the main plot event at the book’s conclusion coming, but I was neither surprised nor dismayed to see it happen, because in Patchett’s better novels, the pleasure of reading is in the journey. These two characters are so richly textured, and so realistic, that I was willing to buy into the less believable aspects of the story, just to get to the end of Danny’s arc, and to read more of Patchett’s prose.

Next up: I just finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland yesterday.

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→ April 7, 2017
→ By

Commonwealth.

I’ve been a devotee of the fiction of Ann Patchett since reading her magnum opus, Bel Canto, an ensemble story that takes inspiration from the 1997 incident when Tupac Amaru fighters took over the Japanese embassy in Peru and held 72 people hostage for four months. Patchett built from that story to create a deep, rich web of complex characters and wrote a literary fugue that she later said was her attempt to recreate Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. (I’m not a fan of that book, so I’d say there’s no comparison.)

Her latest novel, Commonwealth, is the only other novel she’s written that tries to tell the same sort of broad tapestry of a story, with at least five and as many as ten well-defined, realistic characters in a book that plays with time as she reconstructs the history of two families. The book starts with a christening party and a drunken kiss between a husband and a wife who are married to other people, a kiss that begets an affair that begets divorces, marriages, a death, and six children becoming stepsiblings and forging bonds that will last for decades.

This isn’t Bel Canto in format, however; that book had epic scope but was told in linear fashion. Commonwealth jumps around in time based on what details Patchett wants to reveal, a gambit that started as disorienting but improved as the story went on because each section reveals something about one or more characters that proves useful in the next. I still might have preferred a linear timeline here, largely because that makes it easier for me to immerse myself in a story, but Patchett is such a skilled storyteller that she can make the future into prologue and still have it all tie together.

Although the four adults involved in the two marriages that become an affair, two divorces, and another marriage set the plot in motion, this book is much more about the kids involved than anyone else: two sisters from one marriage, then four kids, two of each sex, from the other. They’re not an easy mix at any point, but because Bert and Beverly, the couple who kissed and eventually divorce their spouses to marry each other, are kind of half-assed parents, the six kids end up partners in crime, the older ones mostly taking care of the younger, but also getting into all sorts of trouble, some trivial, some tragic.

Each story focuses on different kids, but Albie, the second-youngest of the six children, is easily the most interesting, I think because Patchett has written him as someone who today would be considered “on the spectrum” of autism but who in this book’s time period would never have been diagnosed. He’s just weird in the eyes of his siblings, who hand him Benadryl tablets and tell him they’re candy so he won’t be such a pain, and grows into a self-medicating, risk-loving teenager who can’t stay in school or keep a job and really doesn’t find any stability until at least his 20s. But as he gets older and the family situation keeps changing, some of his bonds with siblings, especially his stepsister Franny (the second best-developed character in the book), become the novel’s true center.

There’s also a bit of fun metafiction within Commonwealth, where Franny, who feels as I do about books (hand me a supply of books and then just leave me alone for a few weeks), meets a literary idol of hers, Leon Posen, and eventually becomes his lover and sort of amanuensis. Leon eventually takes her stories of her childhood and writes them into a novel, Commonwealth, that restarts his literary career, becomes a bestseller, and narrowly misses winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That last bit may prove prescient; the book is considered one of the favorites to win this year’s award, which will be announced on Monday, April 10th, but is probably less likely to win than Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

Patchett’s prose is as lush as her characters, and here she marries the two with a story worthy of her words; when she hasn’t succeeded, it’s been in books with weak stories, like Run or Taft. Commonwealth is a huge success, however, a story of and for everyone, one that is simultaneously about nothing and about everything. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and Patchett gives us a whole new unhappy family to enjoy.

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→ December 10, 2016
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/10/16.

I wrote a bunch of stuff this week to cover all the major transactions before and during the winter meetings, including:

• The Cardinals signing Dexter Fowler
• The Yankees signing Aroldis Chapman
• The Nationals’ trade for Adam Eaton
• The Cubs/Royals trade with Wade Davis and Jorge Soler
• The Rockies signing Ian Desmond
• The Rays signing Wilson Ramos
• The Red Sox trading for Chris Sale
• The Red Sox trading for Tyler Thornburg
• The Giants signing Mark Melancon
• The Yankees signing Matt Holliday
• The Astros signing Carlos Beltran

I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars, one of the best new boardgames of 2016, and one that will place high on my ranking of the top ten games of the year when that’s published in the next few days.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

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→ January 11, 2014
→ By

State of Wonder.

