2015 Year in Review

2015 started with a bang and ended with a bang -- two fantastic books on either end. Not everything in the middle was as wonderful, though, and I certainly did not keep up with last year's book-a-week pace. Nor did I read the two books I pledged to read, which are still perched, dauntingly, on my nightstand. But War and Peace and The Power Broker are on tap for this year, I promise (myself). Resolution #1 is to read both before the year is out.

In the meantime, I started 2016 with something light, which I desperately needed after those two final books of 2015. More about that later. In the meantime, here is the 2015 final tally (books I particularly liked have an asterisk):

1.     The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters *

2.     Euphoria by Lily King   

3.     Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast *

4.     Being Mortal by Atul Gawande*

5.     The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

6.     Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano

7.     Plays: Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, ‘Night Mother by Marsha Norman, The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman, Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

8.     Home by Marilynne Robinson

9.     Lila by Marilynne Robinson 

10.  Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell Jr.

11.  Shirley by Charlotte Bronte

12.  The Lost Estate by Henri Alain-Fournier 

13.  The Whites by Richard Price

14.  The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

15.  All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr *

16.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark * 

17.  Mrs. Queen Takes the Train by William Kuhn

18.  Going Clear by Lawrence Wright

19.  The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

20.  The Chateau by William Maxwell  

21.  Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

22.  The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham *

23.  On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

24.  The Turner House by Angela Flournoy *

25.  Fingersmith by Sarah Waters *

26.  Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

27.  Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen

28.  Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

29.  Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas

30.  Wild by Cheryl Strayed *

31.  Lucky by Alice Sebold

32.  Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

33.  The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts

34.  They Came Like Swallows by Joseph Mitchell *

35.  Negroland by Margo Jefferson

36.  The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

37.  The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison *

38.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves 

39.  As You Wish by Cary Elwes

40.  City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallburg

41.  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagaihara *

#41 (and maybe final)

This could be the last book of the year, unless I hurry up and finish the one I'm into now (more about it later) by Friday. But this one was so big, in every way, that I'd be happy to say it was the last of 2015.

The title, A Little Life, is clearly ironic. The lives rendered here, of four college friends, who remain in each other's lives for the many years the novel covers, are grand. They all become famous, they have gobs of money, famous trips, stunning homes. But nothing is ever played to impress, and despite their good fortune in so many ways, we are never jealous of this foursome. Life has played too hard and fast with them, particularly the character at the center of the story: Jude.

Jude is a mystery. We know nothing of his origins because he knows nothing of them. Abandoned as a newborn, his upbringing borders on fantastical; the level and multitudes of cruelties and abuses are hard to believe, and harder to read about. They leave him a broken man. What sustains him, as much as he can be sustained, are his friends.

It's a strange book, hypnotic, suspended somewhere outside of time. The four men meet at an unnamed college in New England. There is no date given, and very few signifiers of where we are in time. It feels like a perpetual, vague now. There are cell phones, and computers, but no details of the world--no politics, no wars, no 9-11. Time passes, but the things that mark the passage of time in a book of this scope--marriages, children--don't happen. None of the four main characters has a child, and there is not one scene with a child in the book, other than the flashbacks to the main character's childhoods. Once I realized this vagueness was deliberate, I stopped thinking about it, and lost myself in the beauty of Yanagihara's writing. It felt like being immersed in a dream, or a nightmare.

The book raises interesting, big questions, in interesting ways. There are no easy answers. In most books about someone with a tragic childhood there is redemption, there is change. Wounds are healed, lessons are learned. But that doesn't happen in A Little Life (and probably doesn't happen much in real life, either).

I read more than half the book (and at 736 pages, half this book is more than most other books whole) with tears in my eyes. It is deeply sad, but not hard to read. I'm not sure how Yanagihara pulls it off, but she does. It is a moving, tragic, beautiful, compelling read.

#40: A confession

I feel so guilty. I'm not gonna do it.

I made a vow at the beginning of the year that in 2015 I would read two big books that I've been vowing to read for ages and ages:War and Peace and The Power Broker. But life got in the way.

I was all set to go for the summer. Had my books, the latest W&P translation, and a paperback copy of TPB (because in hard cover it weighs more than that cute guilty puppy over there). Had a quiet summer planned, not much work (not necessarily a good thing), and a comfortable hammock.

And then life got in the way. Work came rolling along, requiring massive hours glued to a computer. Company arrived, then more company arrived.

The work lasted into the fall, nearly until Thanksgiving. And then there was actually Thanksgiving! And after the holiday cleanup and goodbyes, this book came my way from the library:

City on Fire, by Garth Risk Hallberg, all 944 pages of it. How could I say no? It's one of the year's most talked-about novels, certainly the biggest debut novel of the year (maybe literally the biggest debut novel of all time?). And the library was offering it to me for two solid weeks. 

