Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex

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Is gender genetically or socially determined? This is the question that lies behind Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. Enter Calliope – the lucky girl who gets to be a muse for her adult male self. Calliope is raised as a girl but discovers at the age of fourteen that genetically, and almost physically, she is actually male.  

Middlesex is often presented as a single story – Calliope’s. In fact, the novel doesn’t really belong to Calliope at all, it is more about how the entire Stefanides family and their various experiences resulted in Calliope. And so the novel actually begins in their ancestral village of Smyrna, a village the Stefanides were forced to leave during the Great Fire of 1922, and moves forward through two further generations as the family adjusts to immigrant life in Detroit.  

Eugenides uses incest and its genetic consequences as an explanation for Calliope’s disorder and so he sets it up early. In Smyrna, we meet Desdemona and her brother Lefty – who soon becomes her husband Lefty. The problem of inbreeding is continued, in a lesser degree, in the subsequent generation when Desdemona and Lefty’s son Milton marries his second cousin. The adult Cal is our narrator through all of this and his tone is an intriguing one – part admirative, part sympathetic, part accusative. He has a vested interest in getting the details of his family history recorded correctly because they are what made him who and what he is.  

The trick to enjoying this novel is perhaps understanding its humor. Cal’s hermaphroditic situation is tragic but it is so tragic it is also comic. And the entire family history rides along the crest of that paradox. Once Lefty and Desdemona finally arrive in Detroit, their immigrant experience turns into a kind of farcical sitcom: Lefty gets work as a rumrunner, they move in with their married (but devoutly lesbian) cousin, they open a juke joint that eventually becomes an old-fashioned diner, Desdemona gets work in a wacky mosque. But beneath that are all the banal tragedies of life: racism, poverty, and perhaps the most poignant tragedy of all, despite their unusual romantic beginnings Lefty and Desdemona struggle with the sad reality of a fading love affair. The torch is passed to the next generation – enter Milton and Tessie and their children. 

Finally, we meet Calliope. Calliope’s childhood more closely examines the novel’s preoccupying question about gender determinism. She is a beautiful child who grows tall and slender, perfectly girlie and bad at sports to boot. Socially, she is unequivocally a girl. But puberty acts as the catalyst for all of Calliope’s gender identity issues – she falls in love with another girl at her school which leads toward her first confusing sexual experiences, the eventual discovery of her genetic mutation and the journey of self-realization that ensues. 

Middlesex is a multi-storied saga. The novel begins with such incredible steam, charging forward unapologetically through Lefty and Desdemona’s affair and what happens to this unusual couple in America. But it somehow loses pressure as we get closer to Calliope. Perhaps because it is the adult Cal telling the story – without meaning to he answers almost all our questions about his life and what it has done to him before we get a chance to ask them. There is no doubt, however, that Middlesex is an interesting and captivating read. The book is extremely well-written and contains a breathtaking amount of history. If for nothing else, the sheer creativity in Eugenides’ careful prose makes this a book worth trying.      

Alice McDermott – That Night

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There is a lot of important and provocative fiction out there; in the last two years alone there have been numerous BIG books. What I mean by that are the books that openly tackle huge questions about morality or the future, about issues relating to theology, philosophy, good and evil. While I do love fiction that takes on those kinds of challenges, I also have an immense respect for the writer that takes a quieter story – a tale of love and madness, of ordinary heartbreak and modest triumph – and writes it honestly and beautifully.  

The actual story behind Alice McDermott’s novel That Night is nothing extraordinary – teenage love, life lessons learned early…but the careful way McDermott works this simple narrative manages to create a startlingly rich world peopled by a sympathetic cast of characters with a lot to say about life. The entire novel centers on a single event in the life of the narrator – a summer evening of her youth when a street fight broke out between some teenage kids and the neighborhood fathers.  

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad – the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes – startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all. 