Thursday’s Klawchat had a lot of Hall of Fame talk plus some prospect content. The Top 100 prospects package will run the week of January 27th.

Ann Patchett’s 2011 novel State of Wonder marks a return to form for the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, Bel Canto, where she pays homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain while drawing on the real-life hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. In between those two books, Patchett wrote just one novel, the embarrassing Run, a not-even-thinly-veiled love letter to then Senator Barack Obama, whom Patchett clearly hoped would run for President and win. That novel lost all of what made Patchett special, even in the quality of her prose, but State of Wonder brings everything back together.

Marina Singh is a pharmacologist working for a major drug researcher that has been funding a long-running development project deep in the Amazon basin, where the women in a tribe of natives, the Lakashi, maintain fertility well into their 70s. The eccentric researcher running the project, Dr. Annick Swenson, has cut off nearly all contact with her benefactors, and another researcher sent to locate her and report back on her progress, Marina’s colleague Anders Eckmann, died of fever while still in Brazil. Marina, who studied under Dr. Swenson over a decade earlier before an incident pushed her out of obstetrics into pharmacology, draws the short straw and has to go track down her former mentor, but finds that her mission is more complicated in both a practical and philosophical sense than anyone realized.

The lead characters in State of Wonder, Marina and Dr. Swenson, stand alongside Patchett’s best characters from Bel Canto and The Magician’s Assistant as smart, three-dimensional personas. Their thinking is complex and real without becoming unrealistic; Dr. Swenson is a genius, and a different sort of person, but her character is logical and thinks and behaves in logical ways. Marina’s back story is more involved, and her character, while very intelligent, is less mature, and she’s still grappling with the fallout from that incident that caused her to switch her specialty during her residency. (The novel would also pass the Bechdel test if it were made into a film.)

Marina spends a few weeks in the (real) Brazilian city of Manaus before finding Dr. Swenson and heading into the remote jungle location of the research labs, encountering some oddball, entertaining side characters that make up for some of their two-dimensionality with their injection of humor. But Patchett’s renderings of the settings, both Manaus and the Lakashi region, are beautifully detailed, and she represents the natives, by any Western definition a “primitive” people, without resorting to condescension over their way of life, even though it would likely be warranted.

Patchett has commented in interviews that her book was inspired by several films, notably Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (TL;DW), but there’s also a clear evocation of Evelyn Waugh’s demented A Handful of Dust, where one of the protagonists, Tony Last, meets perhaps the worst non-death fate of any major character in literature, all in the remote jungles of the Amazon basin. (Patchett slips in some Dickens references which make the allusion to Waugh obvious.) State of Wonder also steps back from the overwrought political leanings of Run, instead presenting soft arguments, pro and con, on environmental subjects and treatment of isolated peoples like the Lakashi, without detracting from the central story, one of delayed emotional development for Marina. Her professional success hasn’t been mirrored by happiness, and Patchett matures her without giving her a forced Hollywood ending. Marina ends up having to make a choice with huge moral implications before leaving the Amazon, the kind of decision that ages you emotionally when you face it but that was necessary to conclude the story without turning it into a saccharine mess.

Next up: Still slogging through Robert Tressell’s socialism-pamphlet-cum-novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

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→ April 20, 2011
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Taft.

Just recorded my one Baseball Today podcast of the week – I’ve had to skip two due to early-morning flights. Also, Thursday’s chat will take place after I get off the College Baseball Live set, at either 7:30 pm or 8 pm EDT, because (weather permitting) I’m seeing Javier Baez play at the usual chat time.

—

In an afterword to her second novel, Taft, Ann Patchett laments its status as her least-known novel even though she’s extremely fond of it, a situation she credits to everything from the title (admittedly not the optimal choice) to the way it was superseded by her later works, notably the mesmerizing Bel Canto. But Taft showcases Patchett’s skill for characterization as well as her beautiful yet readable prose, and compares favorably to the novels that came before and after it. (Her most recent novel, Run, was by far her worst effort.)

The Taft of the book’s title is already dead before the book begins. Ray Taft was a husband and father of two in a rural town in eastern Tennessee who died of a heart attack, leaving his family emotionally adrift and buried in bills. His wife, daughter, and son move to Memphis to live with their wealthy aunt and uncle, but the daughter, Fay, chooses to work and ends up in the bar run by the narrator, former blues drummer John Nickel, a black man more than ten years her senior. Nickel gives Fay a job and ends up enmeshed in her new domestic drama, largely revolving around her brother, Carl, for whom the loss of his father has meant the loss of an anchor and a descent into increasingly serious trouble. Meanwhile, Nickel himself is grappling with his own loss, as his ex-girlfriend has moved to Miami with their seven-year-old son, Franklin, leaving him with limited contact with his only child.