I said yes. And that used up my time until yesterday, when I finished it and brought it back. Which leaves me with 25 days left until the end of the year, which would, maybe, be enough to read one of those two giant tomes, but the library has done it to me again, with this doorstop, 720 pages long:

It's due back on the 18th, at while point I will have 13 days in which to read those two I promised to take on this year. Can I even do one of them? With Christmas Eve, Christmas, the birthday of the figlio minore, company, feasts to prepare, presents to wrap, cards to address, etc etc etc? Stay tuned and find out.

In the meantime, what did I think of the 944-page debut novel? Mixed, sadly. I love a big fat juicy book more than anything, and I also love books set in New York, especially the 1970s. And Hallberg does a great job of recreating that dark time, particularly impressive because he wasn't even alive then. He totally gets that shadowy decade, and what it meant to be young then -- the combination of electricity and optimism and scary end-days futility.

But the book has more than enough -- too much, in fact -- of everything. Too many characters, too much plot, too many story lines. It goes from being plenty to being too much somewhere around page 500, and when a new character gets introduced around page 700, I felt kind of like I felt after Thanksgiving dinner -- this is all really good but there's way too much of it.

The book centers around a mystery and unfortunately, the solution to the mystery lands incidentally, like a big who-cares, since there's been way too much information to absorb along the way. Most of the characters are well developed, although, like Dickens, to whom Hallberg has inevitably been compared, there's much more invested in plot than character. There is little warmth -- in the characters, the settings, the stories -- and absolutely no humor. This is a SERIOUS book. He's a skilled writer, perhaps a brilliant writer, but if I don't care -- if I can't wait to pick it up again and instead pick up a three-months-old issue of Vanity Fair -- then there's something very wrong, and 900 pages becomes a long, slow slog.

His writing is wonderful, but with better editing this could have been a better book. I have nothing against bigger and longer (Middlemarch, A Suitable Boy, and The Goldfinch are three of my all-time faves), but at 500 pages this would have been a work of genius instead of a 900-page near miss.

A race to the finish

Gotta get all these latest reads down on paper before the last two biggies of the year...I just realized what a theme I've got here--of these five books, three are memoirs, one is a faux memoir, and the last is about memoir writing. Did I mention I'm teaching a memoir class?

#35 Negroland by Margo Jefferson
Been reading a lot of memoirs lately and, sad to say, this was not one of the better ones. I thought it would be really interesting--the story of a woman who grew up in the African-American upper crust, whose father was a doctor and head of a hospital and whose mother was a socialite--yes, that's what she calls her, a socialite. But there isn't much story there, just lots of rambling exposition that gets tiresome quickly. I wanted to yell at her, "Show, don't tell!" Someone forgot to remind her of the prime directive of writing, and the book really suffers because of it.

#36 The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
I thought I would get so much more out of this book. After all, it's by the author of one of my favorite memoirs, Liar's Club, and two others I haven't read, who is also a famed teacher of memoir at Syracuse University. But the book rambles and meanders, and there is almost no concrete writing instruction or advice. There is a lot of interesting discussion of different memoirs that Karr uses in her teaching, but I was hoping for some illumination, not just entertainment, and I didn't get much.

#37 The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
Oh, wow. A memoir by Harrison about her affair with her long-lost father. The book is short but packs quite a punch. Although the writing isn't always beautiful and she wanders in time and tense, the subject is so fraught and intense that I found myself literally holding my breath. Harrison was raised by her mother--a damaged and distant woman herself--and grandparents, after her father left when she was a baby. She saw him twice as a youngster, finally reconnecting with him when she was in college. The intensity of their reunion and his need to dominate and control her soon led to a sexual relationship. The story resonated with me, and I respected her honesty and the careful but powerful way she deals with what could have been a lurid recounting.

#38 I Claudius by Robert Graves
Read it for the first time back in the '70s and loved it. Read it again for book group and, well, liked it a bunch. It's a fascinating faux memoir of much of the life of the Roman Emperor Claudius. The story begins with his childhood and ends with his becoming Emperor. But there's no narrative arc--it's one (very interesting) story after another, but because of the lack of through-line (and the fact that so many of the characters drop out of the book because they're poisoned, or die in battle, or are killed) it's hard to truly connect with the story. It's kind of like sitting on a barstool in some ancient Roman pub listening to the guy on the next stool telling really cool stories about his whacko family. It's interesting, but you never cry, and you don't really care, and you don't remember half of them in the morning.