The voice McDermott sets up here is just wonderful. The narrator looks back on the event with a keen nostalgia and a careful eye on everyone involved. And she continues to move in and around the event, telling how it came about and how it was resolved, with this same unique narrative access. In this way, she creates a microcosm of desires and disappointments for her entire neighborhood from the shared history of this event – an ingenious trick that adds a subtle weight to the entire story and infuses even the smallest action with deeper meaning.  

But now as she watched her cousin’s husband turning casually and only a little stiffly to see where the other two children had gone, the little boy asleep against him, she felt only a dazzling and depthless loss. Not because her own child would never know its father, the father never know what rest his body had been formed to give, but because she was not the child she had once been but would never be again. Because the shoulder and chest and arms that had once so casually and so thoroughly held her had left the earth long before she had lost her need for them.

And so it happens that wedged inside the simple story of a teenage romance gone awry is a cautious exploration of love and how it works, how it comes into being and in what shape, how important it can seem, and how sometimes it must be given up in the process of growing up.  

That Night is McDermott’s second novel, published in 1987 and it went on to become a finalist for The Pulitzer, the Pen/Faulkner and the National Book Award.

Alice McDermott – A Bigamist's Daughter

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Reading an author’s first novel is always an interesting experience. Especially because in most cases I’ve already read a later work so my basis for evaluation seems a little unfair. That’s not to say that all first novels come out lacking in comparison to an author’s later works (in fact, sometimes it’s the reverse) but sometimes it is clear that the writer is still working through the questions of style or thematic project when the first novel is published. And really this makes sense because writing careers develop over a long time, have ups and downs, big triumphs along with mediocre successes, just like any other profession. Still, I enjoy reading first novels because I can get the sense I’m experiencing a real time development of the writer’s skills and confidence. 

Such it was with Alice McDermott’s A Bigamist’s Daughter. Now, I went into this reading with certain preconceptions about the kind of writer that McDermott is and so it was relatively fun to see how those presumptions held up. I’ve always considered McDermott the most non-flashy of American novelists – someone who writes subtly and tactfully about sex, who tackles domestic (I’m using this word in a positive way) and intimate themes about family and relationships with great insight. Well, to my surprise, The Bigamist’s Daughter is big on fairly explicit sex and it deals with what I would consider the rather provocative subject of vanity publishing. I say provocative because I think it was really ballsy of her to write so scornfully of vanity publishing in her first book. A daring or ingratiating literary feat. 

All that aside, McDermott’s fine touch is unmistakable in this early work. Here is the basic story: 25 year-old Elizabeth is an editor at a NYC vanity press. One afternoon a client comes in with a book about a bigamist. She goes through her usual schpiel, telling him how great it is, pretending she’s actually read it. The fact of the matter is, as long as he’s willing to pay, he’ll get his book. But Elizabeth and the writer end up in a sexual relationship and here is where the story takes a few surprising turns. As it turns out, Elizabeth‘s father kept another family and she’s living out the legacy of his duplicity – in her own romantic life and with her relationship with her mother.  

I nearly got the sense that there were two writers vying for territory in this book – one who wanted to write a chick-lit-esque satire on the life and amorous escapades of a young NYC editor and one who was really interested in exploring the painful territory of a parent’s influence on their children, the aftertaste of a strict religious upbringing as well as the pitfalls and victories of feminism. The first author was primarily concerned with creating a new kind of heroine, smart, tough and vulnerable all in one. The second author wanted to investigate the boundaries of fiction and how we self-narrate our successes and failures. Because of her skill, I think McDermott pulls off this combination but there were moments when I felt like I could see the seams.  

At least for me, the most satisfying part of reading McDermott will always be her writing. The startling little moments of intuition or exposure: 

She held herself before me rather delicately, as if her center were made of fragile glass. It made me feel childish, or fat, clumsy – a woman without a lover facing a woman with one. I glimpsed, for a moment, what Ward must have found so fascinating and tragic about her: that odd and delicate core, full of secrets. 

It occurs to her that every great realization given up, spoken, placed in another’s clumsy hands is, at heart, silly; every message from the grave a stale sermon or a slick song; every fiction, with all its attempts at sense and order, climax and resolution, words that mean something and change everything, laughable. Terribly laughable. Merely an excuse for fear, for laziness, for bad luck.  

