Books |
Leeway Cottage
Beth Gutcheon
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Fiction
Too many books, too little time. I’ve been wading through piles of fiction. It’s grim work — most fiction, or at least the books that come my way, are really dreadful — and it tempts the busy reader in me to go back to Dead Writers. But of the Living Novelists, there are some standouts. Like these….
Leeway Cottage
Beth Gutcheon
I can’t eat a blueberry without thinking of Beth Gutcheon. She’s written novels of astonishing range, but the books she’s set in her beloved Maine have made her, in effect, the state’s poet laureate. It’s not just that she writes so well — unlike any writer I can think of, she knows the hopes and dreams and secrets of the people who come, summer after summer, to those Victorian "cottages" along the coast.
Those people are "proper." They have money, but more, they have class: good posture, fine educations, great achievements. They’re our role models. Until, that is, Gutcheon takes us inside their houses. And then we see how messy their lives are.
Sydney Brant, for one. She’s something of a renegade. Why else — in 1940, with war beginning — would she marry Laurus Moss, a Danish pianist? And have his baby? And then spend the war in America while he works in the Danish Resistance?
This is a story of generations and questions that children whisper to one another: Do our parents really love each other? What keeps them together? Thankfully, ‘Leeway Cottage’ is not one of those dreadful stories of a weekend in a country house "when secrets are revealed — and lives are changed forever." There’s rich detail here, and a mastery of the customs of many decades. And wisdom: "The thing about the period you grow up in, you’re a child. You have no knowledge that history exists. You think it’s the world, you don’t know it’s the fifties."
To buy "Leeway Cottage" from Amazon.com, click here.
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The Good Wife
Stewart O’Nan
Tommy has a hockey game. Patty watches, but she’s pregnant, so she goes home after, and, spread across her waterbed, reads ‘The Other Side of Midnight.’ Tommy and his best friend Gary are, she thinks, out with their teammates, drinking beer. Only they’re not. They’re in a house they think is deserted. Unfortunately for all concerned, an old woman is there. And a minor burglary turns into murder.
Gary and Tommy get caught right away. I mean: five pages in. That’s how good Stewart O’Nan is — he can go zero-to-sixty in record speed. And then he can slow down, because the legal part of murder has a few twists and turns before you get a verdict. Which is, in Tommy’s case, guilty.
And then O’Nan can turn time into sludge. Tommy will spend 28 years in jail. Patty will raise their son and struggle to preserve their marriage. To do that, she has to swallow a lot — her sexuality, any hopes of a good job, the disbelief of family and friends. Twenty-eight years: could you wait for someone that long? Would you?
That’s the book: what Patty does while waiting and, on the other side, how Tommy manages in jail. It’s a trick of a plot. You think the book is going to turn into something else, that there’s more to it, but there isn’t. This is it.
O’Nan wants us to respect his characters, not to judge them. And we do, no matter how much you want to turn away at the very thought of a conjugal weekend in a prison trailer. This isn’t ‘Rocky’ — you feel no inclination to cheer at the end, you just have a very good understanding of what it means to have your partner’s back. A good wife? Patty is a great one. Tommy is one lucky guy.
To buy ‘The Good Wife’ from Amazon.com, click here.
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Divided Kingdom
Rupert Thomson
They come in the night to take the children away. First to a facility where they are re-educated — one boy can’t stand it, and hangs himself — and then to their new families. And their new names. And their new lives.
Why is this happening? Because in this country — England, some decades hence — society had fallen apart. Crime. Greed. Corruption. And worse: anarchy, people taking the law into their own hands. So the country has been divided into four sections, according to some analysis of their "moods," and walls have been built, and people now live in a "divided kingdom."
Is this science fiction? If so, was ‘1984’ sci-fi? Or is it social commentary? Either way, Rupert Thomson tells a chilling and all too credible story of ‘Thomas Perry,’ who grows up in this odd country, never really wondering what’s really going on. Until he is sent to a conference in another sector. And, suddenly, he’s caught in a thriller, as his identity falls away and he is left with only…himself. But who is he, really?
‘Maybe the differences were only fictions,’ Thomas wonders. That’s the sort of speculation that got Winston Smith in so much trouble in ‘1984.’ Ditto here. ‘Divided Kingdom’s is painful to read — negative utopias are bummers — but there’s a bracing quality to this cautionary tale. Novels of this persuasion are rarely this well written.
To buy ‘Divided Kingdom’ from Amazon.com, click here.
