I think I love You

I was never a David Cassidy fan. I was a bit too young and he looked a little creepy by the time I did see pictures of him. I even sort of missed the craze over his half-brother Shaun so I never did the whole lunch box, pillowcase, poster thing. Still, I understand it. I was an 80s kid and my room was all Duran Duran. In I think I love You, Allison Pearson captures the life of a 13-year old misfit in the backwaters of Wales, crazy about David Cassidy. I say misfit, but who isn't at that age? Still, this one gives the term a run for its money. Petra is a cellist, for heavens sake and she's not allowed pop culture in the home. Her German mother unknowingly named her after a tv dog so she gets barked at in school. Even her mother's German-ness is a liability in a country that still remembers WWII in 1974.

The one thing that saves Petra is her friendship with Sharon over their mutual adoration of David Cassidy. And yes, like all other things at that age, both the friendship and the adoration suffer under betrayal.

The other important character is Bill, a recent graduate with a good and useless degree who, in essence, becomes David Cassidy for a magazine and ultimately creates the David Cassidy Quiz that will someday change Petra's life. But it doesn't happen right away because Petra's mom has no tolerance for pop music, pop stars, or anything that doesn't reek of high culture so that when Sharon and Petra do, amazingly, win the chance to meet their idol on the set of the Partridge Family, they don't even know it. It takes another 25 years for them to collect and everyone, everyone is a different person by then.

I really enjoyed this romp through fandom, youth, and middle-age. Pearson's writing is wonderful so that even when I saw some of the coincidences a mile away, I forgave her and enjoyed the ride. Her eye for what makes 13 torturous is perfect as when she has Petra explain why she could never dare disagree with a friend's opinion:...you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you'd be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist."

And Bill, who cannot believe he has degraded himself to ghosting for a pop star who doesn't even know he's being ghosted has his little tantrum, comparing the fans to "peasants from 1321. You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it's the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and give you everything they own, including the cow. I am writing for peasants." And then he recovers, even becomes a little protective of his alter ego. This is what the world of fandom does to you.

Worlds collide not once but at least twice over the 25 years of this novel. Don't worry if it seems predictable or contrived just come on, get happy...

Okay, I couldn't resist that one.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Japanese thrillers are apparently exhausting. My husband and I independently picked up two different, translated mysteries at the library only to discover that the first three pages were devoted to the peripatetic wanderings of the protagonist. Still, while he quit under the weight of trying to follow a character through the maze of Tokyo, I pursued Ishigami on his walk to work as a high school math teacher in Keigo Higashino's book, The Devotion of Suspect X. The route along the river does turn out to be somewhat relevant to the plot, but it did take a long time to get there.

Ishigami is a brilliant mathematician who has taken a job as a maths teacher mainly in order to devote more time to his own work. There simply isn't enough time in the day with all the distractions in life to solve the unsolvable. That's a plot point that comes back later, too.

One of the welcome distractions from the dreary business of despairing over non-math students having to take math comes from Ishigami's middle-aged neighbor. Yasuko is a pretty, single mom who used to work in a club. She's moved on to a better life selling bento boxes, but she can't outrun her good-for-nothing ex-husband. Things happen, lousy husband is killed, Ishigami comes to the rescue with a plot worthy of his spectacularly mathematical brain. Everything would be fine if he were only matching wits with Kusanagi, the assigned detective, but throw a genius physicist into the works and you've got a cat-and-mouse of intellects. Yukawa, the physicist, is better known as Doctor Galileo and is a recurring character in Higashino's books and movies. In this case, he's also a former classmate of Ishigami's so, as they say: this time it's personal. But whether he wants to clear his old friend, Suspect X, or not, is a big part of the plot.