Lovely, isn’t it? And her writing is filled with these keenly perceived moments.  

My next book will be That Night, published in 1987, five years after A Bigamist’s Daughter. I’ve already read That Night and loved it, so I’m really looking forward to this re-read.  

Richard Powers – The Echo Maker

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I love fiction that engages both parts of my brain – the part that expects nothing more than the words on the page to create distinctive if not beautiful prose and the part that wants to be challenged, that wants to have to re-think something I thought I understood or at least had some idea of. I think that fiction, if it works, should accomplish these two tasks. In that sense, I want more than just well-written entertaining distraction. I want the questions. Along with the messy and improbable answers. I want flawed individuals and eccentric personalities, historical perspective and modern recklessness. I want understanding and fear, courage and abandon. I want humanity distilled and discovered. I want to find myself in the story and at the same time lose myself completely in something wholly beyond me. 

Which is exactly what The Echo Maker does. The underlying story is deceptively simple: a man flips his car on a lonely stretch of highway one night and wakes up several weeks later, both physically and mentally broken. His sister copes with the burden of caring for him. A famous doctor comes to work with both of them. But this simple story hinges on the mentally broken aspect of Mark’s post-accident person. His body is the same, most of his memories intact but his very notion of self has undergone a radical transition.  

The question underneath all of this – how do we know who we are – is profoundly difficult to get a grasp on. The very fact that our own self-awareness is superceded by the brain’s need to ensure the cohesiveness of that very awareness makes the awareness itself dubious.  

To see the person closest to you in this world, and feel nothing. But that was the astonishment, nothing inside Mark felt changed. Mark still felt familiar; only the world had gone strange. He needed his delusions, in order to close that gap. The self’s whole end was self-continuation. 

[…]The job of consciousness is to make sure that all of the distributed modules of the brain seem integrated. That we always seem familiar to ourselves.  

The novel’s two other points of view parallel this idea as well: Karin, the sister, fighting against who she wants to be and the person she presents to others and Dr. Weber, a specialist called in to work on Mark’s exceptional case, struggling to determine his professional and human self-worth, his multi-layered appreciation of brain functioning and what it means to his specific truth. Powers uses these three individuals to explore, quite beautifully I might add, this intricate question of self-understanding and constructed reality. 

In many ways the story reads like good detective fiction. There are several mysteries to solve regarding the night of the accident and other events in the past of each of the characters. Powers introduces a number of twists and turns to the otherwise straightforward and time-contained plot, twists and turns that eventually lead to a satisfying and surprising end. But where Powers really shines is in the humane dissection and presentation of his characters; these are fragile humans from the get-go who are made more fragile by one fantastic event. In Powers’ hands, they fall apart, lose themselves and lose each other but in that dissolution they somehow stumble upon something essential. Some tiny piece of understanding worth fighting for. And they fix on that breathtaking perception and find a way to hold on.  

Finally, I can’t finish this without mentioning the cranes. Powers begins the book and centers much of its story on the spectacle of migrating Sandhill Cranes. Such a perfect image running parallel to his exploration of memory and consciousness – creatures with an inherent map, their lives and self-perpetuation wrapped up in something as simple, as complex as memory.  

The nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they’ve learned to find by memory. They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.  

[…]As first light breaks, the fossils return to life, testing their legs, tasting the frozen air, leaping free, bills skyward and throats open. And then, as if the night took nothing, forgetting everything but this moment, the dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started.

Don Delillo – Falling Man

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Delillo’s most recent and ominously titled novel tackles the aftermath of September 11th by giving us the story of two New Yorkers – Keith and Lianne. We meet Keith on the horrifying day itself as he slogs, dazed and stunned and holding someone else’s briefcase, away from the rubble and toward Lianne, his almost ex-wife, whom we are told he has been separated from for over a year. Lianne, who we learn later had watched the towers fall believing Keith was inside, believing he was dead, lets him in and slowly these two bewildered individuals find themselves a family again.  

