Do you ever get on a roll with your reading where you love every book you pick up? Where you don’t feel like waving the white flag on a single title? Where your nose is stuck so far in a book that maybe calls go to voice mail, the dog has to bark at the back door more than once, and the kids have to remind you that you PROMISED you would make lunch, like, half an hour ago? Well, I have been in that reading nirvana lately. It’s a nice place to be and it certainly bodes well for the year ahead.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Random House
published January 12, 2016
I read this at least a month ago and I still find myself returning to it in my mind. Strout did something extraordinary with just over 200 pages. Not a word is wasted in this spare, beautiful tale of family, art, and how childhood poverty wreaks a kind of violence on families and individuals that can persist.
Lucy is recalling a period in the 1980s when she went into the hospital for an appendectomy and wound up staying for weeks, fighting off an infection. The mother she hasn’t spoken to in years comes to stay with her for a time. Slowly, through “where are they now” conversations about the people that populated Lucy’s childhood – a kind of neutral ground topic for them – we learn where Lucy came from, and the effort it took to extricate herself. The affection and bond between mother and daughter is apparent but neither can get past their own barriers for long.
This lovely, haunting book is a joy and a heartbreak. I expect it will make it onto many “best of” lists at the end of the year. Highly recommended.
The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday
published January 5, 2016
This title is a nail-biter about one poor decision turning into consequence after worsening consequence. The bad decision in this case is Richard Chapman agreeing to host his younger brother’s bachelor party at his Westchester home. He assumed one of his brother’s friends would organize for a stripper to be there, and there was. In fact, there were two. Along with two intimidating Russian bodyguards. What he didn’t expect was the strippers murdering their bodyguards in his living room and driving away into the night.
What follows is the story of Richard, his wife, and daughter coping with the murder becoming the sordid news story of the moment, alternating with the tragic story of one of the strippers, Alexandra. We learn how she went from schoolgirl and ballet student in earthquake-ravaged Armenia to bachelor party “talent” and now doubly a fugitive – wanted for questioning by the police, and wanted back by the gangsters that brought her to America.
Her harrowing tale contrasts with Richard’s comfortable upper-middle-class naiveté. He tells himself the strippers he sees on stage are really a “sociology major with a flat stomach” or a Brazilian who “viewed herself as a feminist capitalist.” The more problems caused by the case’s notoriety, the more he mentally catalogues his almost-the-best material possessions: the “wannabe Bierstadt painting” ruined by blood spatter, the “faux antique divan.” It’s never a car, it’s a pewter gray Audi. He is quietly irked when the paper describes his house as the smallest on a street full of mansions. It’s the comforting language of Stuff and he clings to it as his carefully curated American Dream frays.
Bohjalian knows how to keep the reader turning pages. The issues around sex workers, particularly international, that he raises make this a good choice for book clubs looking to sink their teeth into a very serious issue.
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
Doubleday
published January 12, 2016
This is another slim volume – a sharp collection of (very) loosely connected short stories and vignettes about ladies who lunch – and who might be heard to exclaim at one of these lunches “my breath is the Pinot Grigio-est!” There is plenty to make the reader laugh out loud – from the demented anarchy of the “Wainscoting War” to the chilling (but ever amusing) oppression of “My Novel is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax.”
You can easily devour this dark confection all at once or dip into these stories of a privileged, rule-bound, and slightly deranged milieu here and there as you find a moment. Ellis has something to say – something serious when you look past the absurdity – and a wickedly funny way of saying it.
Advance galleys of these books were kindly provided by the publishers with no expectations other than an honest opinion.
