Unsheltered Isn't Up to Kingsolver's Best

Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful writer, and her Poisonwood Bible is one of the best novels of the 20th century, in my opinion. I think I've read all the ones she's written since, and found them engaging although not up to the standard she set with PB.

Unsheltered--two stories, one set in 2015 when Trump is on the rise and another about 1870, that are interwoven-- is not either. Some of her zingers were marvelous, and certainly the novel was compulsive reading. There was too much didactic stuff in places, although I thought she did a great job in explaining natural selection when her 19th century character Thatcher Greenwood must defend Darwin in a debate on which his future as a teacher depends. But I doubt that few Creationists are going to read the book, so Kingsolver is preaching to the choir here.

The novel has a few loose ends that are annoying, like why didn't the other set of grandparents contribute something to a child's welfare, and how did social services approve the transfer of custody of the child from the father to the "unsheltered" grandparents when their living conditions were so terrible. (The photo, BTW, is of our house during a period when we felt it was falling down around us: I really sympathized with the characters' concern about the place they were living.)

On the other hand, the conflicts and travails of the characters were perhaps too neatly wrapped up at the novel's end: all but the villains have things to look forward to. I'd like to think the world was like that, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure Kingsolver is as pessimistic as I am.

Libraries Where You Can Sleep (Sort of)

The first thing I look for in a room where I am to spend the night (yes, seriously) is whether there is good light for reading in bed. This means a lamp on a bedside table that isn't so high that it shines in my eyes, and of course not an over head light that 1) will do just that and 2) require that I get out of bed to turn it off.

So I like this story in Bustle about  AirBnB accommodations  with lovely collections of books. But I also like places where guests are invited to leave a book they've finished and don't want to carry home. As Dylan Thomas had it in A Child's Christmas in Wales :

“(Miss Prothero) said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?” 

 

The all-purpose question!

Pat Barker on How Writers Work.

 Very interesting interview in Winter 2018 Paris Review with prolific British writer Pat Barker.

I particularly liked her comment about how she began to think about writing about war.  Her grandfather had a bayonet wound in his side.  "...I would ask him what it was, but it must have been difficult for him to answer that question, since he never spoke about the war.  I can't remember what he said--there was the wound and there was silence, so there was a mystery, and that is what usually sets a novelist going.'

And the zinger, the core of creating fiction:


"People are always saying, Oh, I know a wonderful story, but you don't want a wonderful story, you want a little something that you can turn into a story.  You need a gap. You need mystery? "

French Exit: Maybe a Turn-off to Miss....

Patrick deWitt's French Exit a strange book! Thankfully, it's not as gruesome as his The Sisters Brothers, but at least there he addresses some interesting things, among them the mythology of the West and the damage done by mining. Here we've got a mother and son couple who've gone through billions and now find themselves reduced to retreating to a borrowed apartment in Paris.

Poor them!

DeWitt's novel reminded me a little of Boris Vian's cult favourite L'Écume des jours (called, improbably, Froth on the Daydream in its English translation) in that the characters move through a number of adventures in a dreamlike Paris, heading toward an irrevocable ending. If deWitt were inspired by Vian, he is not alone: En attendant Bojangles (Waiting for Bojangles in English) by Olivier Bourdeau also shares an uncanny resemblance with Vian's book.

But playing the game of literary sleuthing is not enough to give deWitt's book more than a passable rating. Maybe better to read Vian and be done with it. Or better yet, go to Paris and live your own quirky adventure.

(This French Exit, is not to be confused with Brexit, by the way, and I'm looking forward to some sharp-tongued Brit writing a satire about what's happening in the UK at the moment.)

Raging Storms, Raging Hormones in a Very Dark Tale

Once again the library discussion group where I'm filling in for the leader this spring turned up a very interesting book.  I would never have picked this up, since I don't read mysteries very much, but I've very glad I was introduced to Peter May and his characters on the Isle of Lewis, one of the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland.

We are plunged into the mystery with a gory scene of two teenage lovers seeking a quiet place who discover a disemboweled corpse swinging from the rafters of an abandoned boat house.  Within one short chapter, May gives us a taste of the main themes of the book: hormones and fundamentalist religion, wild weather and wild men, fathers and sons. Then the story itself opens as Fin Macleod, a detective based in Edinburgh, is called to investigate the murder on the island where he was born and from which he could not wait to escape when he turned 18. 

Alternating between Fin's first person memories of his childhood and adolesence and a third person recounting of the investigation, May does a masterful job of maintaining suspense, giving us an intimate look into life on the Isle of Lewis which is like many other places on the edges of 21st century society (I was reminded of Appalachia), and conveying the anguish of a man who has lost a son.

The weather and the sea play an enormous role in the story, and here May's writing is compelling.   Ultimately, though, it becomes almost tedious, since May, like many other mystery writers, succumbs to the temptation to fill pages with detail that are only somewhat related to the yarn they're telling.  (And here I'm thinking of Louise Penny, whose delightful Armand Gamache stories contain too much about the good food eaten in Three Pines!)