Quiet Americans by Erica Dreifus

What I love about short story collections is also what can put me off: the coherence of the stories. So it is refreshing when the stories in a collection hang together in a way that each story complements or adds to the others, and yet still brings something fresh to the mix. Some people might call this unevenness in a collection, but I think unevenness occurs when some stories aren’t up to the craft or storytelling of the others. I actually don’t like story collections where the stories are overly-thematically linked, or where I feel the stories hit the same note again and again.

The Quiet Americans includes stories in different styles, with various narrative approaches and most of the stories reach a consistently high level of craft and storytelling. The first story in the collection “For Services Rendered,” set a tone that would not have been welcome if it had been maintained for the entire book.  Luckily, the second story, “Matrilineal Descent,” employed a different structure and voice. The jump between the two modeled the leaps that occur throughout the book. While the book overall presents some coherent themes relating to the Holocaust, family, survival, and secrecy, different stories deal pick up various strands, some themes disappear only to be picked up a few stories later. The different stories and themes accumulate to evoke emotions and ideas that resonate together without becoming overbearing.

“For Services Rendered,” which starts the book, begins with a Jewish doctor in Berlin, then follows the doctor and his family to the United States. I understand why this story starts the book. The book begins in Germany and moves to the United States, just as the stories demonstrate the shift from the effects on one generation to how those effects filter down through generations. But I really loved the next story, “Matrilineal Descent,” and one reason might be because the voice shifts so radically, from a more distant, observing third-person to a third-person that is really a first-person with very specific views about the story. The voice of this story fantastically weaves  opinionated asides into a story that is told almost like a fairy tale. I was glad that later stories dealt with characters who were part of this family, and I found myself wishing that there would be even more stories, continuing the lives of these characters. Perhaps there is a novel in there, waiting to be finished.

Overall, this collection won me over slowly, story by story. I was a bit worried that the stories might focus too exclusively on the generation who survived World War II and the Holocaust, but what I ultimately enjoyed about these stories was the ways in which they traced the influence of that generation on each successive generation, not just through genealogy, but through omission and exclusion as well. The stories connect to one another in meaningful and sometimes surprising ways, illuminating the silences and secrets in our dark pasts. 

Review: Forgetting English by Midge Raymond

The eight stories in this slim collection revolve around the theme of displacement. The sense of alienation underlying all these stories is literal; all the main characters are away from home, usually in a foreign country. But the sense of alienation becomes metaphorical because the women in these stories are emotionally wounded, alienated from their former lives and from themselves. Each has experienced an unsettling emotional situation that causes her to flee from home. Most of the stories begin well after a heartbreak of one kind or another, a husband’s affair, a lost job, the end of a romance.

Forgetting English refers to the characters presence in non-English speaking countries, namely Tonga, Africa, China. The title is interesting also because most of the protagonists seem unable to forget their troubled pasts, they are unable to “get on with their lives,” as a self-help book consulted by the narrator of “Rest of World” instructs.

The endings of the stories do not provide easy epiphanies or even the hard won insights of suffering. Many of the stories end with a single image that reflects the protagonist’s emotional state; The image of a female penguin mourning the loss of her chick in “The Ecstatic Cry,” or the memory of touching the cold face of a stone figure in “Translation Memory.” Only “Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean” ends on a positive note, the narrator following the sound of a man’s voice in the dark.

Together these stories express a deep longing for connection among characters who have somehow become estranged from themselves and others. The overall tone is one of melancholy and reflection. I prefer short collections of short stories, because, like the stories themselves, they can be read in a shorter space of time, the effects of each story accumulating into one complex experience. This collection is emotionally and stylistically consistent, and the events of these stories accrued to create the sense of a weary traveler who wants to return home, only she doesn’t know where that is.
You can purchase the novel here.

We Need to Talk About Kevin Review

I just finished We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver and my timing couldn't be more canny. Or is it uncanny? In any case, as I surfed the internet this weekend for news and updates about the shootings in Arizona, my fictional mind was entrenched in this story about a high school shooting and the fallout for the family. Narrated by the mother of the school shooter, Kevin, the novel is a series of letters to her husband, Franklin. The letters allow her to investigate her own role in Kevin’s crime. The novel is, from the outset, an interrogation of our culture’s tendency to blame the mother, but the novel doesn't let her off easy. She is telling the story from her own limited perspective and so she is, by definition, unreliable. But she also doesn't let herself off easy, continually questioning how she might have mothered differently.

The novel is incredibly well-written and compelling. The style is neither overwhelming nor flat. The narrator has a tendency to be strident, but her tone and language are consistent with her position in the novel. Overall, I found the novel interesting. 