The present-day stories of Fay/Carl and Nickel/Franklin are interrupted by what are either flashbacks or Nickel’s own interpolations of Taft’s story, including the switch in Fay’s and Carl’s personalities after their father’s death and a poignant scene where Taft interacts with a local boy selling candy door to door to raise money for his school science class.

If there’s a reason for Taft‘s relative lack of success, it might be that the book seemed less substantial than her other novels. The Patron Saint of Liars revolved around a terribly broken woman and the daughter she is destined to disappoint. The Magician’s Assistant is about a woman dealing with the death of her longtime business partner, who could never requite her affection for him. Bel Canto is a masterpiece, a story of hostages and terrorists in a Latin American embassy where, over time, the barrier between captor and captive begins to break down. Major things happen in Taft – if you’re familiar with Chekhov, you’ll see the biggest event coming a mile away – but the results aren’t that different from what preceded the big stuff. Characters aren’t much changed, and little is resolved at the end of the book. I was fine with that because it’s a well-written slice of life, but if you like your novels to come with firm beginnings and ends and a cherry on top, this isn’t the book for you. And that’s fine too.

Next up: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She might have been the original Debbie Downer.

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→ July 30, 2010
→ By

The Patron Saint of Liars & The Whore’s Child.

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, showcases the kind of insightful, compassionate writing that helped make her magnum opus, Bel Canto, such a critical and commercial success, although Liars lacks the same degree of storycraft found in Bel Canto or in The Magician’s Assistant. It is, however, one of the best sad books I have ever read, as the story of a woman who is hopelessly broken inside and yet can’t help but damage the people close to her through her inability to deal with her own fears and insecurities.

The primary liar in the book is Rose, who flees a comfortable marriage in California when she discovers she’s pregnant and “realizes” – or decides? – that she isn’t actually in love with her husband. She ends up at a Catholic home for pregnant girls who want to have their babies and give them up for adoption, but Rose ends up staying on well past her ninth month – and keeps her daughter as well, only to find herself unable to be a mother to her child or even much of a wife to her second husband. Patchett gives us a window into Rose’s sadness but never much of an explanation for it beyond the death of her father in a car accident when Rose was three. Her own daughter, Cecilia, reaches her early teens before her mother leaves the picture, but Rose is unable to mother her and Cecilia ends up forming bonds both with the nuns who run the facility and the girls who come in for six or seven or eight months and then mostly disappear from her life.

The book comprises three sections, and though Rose is the central character in the book, she only narrates the first third, and her motives for lying and leaving were never fully clear to me. Son, the groundskeeper she meets and marries at St. Elizabeth’s, narrates the second part, and Cecilia handles the third, and both were more compelling, deeply drawn characters with the ability to process and communicate their own complex emotions in ways that Rose’s character cannot. And Sister Evangeline, a sort of grandmother-figure/mystic in the group of otherwise grey, dour nuns is a scene-stealer whenever she appears.

The Patron Saint of Liars is a sad book, but not a bleak one. Rose is clearly depressed and her lack of progress or recognition is heartbreaking, especially as it threatens the lives of those closest to her. But there are streaks of hope not for Rose but for Son and especially Cecilia, who wants her mother to be a mother but has also has the strength to find that nurturing from others and is, at the book’s end, developing into a healthier, fuller person than her mother ever was. It is imperfect, from Rose’s scant motives to her ambiguous fate in what becomes Son’s and Cecilia’s story, but Patchett writes about emotions so clearly and empathetically that I moved through the book’s pages as I might through a novel of action.

—

Richard Russo’s first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, feels almost like a collection of rarities and B-sides, with a few outstanding entries that, in total, wouldn’t be enough for a full volume, so the publisher stuck in a first draft and a few throwaways to provide some bulk, although the hardcover edition still barely reaches 200 pages even with generous line spacing. The highlights are vintage Russo, though, and it’s worth going through the collection to find those stories and moments.

The main thrust of these stories seems to be failure, especially confronting failure of the past with the uncertainty of the future among his mostly middle-aged protagonists, many of whom are professors, writers, or other sorts of artists. The title story is told by a creative writing professor who has an unusual student auditing his class, one who becomes the star of the show for her brutally honest writing that turns out to be an exploration of her own sad childhood. Several stories revolve around failed marriages – I found “Monhegan Light,” in which a successful cinematographer chooses to meet the man who cuckolded him, only to find himself the loser in the confrontation, very disturbing – and “The Farther You Go” is the ancestor of his novel Straight Man, condensing the story of the narrator’s daughter throwing her husband out of the house.

