When Will There Be Good News?

There was another great character in Olive Kitteredge that I forgot to write about. She seemed at first like someone to ridicule or even dislike because she was really into crafts and not so warm and fuzzy towards her husband. I guess she just seemed like a "type." But Strout gave her a great voice so that I ended up really enjoying her and so here I am still thinking about her, a book later. She was cranky about the name of the Grateful Dead, thought it just seemed disrespectful, and when told that the lead singer was dead, this relentlessly cheerful, afghan-knitter, announces, "Well, I hope he's grateful!"

In Kate Atkinson's latest, When Will There Be Good News? there are a ton of lines like this, funny, throw away lines or images that just stop me. One character is pretending to be a tourist while he's kind of up to no good so he ends up having to admire the local natural wonder as cover for his story. He decides 10 minutes is the minimum for authenticity and Atkinson writes: "He wished he still smoked. He wouldn't mind a drink.If you didn't smoke and you didn't drink, then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you..."

I really loved Atkinson's last book, One Good Turn, and I really disliked her other thriller with the same characters (Case Histories). Her other books are somewhere on the spectrum though they are ALL weird. This one was good. I like the characters, I like her writing, and everyone more or less ends up where they're supposed to be (some dead, some avenged, some rewarded, etc.). There are some dissatisfying moments towards the end and the train accident is a bit over the top, but you just have to let that go. I did get fairly annoyed reading about Chief Inspector Louise's qualms about her new marriage. Who cares? I hate reading about women who get themselves into a situation (in this case a good one) and just churn around in their own mess until they muck everything up.

Friend Denise and I don't agree much on mysteries--though she has the advantage over me of having read them for years. I am too picky, I suppose, but I feel that Atkinson's books are an easy way into this genre if you're a novice or nervous about trying a "mystery' (for whatever reason). Maybe I just like skirting the edges of the genre.

I did notice that just about every character had at least one family member (sometimes several)that had died in weird ways (or died, anyway). There were several car crashes, murders (obviously), and long hair getting caught in pool drains (ooookaaay...). I know the story centers around police and sordid lives, but really, how many people die so dramatically in one place? Maybe this is always happening in mysteries and thrillers. Doesn't make me want to move to Edinburgh, anyway.

I'm working on Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I'll see how far I get with a man's voice.

Olive Kitteridge

In my last blog, I pretty much admitted that I am a snob, but after reading Elizabeth Strout's latest book, Olive Kitteridge, I realize there is hope for me to become a more tolerant, if not better person. The bad news is, I might have to wait until I'm 74.
It takes Olive about that long to let down her guard and become the sort of person who can get along with others. Apparently her inability to do so hasn't really crimped her style in her years in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is the center of this collection of linked short stories. She is like the relative that everyone fears or tries to avoid at Thanksgiving, but grudgingly admires for speaking her mind and she is a piece of work in this book.
Olive's husband, Henry is the one everyone loves, and he loves Olive in spite of the fact that she is the sort of woman who would steal clothes from her new daughter-in-law just BECAUSE SHE CAN (oh yes, and because her son has chosen the wrong sort of woman for Olive...oh, I mean for himself). The sabotaging of the first daughter-in-law is horrifying(the theft is not the worst of it) and hard to read because I wanted to like Olive, to see what Henry sees, but we have to wait a long time for that.
The other characters in here are interesting (I only skimmed through one story) though the connection to Olive can often seem contrived. If not everyone is old, they mostly seem old so I would say Strout didn't vary her voices enough. There's a lot there, though.
What if you came back to your hometown to kill yourself and had to save someone instead? What if your mother was a former beauty queen who insisted on still living as she did when she was a hardscrabble trailer kid(complete with "weird' plumbing and a shotgun)? What if you found yourself happily in retirement and in love and you found out your husband had had an affair (and not too long ago)? Or what if he suddenly suffers a massive stroke, just on an ordinary day and you had to realize no one really likes you without him?
But Olive comes out all right in the end, even if she does end up friends with a...gasp!...Republican.

Nice image: "They had fun these days...It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert."

The Lucky Ones (Part 2)

So, I opened my Entertainment Weekly (which did used to have a pretty good BOOKS section) and discovered that Nicholas Sparks has a book called The Lucky One. So, now not only there's a movie not named after Rachel Cusk's novel, but there's also a Sparks novel with a similar title. I realize this happens all the time and that's not really what this post is about.
THIS post should really be titled ??????!!!??!!??! because APPARENTLY Nicolas Sparks--he of the schmaltzy novels (okay, full disclosure, I haven't read any, just seen the previews)--CLAIMS to read 125 books per year. ONE TWENTY FIVE!

Am I jealous, just snarky (what kind of "books" is he talking about?) or highly skeptical? A fourth possibility is that I needed a topic for a post because I'm strangely slow reading this month.

while you wait...