Bewildered, stunned, shocked, numb…these are the predominant flavors of Delillo’s exquisitely-written feast. Both Lianne and Keith seem to move through a foggy haze. There are moments that they lose control, like when Lianne finds herself attacking a neighbor woman for playing music too loud in their building, but that stronger emotion is swallowed up by the whale of her own shock. And again for Keith, who gets in a fight in a department store, he seems to experience this loss of control as a curious and misplaced moment in his day, a fluke. Although this myriad of astonishment and numbness seems to ring true, psychologically speaking, following this kind of traumatic event, it did create a wall between me as the reader and the novel’s characters. Neither Lianne nor Keith, despite the carefulness of Delillo’s description and the thoughtfully attended subject matter, managed to create a ripple on my reservoir of sympathy. Their stunned bearing kept them watching their own lives from a distance and therefore, held me behind the same restraining wall.  

On the day the novel opens, the twin towers are no longer a part of the New York City skyline but their ghost looms over the entire novel with a lurking shadow and Delillo parallels this metaphorical reality in several places: Lianne’s father’s years-before suicide, the children hunting the skies for planes and believing that the already fallen towers will fall again, and even the sporadic attention paid to Keith’s missing friends. It’s extremely well-done, this idea that something missing can take up more space in its absence and just one example of the many questions that Delillo poses in Falling Man.  

Despite the more personal nature of this novel, Delillo is still exceptionally good at turning a microscopic lens on America in a general sense, at its nuances, its eccentricities and emotions and Falling Man is no exception. His characters may remain enmeshed inside their own personal story but they externalize more global fears and opinions: 

But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down. 

There is quite a lot packed inside this novel, a lot of questions and a lot of ideas in only 246 pages. In one sense it presents just one single road inside September 11th, only one example of an individual’s reaction to the trauma and damage of that day. But at the same time, Keith and Lianne’s couple offers the dual perspectives of survivor and spectator and Delillo works these distinctions very well.

Among other literary explorations of America’s response to September 11th as a defining moment, Falling Man stands out as careful and specific, as honest but still kind, and most of all, as an attentive work of art.

Edward P. Jones – The Known World

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The first chapter of Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World opens with Moses, the overseer slave for a black slaveowner, tasting the soil he has just worked for 15 hours and then walking out into the small patch of forest beyond his cabin but still on his master’s land. In these first few beautifully written pages Jones create the rich and paradoxal world of Henry Townsend’s plantation. From Alice, a brain-injured night-wanderer to Caldonia, Henry’s wife, to Elias, another slave and many more, the personalities on this both unique and typical southern plantation come alive, setting out the threads of a perplexing and haunting story that once woven together will extend far beyond the boundaries of the fields and the house. 

While reading the novel, I was reminded of an interview I once listened to on NPR with Romeo Dallaire, who was commander of the United Nations peacekeeping forces during the Rwandan genocide and who wrote the book: Shake Hands with the Devil. In the interview, Dallaire spoke of the time he saw a woman, carrying a baby and wielding a machete, chasing another woman who was also carrying an infant. More than the horror of this image, Dallaire couldn’t get over the symbolic nature of the moment and what it spoke about the process of dehumanization. In The Known World, Jones takes on this same appalling idea by telling the story of one of slavery’s lesser known legacies – free black persons owning their own slaves.  

I call it a legacy because its very possibility stems from the moral corrosion created by the institution of slavery. Jones eloquently investigates the soul-destroying ethical compromise of granting yourself the right of power over another human being, allowing life and liberty to be considered property. Accepting slavery as ‘correct’ and ‘right’ relies upon an incredibly powerful process of dehumanization. Jones shows exactly how powerful this process was and how easily it was accepted by the white community but, more importantly, how it filtered down into the black community as well. 

Although the book tells a myriad of stories, about each of the slaves and what happens to them, the novel is mainly concerned with tracing the development of Henry’s plantation and his relationship with his parents and his former master as well as the chaos, confusion and disappointment that ensues upon his unexpected death. With the care of a historian and the prowess of an incredible writer, Jones dissects this tiny universe and exposes the essential fact of its tragedy.