My main problem with the novel is that the inherently brief nature of the short story limits Russo’s ability to introduce the local color of side characters and the comic relief of subplots and running gags. Instead, we’re left with a sort of stark, gloomy fatalism about lives lived wrong without hope of a turnaround or just a temporary uptick. Only the final story, “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” brought that mix of humor and sadness in a sort of of coming-of-age story with a number of baseball-related scenes, but the attempts to decipher a complicated adult relationship through the eyes of the ten-year-old title character felt blurry.

I’ve enjoyed the five Russo novels I’ve read, especially Empire Falls and The Risk Pool, but I’d recommend The Whore’s Child for completists (like me) only, as the title story alone isn’t enough to justify buying the whole book.

–

I received a review copy of a new short story collection by Justin Taylor called Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, but the collection doesn’t live up to the title. I found the stories crude and immature, with the young writer’s obsession with sex (and with using sex as the primarily vehicle for meaning in the lives of his characters) and an evident lack of life experience. The characters were uninteresting, sometimes two-dimensional and largely self-absorbed, and their actions struck me as forced.

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→ June 10, 2010
→ By

The Magician’s Assistant, etc.

I loved Ann Patchett’s breakout novel, Bel Canto, in every way imaginable – for its plot, for its prose, and for its rich, wide array of compelling, well-drawn characters*, but found her follow-up, Run, to be a thin, hackneyed love letter to then-candidate Barack Obama disguised as a novel.

*The Q&A with Patchett at the back of her last novel had an enlightening line from her about how, to her, all her novels are alike, because each is her attempt to rewrite Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I got about 40 pages into that book and bailed, because the prose was maddening, but knowing the general plot I can see the correlation between it and Bel Canto. So, nice work, Ann – I think you rewrote it in a way that people are more likely to finish it.

The Magician’s Assistant precedes Bel Canto in Patchett’s bibliography and shares its theme of people from different worlds thrown together by fate, although its cast is smaller and there are some elements of magical realism that weren’t in either of her two later novels. The novel opens as Sabine, the assistant of the title, finds herself suddenly widowed after the magician she assisted for twenty years suffered an aneurysm. But it turns out that the magician, Parsifal, was gay, and their marriage was one of convenience, with Sabine’s love for her boss-turned-husband unrequited, and Parsifal’s partner, Phan, died not long before Parsifal did. And after Parsifal’s death, Sabine finds out the family he claimed died in a car accident is, in fact, alive in Nebraska, and when they learn of her existence, they fly to Los Angeles to meet her, which results in a trip for Sabine to Nebraska to explore her late husband’s past.

The novel is filled with people, nearly all women, in various stages of broken, with Sabine perhaps at the top of the list. She’s confused by Parsifal’s refusal to confide the details of his past in her, and grieves in part through dreams or visions of Phan and eventually Parsifal in some sort of afterlife. While she’s looking for direction, the women in Nebraska – Parsifal’s mother and two sisters – are each looking for something different, closure for the mother, an escape (or simply an answer) for the older sister, a connection to a lost brother for the younger one. It’s not devoid of action, although some of the most active scenes are told through flashbacks, but the book is driven by the emotions of the central characters, and other than a sentimental (but, I confess, moving) ending, these emotions felt very real throughout the novel.

Patchett was still rounding into form in this novel, and the book suffers from its lack of a decent male character – decent in the sense of well-formed but also as a comment on their behavior. Sabine’s father is wonderful, but a cipher in the context of the book. The two best male characters to get any screen time are both dead. Parsifal’s father, brother-in-law, and younger sister’s fiance are all two-dimensional and either jerks or wallflowers. Bel Canto had far better developed male characters as part of its amazing menagerie of hostages and terrorists, each drawn clearly and fully in ways that the men of Magician’s Assistant are not. It’s worth reading, but only after you’ve read Bel Canto.

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I mentioned starting Walter Moers’ Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures, but quit after 150 pages because the book wasn’t going anywhere and I had 500+ pages to go. I loved Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear and liked The City of Dreaming Books, but he repeated himself in Rumo and the latter book didn’t have the whimsy or character development of the other two novels.

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Next up: I’ve got about 50 pages to go in Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, which for some unknown reason is only $6 on amazon.com.

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→ December 15, 2009
→ By

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

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Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

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