The brain play is as exhausting as tracing a route through the city. There were definitely times where I no longer cared about the mystery, but I kept reading because that's what you do in a mystery. I thought I knew the who, I thought I knew the how. So what was I waiting for? Ishigami becomes creepier as the story goes along and I was annoyed by that. Oooh, how original--the vaguely autistic genius is a stalker! But, suddenly (and it does take a while), the plot twists again and nothing is quite as it seems. The book ends in a somewhat Twilight Zone, or Hitchcock way (trust me) so I forgave the cultural stumbling blocks I had to navigate.

This is not a seat of your pants mystery/thriller, but I ended up enjoying the aesthetics of a Japanese-style mystery. Apparently Keigo Higashino is a critically acclaimed writer as well as a best-selling author in Japan, just be prepared to commit to reading his books.

Good-Bye and Amen

Beth Gutcheon makes a risky choice in this novel, a follow-up on the family in Leeway Cottage. Good-Bye and Amen is not just written from the perspective of the family members but, seemingly, from everyone who's ever had any contact of any sort with the Moss clan, including some sort of presiding spirits from the 'other side'. Yes, it's crazy at first, the voices (well-labeled) occasionally interact, as if answering each other's questions or they hint at an event yet unseen, and everyone gets anything from one line to a few pages. I felt very disoriented at first, then realized how aptly it echoed the chaos of that clan. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the voices and really enjoyed the style and the book.

The matriarch of the Moss family is long-dead (though unscattered) in Good-Bye and Amen. Sydney Moss dominated Leeway Cottage and the Maine summer home by that name, and she was not a nice person. In Good-Bye, it's the turn of the next generation, her grown children--Eleanor the seemingly well-grounded eldest, Monica, the ever-hungry-for recognition middle child and Jimmy, the prodigal son. And their families, of course, because time marches on; even someone as permanent as Sydney Moss doesn't live forever.

The story really centers around Monica and her husband, a former star lawyer who chucked it all to become an Episcopal Priest. Norman Faithful has the name and the oratory for such a role, but he severely lacks the humility to truly succeed. We're here to watch him fall by the end of a final summer at the Maine Cottage, but we get all the back story in the meantime.

I'm a bit of a sucker for sweeping family dramas and this one delivers. I loved reading about all the accidental and intentional clashes with so many different personalities, all the while grateful that I didn't have to deal with anyone of the characters personally. I'm glad that the "spirits" don't show up often. It's almost as if Gutcheon decided half-way through that her characters can tell their story themselves without the need for an omniscience beyond the grave. I couldn't relate to them and didn't care about them. They weren't even giving any great insight.

I loved that one section of the book is a photo album purportedly of the different generations of the Moss family. I think that was a clever little way to round out the characters. I suppose they come from the author's own family which is another gutsy move.

Gutcheon is a fun writer and clever. Norman Faithful is a pain in the neck, but she gives him some decent lines: America in Bermuda shorts is not a pretty sight, he says about the summer view. His own laziness makes a good story as well, like when he tells the church secretary to do a search and replace on a funeral program used for a woman named Mary to be used for the funeral of a woman named Edna. As one character tells it" ,..and then obviously didn't proof it, because we found ourselves on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna. You wouldn't think it was funny if it was your mother's funeral." So, yeah, Norman is a drag, but I was glad as a reader that his fall didn't come too soon.

I may have to go back to Leeway Cottage, to revisit these characters.

Heat Wave

Putting a mother and her grown daughter in side by side cottages in the English countryside, even if only for the summer, is a recipe for disaster. Pauline is the 55 year old voice of Penelope Lively's novel, Heat Wave, and her tenants are her 29 year old daughter, her 14 month old grandson, and--most importantly--the daughter's husband. Maurice, like many of Lively's male characters is peripheral since her focus is often on the generational bonds (some good, some destructive) between women, but his actions are the center of Heat Wave.