My friend Liz was a bit scared off by the blog format, but she is a reader you can trust so I've reprinted her suggestions to me (via email) for good reads. We aren't always attracted to the same books, but I've never been steered wrong when I DID pick up one of her suggestions.

From Liz: Great books I've read recently are Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, and I'm now reading a delightful, unique novel newly published on this side of the Atlantic but which has been a best seller in Europe (came out there in 2006), The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from the French)....a paperback original, at least over here.

Liz has been talking about the potato peel book for awhile and it's definitely on my list, but right now I'm in the middle of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (finally! And more on that later, when I'm done). After that I definitely need to get out of the domestic fiction genre that I've been rolling through.

The Lucky Ones (not the movie)

Like Arlington Park, this Rachel Cusk novel moves from one character to the next, a bit like Richard Linklater's movie, Slackers. We move from the young pregnant woman in jail for something she probably didn't do to Martin, skiing in the alps with the woman's assistant lawyer, to the sister of a friend of Martin, etc...
It's all very gentle and, though a bit gimmicky, I like the puzzle aspect (Okay who will we follow next?) and the example it provides of the six degrees of separation theory (which I like). In this way we're given a sort of "short story lite" for those of us who balk at the choppiness of the short story genre.
This style does break down towards the middle of The Lucky Ones, though we cycle back to the first character in the end, and we're given instead certain "types". Mrs Daley is a horror--the mother of grown children with five or "I suppose six, now" as she says herself, reluctantly acknowledging the latest one. Mrs Daley could serve as a warning to the other mothers presented here, but they seem a long way off from her life, still in the bewildering years of staying at home with small children.
Cusk paints a grim picture of marriage and parenting. The few decent men are either dying or realizing too late what it means to be a good father. The women seem at a loss how to rejoin the world or make a place for themselves. The nastiest character is no help at all, saying to his wife, "All right then...you go and earn the money and I'll sit at home all day drinking coffee. I know which I'd rather do."
It's hard to believe this sort of character still exists in this day and age, but I suppose he does somewhere, even if those words are never spoken aloud.
This seems a very domestic book, but the characters are mostly interesting and the writing is nice.
I like this line:
"I lived in the square house up the potholed lane with my parents and my twin sister Lucy, and they loomed large in the flat landscape, which was so empty of obvious entertainment and where time passed slowly, laboriously, as though each hour were being manufactured by hand."

Doesn't that just describe a childhood's Sunday afternoon?

Minette Walters and thrillers

I don't normally read thrillers, though it's getting less and less accurate for me to say that. I read Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell and a few others I've tried in the past. I read a bunch of Archer Mayers, mostly because one of them took place at my alma mater, but I quit when the absurdity of so much crime taking place in the small town of Brattelboro, VT (which I've visited) outweighed any pleasure I got from the books. I absolutely love Stella Rimington's three books about MI-5. But generally I stay away.
It's the writing that kills me. Most thrillers are terribly written and I've always been less of a plot-driven reader and more of a hyper-sensitive critic of the finely-turned phrase. The writing's got to be good.
That said, there is a time when my mind turns to the dark and easy-to-ingest, and that's why I'm so pleased to find good writers who also make me turn the page in anticipation of the big pay-off of whodunit (or whydonit or, occasionally, howdonit). I've been circling around Minnette Walters for a few years--since my bookstore days really, but I never committed until this summer and now I've read two.
I started with Acid Row (by chance) and immediately had grave misgivings because it turned out to be about pedophiles and I feared the story would just become bogged down in the easy disgust we all feel for this type of person. But it was the characters that finally grabbed me and dragged me in. They were all interesting and seemingly no real "good guy." When I finally found a character to like, Walters took her time exposing his basic goodness. The story ripped right along and, being new to her writing, I really didn't know if everything was going to turn out as it should.
More recently I read The Dark Room which I liked a little less because the ending was a bit disappointing, but I don't regret the dark and creepy ride Walters took me on. Make no mistake, these books are creepy. I did have a lot of bad dreams due to reading right before bed, but there was nothing cheap and graphic about the writing. I think "foreboding" is the right word to describe it. She doesn't really take the easy way out by just grossing us out and then having a "The butler did it ending." Just about everyone is flawed or mistaken at least occasionally which doesn't feel forced. And since there's no clear-cut hero, the story feels a bit more like real life (Now that's kind of creepy).
I'm probably done with this kind of reading for awhile as I need some bright and sunny stuff to stave off a New England winter, but I know there's a backlog of Minnette Walters for me at the library and there IS a newish Rendell I haven't gotten to and a new Ian Rankin, so maybe I'm lying about the whole "I don't read thrillers" bit.