Apologies to all for my AWOL status. While on the road from Maryland to Florida I learned of the sudden death of a dear, longtime friend in Massachusetts. Home only long enough to exchange one suitcase for another, I flew north for several days of reunions and reminiscences. It was a bittersweet time for reflection on family and friendships.
So what better way to face the long flight back than to delve into a new book, due out this week, about - you guessed it - family and friendships. "Seven Days of Us" by Francesca Hornak kept me happily occupied for the three hours plus that we hurtled through the air with Jet Blue.
As I was reading I kept thinking, this is made for the stage. In fact, it presents almost like a screenplay, with short, punchy chapters that each focus on a different member of the Birch family as they face the week between Christmas and New Year's, often tense in the best of circumstances, under a medical quarantine at their rambling estate in the English countryside.
Daughter Olivia is a physician whose penchant for helping out in the remotest parts of the world rarely brings her home for the holidays. That's just the way she likes it. But this year, she's been in Liberia facing a crisis that sounds much like the Ebola outbreak and, until she's declared disease free, no one can leave the house.
Her folks, Andrew and Emma, dance around each other like strangers. Each appears lost in his own world, Andrew's, a career decision hanging over his head, and Emma's, a potential life-threatening diagnosis. During their long marriage they've grown apart and lost the joy of communicating.
And then there's Phoebe, the younger daughter, always considered a flighty, flibbertigibbet, whose only interests are clothes, makeup, jewelry and beating her friends to the altar. Maybe that's why she's accepted a marriage proposal from George, a pompous slacker from a wealthy family with whom she's been keeping company for years.
I've often thought how problematic families can be. After all, just because they are related by blood doesn't always mean that they have much in common in terms of interests, passions, or temperaments. Put yourself, if you can, into the Birch family's situation and think about the potential for volatility when an outside party suddenly enters the frame.
Because that's just what happens when Jesse, a young American filmmaker in search of his birth father, (and maybe a documentary), tracks down Andrew and decides to just knock on the door. Merry Christmas! A delightful character, Jesse is the catalyst the breaks the repressed Birches wide open. Hornak's prose is snappy, funny, poignant, and sarcastic in equal measure. Why was I not surprised when I read that her novel has already been optioned for British TV?
This is a warm, wonderful read that explores the quirkiest trait that most families share. We may not always like each other but, oh, how we do love each other.
It's a shame that you'll never see author Jonathan Dee's books on the New York Times bestseller lists. No, we'd rather read Patterson, Baldacci, and Grisham while so-called literary fiction languishes on the back burner. But Dee's last novel "The Privileges," was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. The reason is that the man has vision and courage. He's not afraid to point out the flaws in the people who are just the ones who might be buying his books.
I was drawn to "The Locals" because it's set in the Berkshires where I grew up, specifically, Great Barrington, Stockbridge, Lenox, and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Dee has surely spent some time there because he has the atmosphere down pat. The notorious love/hate relationship between the locals and the folks who come up from "the city" along the Taconic State Parkway for summer weekends, autumn leaf gazing, and winter ski trips. We love them because they pump their over abundance of bucks into the local economy. We hate them because we need them.
This amazing, clever, sly novel is set in the fictional southern Berkshire town of Howland, post 9/11. Local building contractor and general all around nice guy Mark Firth has unwisely invested what little spare money he had in a Ponzi scheme. His business is suffering, not to mention his relationship with his wife who had to go back to work to bail them out. Karen seethes with resentment, a fact that also colors her relationship with their daughter Haley.
Their next door neighbor is a wealthy New Yorker who seldom uses his gorgeous oversized home. People in town resent him too. How come they're all struggling to make ends meet when someone like Phil Hadi can let a palace like that sit empty half the year? Until 9/11 that is. Hadi, a money manager with billionaire clients, moves his family permanently to the Berkshire home to get away from the likelihood of another terrorist attack on the city. He wants an armed fortress. Money is no object. Mark Firth is glad to oblige.
And so begins a novel that pits the wealthy outsiders against the local people who are often just living paycheck to paycheck. Hadi loves the Berkshires so much that he decides to run for Selectman after the death of Howland's lackadaisical part time leader. At first the locals suspect that Hadi is just having fun at their expense. He eschews a paycheck, and even bails out several small businesses on the QT with his own funds just to maintain the illusion that the town is doing great. Eventually the locals come to depend upon Hadi, which is all well and good until he tires of his little social experiment.
This compelling book nails every little truth about small town life. I could visualize every pickup truck filled with carpentry tools, every bagel shop where the "live-heres" and the "come-heres" share turf. There's an hysterical chapter about a pretentious new farm to table restaurant (I even know where it is). The locals save for a year just to step inside the doors while the city people tweet and blog about the $100 four ounce piece of meat decorated with sprigs of mystery grass.
Dee also gives us some wonderful secondary characters. I especially enjoyed Mark's sister Candace who saves the barely functioning library and begins surreptitiously allowing abused kids who've run away from home to sleep overnight in the children's room. Then there's the quintessential Century 21, gold-jacketed, fast-talking real estate agent, Gerry, who uses his unsold listing properties to meet co-workers for casual sex.
If you've ever grown up in a small town or wished you had, this new book from Jonathan Dee is a must-read. It's not all Norman Rockwell any more, but a seething cauldron of pettiness, fear of keeping up, and marriages held together by fraying tethers of economic necessity. Dee has the courage and the talent to shine a light on it.