Maurice is a writer of popular historical non-fiction-- jaunty travel guides on popular culture-- and Pauline, regretfully, is the one who first introduced this man to her daughter. Maurice is closer to Pauline's age, but he's a charming seducer. We don't see the charm, of course, because Pauline is our already-jaded guide to life with Maurice, but it's certainly hinted at.
While Pauline watches with increasing despair as her daughter begins to understand all those weekend visits with a certain Carol--whose boyfriend is editing Maurice's book--she cannot help but reflect on her similar position years ago.

Pauline's somewhat passive-aggressive battle with Maurice is, in many ways, her effort to make up for her failure to act against her own ex-husband, another flamboyant academic. The difference this time is she wants to protect her daughter in a way she failed to do when Theresa was a child. In ways, Pauline is stronger now, and Maurice is a more distant target for her smoldering anger. Also, apparently the heat wave is the very match that that anger needs. There's a massive, raging storm during the denouement. That, naturally, signals the end of the oppressive heat, and spells certain doom for smarmy, philandering husbands.

Lively puts in touches of humor throughout the book, often where you least expect it. For example, in the middle of her personal turmoil, Pauline finds herself having to advise a young writer living "half-way up a mountain in Wales" whose book she's copy editing. She simply tells an acquaintance she's currently "putting commas in a story about unicorns,' but she's also talking this young man out of destroying his marriage and giving up on writing, and she does it well. We may not relate to the characters in Heat Wave, but we can see why they have friends. I just didn't find them all that likeable. Maurice, obviously, is not to be liked, but even Pauline is difficult to take at times. She's secretly irritated by her daughter's passivity--in career, in parenting, in choice of blindness--but Pauline recognizes the same in herself. Neither of these women is trapped the way some women might be. Theresa is a stay-at-home mother by choice--she had a successful and creative career. Pauline is independent and intelligent. Any cages around them are psychological and self-built. Lively often writes about how memory and our pasts can trap us and Heat Wave, an early book, sets us up to enjoy her later books in which we find some characters to root for.

The Abortionist's Daughter

Elisabeth Hyde's book, In the Heart of the Canyon made my top ten of 2009. I loved her characters and the story of a motley crew rafting down a canyon (natch) was intriguing. The Abortionist's Daughter is an earlier novel and it shows. It's still an intriguing story--I read it all in one weekend--but the creakiness of the craft comes through.

It's not a ripped-from-the-headlines Jodi Picoult novel, but Hyde delicately balances the two sides of the polarizing issue of abortion. The anti-abortionist side is represented by a reverend without a church, but he's no crazed monster. The abortion doctor, Diana Duprey is thoughtful about her work, taking her cue from her mother's early advice: ...if you believed in something, you didn't let your own personal circumstances stand in the way: the true test of your convictions came when your emotions rose up and threatened to scribble over everything you stood for. Diana thought, her job, as she saw it, was simply to push the reset button for the woman on the table.

The problem is that Diana Duprey is found dead in the first few pages of the book. Is it a crazed and angry protester, which is what most people believe in this tight-knit community? Is it her husband with whom she'd just had a knock-out, drag-down fight, which is what the police believe? Or is it her furious daughter, grappling with her own sexuality and politics?

Diana Duprey's death, like her very existence, sends ripples into that community and the police spend a lot of time tripping over information. I must admit I didn't have much doubt as to whodunit, but Hyde takes her time getting there, in a decent way. The question becomes not so much who killed the abortion doctor, not even the why, but the clever way Hyde keeps the killer in the periphery. You just want to shake everyone to tell them what's what, but the responsible character is so realistically drawn that you understand the oversight. Plus, there are so many secrets that need to come out that the reader becomes as distracted as the police. I liked the way the reader is given all the missed connections in people's lives, all the clues that are missed, whether by police or by loving parents and a long-term couple.

The title implies we'll care about Megan Duprey but if anyone needed a good shake, it's the 19 year old daughter. I didn't think she was very realistic for her age and circumstances, but she makes a decent catalyst. The police are better drawn and it would have been nice to get more of Diana's voice as we follow the final day in her life, a day that already starts badly and then...ends.