#39 As You Wish by Cary Elwes
The Man in Black speaks! Or writes! He isn't much of a writer, even with his co-author, but for anyone who loves The Princess Bride like I love The Princess Bride (and I know it's a large club but I count myself one of the premier members), it's so much fun to hear his stories of the making of the movie...of how sweet and good-hearted Andre the Giant was, and how Billy Crystal as Miracle Max was so funny they had to clear the set during his scenes so as not to ruin the takes with laughter, and how difficult the fencing training he and Mandy Patinkin had to do was, and how insanely hot the R.O.U.S. costume was and on and on. It was like eating delicious candy and just made me love the movie more. And he has little sidebars of stories from all the other people involved (except poor Andre of course). One of my favorites: Billy Crystal said not a week goes by when someone doesn't come up to him in a restaurant or an airport or a store and say, smiling, "Have fun storming the castle!" and he loves it.

Life gets in the way

Somehow I got very far behind. Actually, I know how I did it. It's called life. I was working a lot, and going to plays, and watching great television (just discovered Fargo--how did I not know about this show???), and playing with friends, and cleaning the bathroom, and cooking dinner...

Anyway, numbers 30 through 34 coming right up, in brief. Numbers 35 through 38 to follow shortly.

#30 Wild by Cheryl Strayed
More memoir reading for the memoir class, and I liked this one a whole big bunch. She's a terrific writer, which I knew because I had read Dear Sugar. And she had a great story to tell, about how after the death of her mother, the breakup of her marriage, and a scary drug addiction, she decided to tackle a huge (some might say insane) challenge: hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. She wasn't a hiker, didn't plan well, and faced some serious obstacles. But the story of the hike is interwoven so skillfully with flashbacks to her childhood, her mother's illness and rapid decline, her misbegotten marriage, and dalliances with drugs and dangerous men, that I couldn't tell if I enjoyed the story more, or the way she kept all her balls in the air and never dropped one. Respect for the writer and the woman!

#31 Lucky by Alice Sebold
A beautifully written memoir, as you would expect from the author of The Lovely Bones, about an awful experience--her rape as a college freshman. It's hard to read, in a good way, and a very moving, honest account of an awful, brutal attack. I was happy to see that the book doesn't rely on the cliches of an experience like this--brutalization of the victim, backwards cops, cold clinicians. Sebold has many people who help her through this time--and a few who turn away--but she doesn't flinch in her honest, compelling writing.

#32 Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurzel
A memoir that could turn you off memoirs. Self-indulgent, poorly written, repetitive, boring...so many ways this book went wrong. It slips around loosely in time and place, never actually rooting you in any events or any characters. Nothing is described, no person is depicted, so you can't visualize anyone or anything. And there are few actual scenes, just page after page of her talking about her craziness, her depression, her need for help that never comes. It's hard to believe this got published, but she was pretty and it was 20 years ago and Prozac and depression were new and exciting. Could that have been it? I can't see any redeeming value in this boring, dreary, poorly written book.

#33 The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts
Read it for the class I'm teaching. Not terribly helpful but there were some choice bits and pieces about structuring memoir, with an awful lot of unhelpful stuff in between.

#34 They Came Like Swallows by Joseph Mitchell
Oh, what a wonderful book. Beautiful story, beautiful characters, and so beautifully written. It's quite short, and every page and paragraph feels perfectly crafted, almost like poetry. Although it was published in 1937, it has an unusually modern conceit--the book is divided into three parts, and each part is seen from the POV of a different character: an eight-year-old boy, his older brother, and their father. The lives of each revolves around the mother in the family, a loving figure who holds the household together. The first section, from the eyes of the young boy, is the best depiction of a child's-eye view of the world that I have ever read.

Memoirs and More

I'm trying to read a lot of memoirs now, for the memoir writing class I am scheduled to teach in October, so two out of the next three books are from that genre. And there will be more. Luckily, I just love memoir!

But first:

#26 Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Verghese is a doctor-writer who grew up in Ethiopia, and his knowledge of both his homeland and his chosen profession informs every page of this book. It is the story of twin boys, born to an Indian nun working in a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Their mother dies at their birth, and their father, the staff surgeon, vanishes. They are raised under the very loving care of married doctors and the entire mission staff. The book is fascinating for its portrayal of Ethiopian life and history, as well as the way medicine is applied in such a place. But it goes on (and on and on) and the last third, when the main character ends up in the Bronx in the 1970s, becomes tedious.