If it's suspense you want, you've come to the right place. Count on Nelson DeMille. He won't leave a reader wanting when it comes to ratcheting up the pace, placing his heroes in harm's way, and letting them bulldog their way out. If you've ever read any in the John Corey/Kate Mayfield series, "Wild Fire," "Nightfall," or "The Panther," you'll also know that DeMille has a devilishly snarky sense of humor that isn't remotely PC.
This new novel, "The Cuban Affair," may signal the beginning of a new series featuring Afghanistan War veteran Daniel "Mac" MacCormack, a guy still questioning his five years and two terms of service, a little unsure where life is taking him, but currently chilling out in that chilliest of places, Key West. He and the bank own a good size fishing boat, and he's got a second mate, Vietnam veteran Jack, who he'd trust with his life. When they aren't squiring tourists out to the best fishing holes, they hole up at a comfy dive bar, drink and tell war stories.
Some might call it the good life. So why on earth would Mac fall for the fast- talking "offer too good to be true" that comes from the unlikely Cuban-American attorney Carlos? A woman, of course! Sara is gorgeous, mysterious, and low-key. She's sent in to seal the deal. Sara and Carlos want to hire Jack, Mac, and the boat to participate in a ten day fishing tournament in Cuba. At least that's the cover story. The money they're offering is an astonishing amount. Mac could pay off the loan on his boat and then some. But is it worth his life?
Originally I decided to read this novel thinking that, because of the Florida setting, I could give it a rousing review for my radio program. http://news.wgcu.org/programs/florida-book-page
It didn't take me long to realize that I could disabuse myself of that idea. In fact, one of the main characters in this book is Cuba herself. DeMille spent time in the country in order to authenticate his writing but, sadly, he did not come to appreciate her.
When the Obama administration finally opened channels with Cuba I was thrilled. I've always thought it would be a fascinating country to visit. The difference between me and DeMille is that his view of the detente and the country is jaundiced and he's not ashamed to show his bias.
By the time Sara confesses her real reasons for being in Cuba, to retrieve boxes of documents, land deeds, and records of wealthy Cubans who escaped to Miami and points north during the Castro revolution, she and Mac are ensconced on a "cultural tour" arranged under the auspices of the Yale College Alumni Association. They are under constant surveillance by the Cuban tour guide who may or may not be undercover police, yet they need to connect with Sara's underground network in Havana to complete the mission they're being paid to do. To complicate matters even more, they're in the middle of a hot and heavy affair that has Mac thinking with something other than his head.
There's never a dull moment in a Nelson DeMille book and this romp will not disappoint. I was left guessing right to the very end. Whose side are we on? Who might turn on whom? Who's lying? Who's using whom? If you're looking for a great weekend escape then dig into "The Cuban Affair." Just don't let it deter you from traveling to this beautiful country.
Jesmyn Ward is already on the long list for the National Book Award though her latest novel, after NBA winner "Salvage the Bones," has only been out for a few weeks. This is a remarkable testament to the consistent quality of Jesmyn Ward's skills, the way her narrative voice evokes all the joy, heartbreak, and anguish of a certain southern time and place and people. In thirteen-year-old JoJo, Ward has given birth to a character so anxious and watchful yet so loving and selfless that you want to wrap him up in your arms and take him home with you.
JoJo and his baby sister Kayla are the mixed race children of Michael, serving a three year stint at Parchman Farm, part of the infamous Mississippi state prison system, and Leonie, an addict who is so involved in her own needs that those of her children go unheeded. But for Leonie's parents, with whom they live, JoJo and Kayla would likely have been caught up in the foster care system a long time ago. But Pop and Mama, steadfast grandparents who lead by example, are working through their own crisis. Mama is at the end of a long struggle with cancer, Pop is trying to be all things to all people, and Leonie is off on binges for days or weeks at a time.
Not a single word is misplaced in this tight little novel that toggles back and forth between Leonie's and JoJo's points of view, between the present and years ago when Pop was also at Parchman. There he befriended a child named Richie who, like oh so many black boys in minor trouble, were housed and used in the cotton fields as slave laborers. Richie appears as an unquiet spirit, still wandering the land in search of the answers to his death appearing to JoJo who, like his mother, has a sixth sense. Please don't be put off by the use of ghosts to speak of past atrocities. The trope works. The unburied sing.
In exquisitely wrought prose, Ward sanctifies the relationship between JoJo and Kayla. She is everything to him. She is his reason for living, the vessel for his love, and Leonie can't stand it. She is unreasonably, but not inexplicably, filled with rage over the state of her life. When Kayla screams for JoJo and only JoJo to satisfy her needs, Leonie is both relieved and infuriated. She intuits but doesn't admit that her children feel safer with each other than with her even though she yearns for some semblance of family with Michael and their kids.
Naturally race plays a central role here, Michael is white and his family refuses to accept his black wife and children. But more than the personal, it is the long view of the south and racial injustices that interest Ms. Ward. She fuses the stereotypical story of poor black families just trying to survive with the untold stories of the past that history would prefer to bury. Her ghosts speak eloquently of a time we persist in believing and hoping is behind us. Though we now know that it may never be behind us, Ward gives us a glimpse of hope in "Sing Unburied Sing" that she didn't offer in "Salvage the Bones."
I predict that multiple awards will be forthcoming for this crushingly beautiful novel. Grab it now before the holds list grows too long.