Rachel Cusk – Arlington Park

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Rachel Cusk’s 2006 novel Arlington Park begs the question: Are all suburban women profoundly unhappy with their lives as wives and mothers? The emotional landscapes of the five women Cusk selects to follow about are a raucous mixture of bitter, enraged, depressed and perplexed. They are overwhelmingly frustrated with their roles as housewives, revolted at the perception of themselves as slaves to their children and keenly aware of a separation from their true inner identity.  

In the bathroom Maisie looked in the mirror. I am thirty-eight, she thought. I am Maisie at thirty-eight. This did not seem to be the same thing as saying, this is Clara at six, this is Elsie at four, which she did far more often. She did not know whether anyone had ever crystallized her. It seemed just then a terrible thing not to know: to have to guess at, and to conclude from something unclaimed in her face, something unauthored and anonymous, that the answer was no. She could have been anything she wanted to be: that was the spirit in which she might have taken her parents’ limited and discriminatory love, rather than being left by it to wonder what she actually was.  

Cusk’s 2004 novel The Lucky Ones (my review here) dealt with very similar issues – the possible transformation of the individual after marriage and parenthood. In that novel, the exploration of this idea seemed balanced and fair, carefully wrought and creatively considered and it determined a wide range of possible and believable resolutions. While The Lucky Ones hugged a broad cross-section of socio-economic life and posed more questions than it answered, Arlington Park deals specifically with wealthy suburbia and seems to offer a single unhappy vision as a final answer. 

The husbands in Arlington Park are a gallimaufry of righteous machismo, perplexed insensitivity and concerned helplessness. They are not at all partners to their wives. In Cusk’s vision, the suburban lifestyle creates couples who do not communicate and whose alien universes only come together for procreation, the exchange of money and frequently unkind conversation. Some readers might question the believability of this rigid and dismal situation. Is it really that awful? Do ALL suburban women feel this way? Hasn’t anyone figured out how to successfully marry their individual passions with family demands?  

Even the rare moments when a few of the women attempt to affirm their maternal or conjugal positions, they end up sounding emphatic, too shrill and even neurotic, like they are trying to convince themselves that the horrifying disaster they just perceived as their life is really nothing but a small hiccup in an elegant and rewarding existence. And then they throw their daughter’s lunchbox against the wall. 

In many ways, the thematic project of the novel seems to work against its meaningfulness. The incredible self-awareness of each of the women runs directly contrary to the idea that they’ve allowed themselves to accept or be tricked into such unfulfilling lives. So then, is it society’s fault? The smug anesthetization of suburbia? The evil male? Unless we are supposed to laugh at these women (a rather horrifying idea), the novel reads like a vigorous scolding. You silly women, why did you give up your jobs? Why on earth did you fall in love? Who told you having children would be easy? Motherhood, life and marriage – suburban setting or no – are all much more nuanced than the inflexible and polarized war that Arlington Park presents.  

However, something that Arlington Park does provide are wonderful, startling moments of distilled emotion. Cusk is remarkably skilled at using her prose to explode a single moment into a vast offering of experience and feeling, as exampled below by pregnant Solly’s middle-of-the-night thoughts: 

In the strange, whirling, light-cluttered realm of her body she felt only an immense confusion. She felt she contained everything, all good and evil, every possibility, everything in the world all jumbled together, shaken up like the sea by a storm so that nothing was clear and separate; it was all opaque, nauseating, full of litter and rubbish. She burned to expel from her this great, mounting force of debris, to clarify herself.  

Cusk writes with a rich and textured prose, filled with unique images and sharp dialogue. She writes confidently and vividly. Despite any frustration with the project of this particular novel, her writing is a pure pleasure to get lost in.  

David Guterson – Snow Falling on Cedars

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David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is an intriguing mix of literary finesse and shrewd plot-making. While it may not exactly qualify as genre-bending it does tend to push the limits of a reader’s boundaries. The opening chapter, filled with taut courtroom dialogue and jumpy fisherman ‘types’ seemed to run perpendicular to the breathtaking character portraits that followed it. This back and forth continued throughout the book, although it may be safe to assume that the more literary aspects of the novel remained dominant.  