#27 Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home 
by Rhoda Janzen
The memoir of a woman whose life falls apart and she is forced to go home again. It's a frequently used trope -- the escapee forced to turn to the people who have to take her in -- and I wish I could say this is a whole new slant on it that makes the old tale new again. But other than learning about the Mennonites and getting a few nice Mennonite recipes, the book felt meandering and shallow. Joanne tells us what happens in the story, but she doesn't go deeper to tell us how she felt about the events, what the repercussions were, what she learned, how she changed. It moves along nicely enough, but it's a pretty meaningless ride.

#28 Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Another memoir, this one even thinner than the last. Susanna Kaysen's story of being committed to McLean Hospital at the age of 18 is padded with wide margins, pages of her committal papers (which repeat the same information over and over), and wide open spacing. Put together normally, it's probably shorter than an article in The New Yorker. There are no meaningful discoveries, no compelling characters, no distinctive narrative or voice. It's hard to imagine how this ever got published -- much less made into a movie. I guess I'll have to watch the movie and see what they did with it.



#29 Thinking About Memoir by Abigail Thomas
A very (very!) slim little book about writing memoir by one of my favorite teachers from the MFA program at the New School. It's more like listening to her talk for an hour or so, memories from her life, occasional writing exercises, ramblings about time and order and events. To paraphrase Spencer Tracy, "There ain't much to it, but what there is is choice."

#25 More by Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

Yes, I'm on a Sarah Waters roll. First (literally the first book of the year) was The Paying Guests, which was terrific. Next, a couple of months ago, was The Little Stranger, not as terrific, but very good. And just recently was Fingersmith, which fell somewhere between very good and terrific. Very very good? Nearly terrific? 

It's the story of a young fingersmith -- a thief -- in London in 1862. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a baby farmer who doses her babies into quietude with gin. Sue has been left in Mrs. Sucksby's devoted care by her mother, a fingersmith herself who was hung for her crimes.

The story is set in motion when Mrs. Sucksby and Sue are visited by Gentleman, a fallen swell, who has a plan to set Sue up as maid to a wealthy orphan as step one of a plot to steal the other young woman's fortune. But things are pretty much never as they seem, and there are a couple of Gone Girl-style gasp-inducing moments that had me going back and re-reading entire sections, just to make sure I was getting it all right.

The plot gets a little convoluted at times, but Waters keeps all the balls (and your head) spinning. The characters are as colorful as anything Dickens ever came up with, and the ever-thickening plot reminded me of his work as well. But things with Waters go deeper than Dickens ever did, and I ended up enjoying the book mightily, even though I couldn't begin to explain everything that happened.

I just discovered that the book was made into a British mini-series with Imelda Staunton and Sally Hawkins. Netflix, here I come!

The great and the not-so-great

#21 Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
The graphic memoir is the sequel to Fun Home, and it disappoints. The first was emotionally gripping, a painful and personal examination of Bechdel's troubled childhood, her coming out as a lesbian in college, and her relationship with her father, who revealed his own homosexuality shortly after Alison did, and then committed suicide. And, of course, the book was made into the wonderful, beautiful, moving musical of the same name.

The second book is an examination of her relationship with her distant mother. It is far more clinical, much less emotionally involving, and sometimes even boring. Maybe Bechdel was intimated into her emotional remove by the fact that her mother, a pretty damn chilly gal herself, is still alive. She spends a good chunk of the book reporting on her therapy over the years, and her research into infant and child psychology, her reading of various experts in the field, and reporting on their theories. It doesn't make for much of a story grabber, more like reading a text, with pictures. The book ends up as cold, and clinical, and distant as her mother is. 

#22 The News from Spain, by Joan Wickersham
I read Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index a couple of years ago and loved it. This book is more recent, and very different from that memoir of loss. It's a collection of short stories, each one titled "The News from Spain," and each one featuring the phrase in a different way. The book's subtitle is "Seven Variations on a Love Story," and each story tells of a different type of love, between different types of people. That probably all sounds like some sort of silly writing challenge, like writing a whole book without an "e" or without using an adverb. But this book feels completely organic, and beautiful, and every one of the stories was moving and wonderful. I have to read more from this terrific writer. 

#23 On the Move, by Oliver Sacks. 
I have always enjoyed Dr. Sacks's non-fiction writing about his work as a neurologist. I wish I could say I enjoyed this, his memoir, as much. I did find out a lot more about him. I never knew he was British, or Jewish (a cousin of Abba Eban, whose real name was Aubdrey!), or gay. His childhood, the son of a fascinating and accomplished family (his father was a physician, his mother one of the first female surgeons in Britain), and his early years in the US, were moderately interesting. But he tends to write clinically, like the scientist he is, and the lack of emotional content became frustrating. He writes about hinting to his parents as a boy that he had different feelings towards other boys. His mother responds by saying she wishes he were never born, which had to have been devastating, but he can't seem to bring himself to express it. He mentions later that he goes without sex for 35 years. But he never says why, or what that meant to him. The last quarter of the book starts to feel like a long list of scientific endeavors and achievements, and I nearly started to skim. Dr. Sacks has had a fascinating, accomplished, unusual life, but maybe he's not the best one to chronicle it. I look forward to the gripping biography someone will someday write. 