Did I like it? As a writer, I admire it. Shriver embraces the ambiguity and she doesn’t let her narrator, or her readers, off the hook. Every mother will find at least one small thing to identify with in this novel, and that identification will be horrifying. As a mother, I couldn’t help but study myself and my child’s behavior a little more closely as I read this novel.

As a reader, I’m not sure I would recommend it to another reader. It is not enjoyable or pleasurable or entertaining. Reading this book was like living in the world since the shootings on Saturday. While reading this book, you can’t pretend that bad things don’t happen; in fact, you have to confront that reality. And, what’s more, you have to live the reality of bad things, without any of the good things to offer needed relief.

I can, however, recommend two other Lionel Shriver novels: The Post-Birthday World and The Female of the Species. The Post-Birthday World is the more lighthearted of the two. The novel begins on a significant birthday and takes as its departure a kiss. Two narrative paths take off from this moment: one in which the main character goes home to her boyfriend, who never knows; and a second narrative, in which she leaves her boyfriend and begins a new life with the man she kissed on her birthday.

The Female of the Species focuses on the later life of a famous anthropologist. Narrated by her longtime assistant, it follows her as she returns to the site of her first big discovery, and then as she falls in love with a much younger man.

All of Shriver’s novels are well-written. I never found her style overdone or distracting, though she is given to Britishisms, even when her characters are American. She tends to gravitate to the darker side of life, and ambiguity. The stories she creates are compelling. I plan on reading her latest novel, So Much for That, soon. But right now I need a break. Time to go watch some TV. 

Short Story Collections by Women

In 2011, I want to read more books by women actually published in 2011. I'm forever trying to catch up and, like many things in my life, it just ain't going to happen. So, instead of trying to catch up (which I'm still going to try to do anyway, knowing I will fail), I'm going to try to read a lot of books published in 2011.
Dear readers, will you help me? Please recommend books that were published in 2010 or are about to be published in 2011. By women. I am going to begin by focusing on short story collections, but I will expand that.
I love to read, and I have strong opinions, so I decided I'm going to post reviews here regularly, along with continued commentary about my life in general.
Watch this space for a Lionel Shriver recap, coming soon.

One Day: One Book

On Friday night, I began reading The Thirteenth Tale for my Moms-with-Kids-who-were-in- Kindergarten-together Book Club. We're meeting December 13th, in some kind of numerical coincidence.
In any case, I started the book around 8:30 on Friday night and read until just past midnight. I thought Middlebrow was still reading too, but unbeknownst to me he had fallen asleep. Then I got up today and, after dropping Son at a playdate, finished the book. It's a recent record for me, one book in less than 24 hours.
Reading this book was a relief, as lately I'd had a hard time getting into any book. I love the feeling of getting so wrapped up in a story that things like sleeping and eating seem less important. But then there's also that feeling when the book is over. A kind of elation, but also the let down. The world of that book is closed now, though in a way it's still alive inside you. If the book was really good, you go over parts of it again and again in your mind. The characters are vivid.
I liked many things about this book: the narrator's voice (distinctive and clear, but unobtrusive), the plot (a mystery, but really a family mystery about characters and relationships between them), the structure (divided into sections, "Beginnings," "Middles," and "Ends"), and many of the little details (the narrator is a biographer who has written an article on a certain set of twins, her father owns a rare book shop), the writing. The book has some beautiful sentences which are heavy on insight into the human character. But I didn't mind that.
And it has closure, and a somewhat happy ending. No loose threads to annoy the mind.
I was going over my list of books read this year, and I think this is definitely one of my favorites. My mom has a five star rating system, and she hardly ever gives anything five stars. She's a librarian, so she's read a lot and has many books to compare against one another.
But this was a five star book, definitely.
Next on my bedside table: The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver. I've heard great things about her writing. One friend (from the book group) said she couldn't put it down. She also said her mother called her and told her she had just finished it and, when she hung up from talking with her daughter, was going to read it again. I look forward to it.
Winter (especially vacation) is the time for reading, especially reading a book a day. Okay, maybe every three or four days. Or five, depending on how much movie watching is taking place.

My Five Seconds

Here's my five seconds of local fame: a book review column in City Weekly. Just two things to note: MB helped me with the clever "best read" part. And since writing it (two weeks ago) I have finished Devotion by Howard Norman. Even though he is one of my favorite writers, I did choose not to stalk him at AWP (I saw him at the Starbucks in Atlanta). But having finished the book, I can no longer recommend it. It was thin, like an over-stretched short story. The sad thing is, the characters and set up were good. But he didn't deliver. No delivery! So, skip that one. I stand behind the rest, however.

Also please note Scorpion's Tail has an article on running in the same publication. We're co-published. It's a first!