The novel is set on the coast of an island in the Puget Sound in 1955 and follows the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, a local fisherman of Japanese origin who is under arrest for the murder of Carl Heine, another local fisherman. The murder is supposed to have been committed over a land dispute going back to before the war when Miyamoto’s family worked on the Heine family strawberry farm. 

The novel uses this ‘drama’ as a backdrop to explore racism, the complications of love and loss, and above all, the destructive capacities of war on an individual. The main male characters in the novel – Ishmael, Carl and Kabuo – share a certain grim understanding of what part of their soul they were asked to give away when they willingly went to war to fight for their country. All of them use the word murderer in their self-reflection, an idea that is only accentuated as Kabuo’s murder trial plays out. 

Guterson moves easily from one perspective to another, detailing the interior life of the many individuals that make up the small island community. Through these variegated lenses he manages to paint a faithful and engaging portrait of life as it may have been before and after WWII in a community that was home to a significant percentage of Japanese-Americans. All of whom were sent to the internment camps and who struggled with their bi-cultural identities.  

Kabuo’s wife, Hatsue, is the character Guterson uses to express most of this bi-cultural burden and the novel follows her life in exquisite detail. From her childhood working on the island’s strawberry farms, to her secret adolescent love affair with Ishmael Chambers, to her internment during the war and subsequent marriage to Kabuo. She is a remarkable character. Torn between her understanding of her own culture and her youthful love for Ishmael, she navigates a harsh course through the racial climate of pre-WWII America.  

Ishmael, for his part, returns from the war minus an arm but overloaded with a raft of bitterness. About losing Hatsue and, especially, about his understanding of how the war managed to transform him. He is a pivotal element of the novel, a man in possession of valuable information about the murder trial. His emotional struggle is one of the more poignant elements of the entire book. 

Overall, Guterson does manage to marry the considerable differences between the more sensational undercurrents of the story and its literary mood, creating a lovely piece of fiction with a lot to say about 1950’s America.

Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

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It is STILL raining here so the rainy day reads have continued in full swing. I finished Joanna Scott’s Tourmaline last night and will be gathering my thoughts for a post tomorrow or Wednesday. This was a lovely, ambitious book that gave me something to think about as well as an unfamiliar countryside to get lost in. 

But I wanted to write today about one of the books I finished last week – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. What a delight to discover this classic American writer! Before one of my book groups picked the book for our July read I’d never heard of McCullers, a fact I’m happy to remedy now that I see what an incredible writer she was.  

McCullers was born in 1917 and wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at the age of 22. She continued writing, despite several bouts of serious illness and depression, until her death of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 50. Her life story doesn’t read happily – young marriage and subsequent divorce, attempted suicide, a stroke at the age of 30, remarriage to her first husband who eventually kills himself, breast cancer, and continued poor health. Yet through all this she managed to write more than twenty short stories, six novels and a fair amount of poetry, most of which was published to critical acclaim during her lifetime.  

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter unravels somewhat like a walk through a gallery – the chapters read like somber portraits as the characters live their lonely lives beside one another but without the consolation of true interaction. The novel is set in a small southern town in Depression-era America, and follows five individuals as they search for something to take them above the daily bleakness of their lonesome existence. These five characters share only one thing – a painful appreciation of their own isolation.  

Biff Brannon – a man perplexed by what he sees occur around him: his wife’s death, the emotional excesses of his customers and acquaintances, the gentle love he begins to feel for the young girl Mick Kelly. Brannon moves through the novel like a man underwater but he is one of its more reflective elements coming up with thoughts such as: in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons – throw it to some human being or some human idea. 

Jake Blount – an intelligent but emotionally unstable man, broken by his understanding of society’s ills. He spends the entire novel fueling his alcoholic rage and ranting to anyone who will listen about the TRUTH he has discovered. 