#24 The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy.
A beautifully-written debut novel (thank you, E.) about a large African-American family who have lived in Detroit for 50 years. The Turners have 13 children, and its a real testament to Flournoy's powers that you never get them mixed up. The book does not parse out its attention equally, thank goodness, but the family members who are in the spotlight are well drawn and very interesting -- and she manages to make the secondary characters colorful and clear as well. It's also a wonderful portrait of a city in decline, and what ends up happening to the people who stay behind. It's a very ambitious book, and kudos to Flournoy for pulling it off. 

The Chateau: #20

I absolutely adore William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, a brief, beautiful, powerful novel of love and loss and family. I would say the same about So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I would not repeat the praise for this book of his.

The Chateau, unlike those two slim volumes, is a long book. I don't mind a long book. In fact, some of my favorite novels are long books (A Suitable Boy! The Goldfinch! Anything by Anthony Trolloppe!). But this book felt long. Set in France just after World War II, the story -- if what the book encompasses can be called a story -- is of Barbara and Harold Rhodes, a young American couple spending three months traveling in Europe. Maxwell captures well the feelings of travel, the thrill of new vistas, the discomfort of not understanding the habits, the awkwardness of getting the customs wrong. And it is interesting to get a view of France immediately after the way, especially after so many books I've read recently that are set in Britain in the same time period. But there are paragraphs, sometimes pages, that chronicle the couple wandering down one street and another, walking for hours, trying to find a hotel...it all becomes nearly as tedious as doing it in real life.

The book centers around the couple's visit to a chateau, a once-regal home that, because of the new post-war circumstances, is now accepting paying guests, where they meet various people and don't do much of anything. They visit other towns, have a picnic, eat dinner, meet people who are sometimes nice, sometimes not, rarely interesting. There are questions raised -- of how the family lost their fortune, why one visitor is pleasant one minute and rude the next. But those questions are not answered until part two of the book. Entitled "Some Explanations," this relatively brief section poses the questions readers might have, and answers them. The tone reads as condescending, a bit snarky, as if Maxwell is saying, "Do you really need to have everything explained to you, you dim hidebound provincial reader?" And the explanations are anything but rewarding. Perhaps if more of the background had been woven into the thin framework of the narrative, it would have felt like a more robust, more fulfilling novel. But as it is it reads as a beautifully written travelogue, and frankly I'd rather experience the journey than read about it.

The Little Stranger: #19

I think Sarah Waters is my new favorite writer. I absolutely loved The Paying Guests, which was my first book of the year (and one that it's going to be hard to top). And now I've read another Waters novel, The Little Stranger and thoroughly enjoyed it. Apparently, she likes exploring different time periods in her work. The Paying Guests is set in London in 1922, and much of the story is set in motion by events relating to World War I. The Little Stranger follows the Second World War, and the deprivation and altered economic states of so many Brits form the backdrop for the tale.

The narrator is a doctor in a small country town who comes to care for the family of the local squire. When Dr. Faraday was a child in the town, the Ayres family was at the top of the social heap, the family that hosted the annual fete and gave out medals to the promising local youngsters (like the doctor himself). Now, their fortune has evaporated and their house, lands, and future are all in a desperately precarious state. The father is dead, the son is damaged, physically and mentally, by the war, and the daughter has returned home to help try to keep the ancestral home from crumbling around their ears.

The horror of their declining fortune is mirrored in a series of strange events that begin, slowly, to occur, gathering force as the novel progresses. There is a sense of growing horror, a constant feeling of unease. Waters has a remarkable ability to slowly, slowly move the dreadful tale along. The crumbling home, the threatening weather, the local gossips -- it all combines to create a feeling of awfulness, of decay, of terrible danger. It's a compelling and creepy web she weaves, a web that reminded me of the tense and fearful feeling I get from reading Wilkie Collins, or Emily Bronte. I can't think of another writer who has the sense of pacing that Waters possesses. Even when almost nothing is happening, you can feel the darkness gathering outside the window. And the slow, inevitable creep of tragedy keeps you turning pages, even while holding your breath. The fact that she is using gothic horror to spotlight economic and social themes just makes her writing more impressive.

I've already got my next Waters novel: I bought Fingersmith this week.