Mick Kelly – ruling her neighborhood kingdom and her younger siblings with a ferocious tenderness. She wants nothing more than to spend her hours understanding the great wave of music that has risen up inside of her. She wants to take music lessons but her family is too poor. Instead she listens to the radio, absorbing the notes, unraveling the puzzle of it. The music was her – the real plain her…Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony and there was not enough of her to listen.  

Dr. Copeland – a black doctor and embittered man whose strictly envisioned hopes for his four children have turned up empty. He is proud and tireless, working long nights despite his advancing tuberculosis to heal and educate his community. To help them rise above their imposed poverty and moral decay. 

And finally, John Singer – a deaf-mute whose friend, another deaf-mute and the only person Singer can fully communicate with, gets sent to an asylum by a relative who no longer wishes to care for the increasingly difficult young man. Singer, alone and needing company, accepts the frequent intrusions of the community around him. He functions as the eye of the novel’s hurricane. The other characters rage and storm against their maddening life perceptions, finding comfort in Singer’s one-sided conversations. He listens to them. He offers them refreshment. He looks them in the eye. And slowly, Dr. Copeland, Jake, Mick and Biff, along with many others in the small town, begin to create a mythical being. A man with endless intelligence, infinite understanding, and vast compassion.  

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about love. About need. About perception. It is also a faithful and painstakingly drawn portrait of America at its loneliest. McCullers’ exquisite prose is the perfect accompaniment to this often overcast landscape, fashioning a certain beauty into the anger and heartbreak of her characters. 

Keri Hulme – The Bone People

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Hulme’s eccentric novel is an unwieldy piece of fiction, as poetic and confusing as it is engaging, a demanding and messy story. Set in New Zealand in the 1980’s The Bone People tells the story of the unlikely friendship between three lost-and-hoping-to-be-found individuals: Kerewin – thirtysomething oddball loner, failed painter and precociously intelligent human; Joe – heartbroken drinker, honor-bound individual, failing father of 7 year-old Simon; Simon – angry and frightened child, intelligent imp and needy youngster who can’t speak.Essentially, the novel hinges on the fact that all three characters must learn to come to grips with the difficult ghosts of their past in order to accept the precious friendship that almost instantly blooms between them when Simon (a frequent truant) shows up one afternoon at Kerewin’s unconventional Tower-home on the beach and Joe must come to fetch him the next morning. The challenges to this friendship are immense. Both Joe and Kerewin are lonely, heartbroken individuals who drink enough alcohol to euthanize a small army and are more than willing to share it with Simon. Joe, while a loving father on the one hand, beats Simon to within an inch of his life every time the boy screws up by either stealing, cutting school or fighting. Kerewin, for her part, refuses to be touched, shunning all human contact and adopting a strict code of self-reliance. Despite Joe and Kerewin’s tragic pasts, only Simon’s difficult character traits seem to be really earned or understandable. He struggles with horrific memories, mostly suppressed we are led to believe, but that manifest in appalling nightmares. He is insecure and proud, tightly wound and often afraid.Simon’s mysterious shipwreck and unknown past wants to be the central story in the novel and it grows in significance from time to time when Kerewin attempts to investigate certain information or examine some of the boy’s psychological behaviors. But this story ultimately loses importance as the reader gets more involved in following Kerewin’s role in helping Joe deal with his abusive temper. Hulme would like the reader to find enough sympathy for Joe to support him through to the end of the book and its supposedly optimistic resolution but after all that happens this is asking quite a lot. So is asking us to believe in Simon’s unwavering devotion to a man that manages to knock out his teeth, create welts and ulcers on his back that refuse to heal and who eventually deafens him and most likely causes brain damage. No amount of poetic interior revelation can soften the blows of Joe’s monstrous behavior. Nor can it forgive Kerewin’s outright complicity with the final, nearly fatal beating.

Hulme takes both successful and unsuccessful risks with her prose. This is not a conventionally written novel but that is also not a reason to forgive many of the characters’ failings. Although there is a significant amount of elegant and lovely writing in The Bone People, the overall project didn’t seem coherent enough to save the difficult traps of the story.