The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter

People reflect upon their loves one summer night in Ann Arbor

I have mixed feelings about this book.  The discovery that the narrator in this novel by Charles Baxter was a writer named Charles Baxter set my teeth on edge.  Ok, I thought, this better be very very good.  And it was good.  But good enough to put up with that.

First of all, this is not really a novel.   A novel is a journey  --  it’s the construction of an Aztec pyramid stone by stone so at the top your heart can be ripped out.   A novel is plotted.  A novel has a vast scale.  The Feast of Love is a collection of linked short stories.  The umbrella story is about a poor schlub who marries an impossible women and lives beside a tragic couple and employs another tragic couple at his coffee shop.   Luckily at the end, he finds love in the person of a saint like black doctor who apparently was waiting all her life for a Caucausian schlub to come along.

The subject matter and maybe even the prose style reminded me of a Midwestern Amy Bloom (although maybe Baxter tries to encompass more than one social class).  Beautiful prose.  Their subject is Love or Love and Sex.  The crazy cruel things the yearnings of love makes people do.  In this book, however, there’s a happy ending for everyone.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

Even in a dying industry, workers feel reverence for their duties

This is a sweet though uneven short story collection, however, it feels rather bogus to market this as a novel.  The book is about different employees at a boutique English language newspaper in Rome and how they struggle with betrayals, of fate, of love, of parenthood.  The stories are best when they are about human foibles, about people believing what they want to believe, no matter what.  I learned the most from the eccentrics.  The worst story was the one set in Egypt with a perfectly ridiculous blowhard character.  The best and most complex stories were in the first half, I think.

I was consistently interested in the characters, never bored.   All the characters are wrapped up in their own issues, never realizing this job, which means so much to all of them, is disappearing. This was an easy read.

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

Boston, 1918, Molasses, anarchists, Babe Ruth and a police strike

I admired the ambitious scope and the implicit commentary on America. I also liked the comparison to terrorism then and terrorism now. A novel should aspire to this sort of serious viewpoint. However, a grand scope requires lots of characters from different levels of society. And I think the fatal flaw of this novel, the flaw that made reading the last fifth a real chore was the flimsy characterization of everybody except Babe Ruth. And Babe Ruth only glancingly interacts with our two main characters – once at the beginning and once at the end. Otherwise, in his interludes he’s an interesting but very passive onlooker, kind of goofy, and not really interested in the theme of this novel, which are, I think, family loyalties.

This is a plot driven story so the characters are like tiny metal cogs in a massive machine, with no range of movement and absolutely no surprises. All the frenetic shooting/bombing at climax left me cold because I had no emotional investment in these robots.  The main character is Aiden, favored son of a Boston Police official. Will he betray his family? It’s also about Luther, black man and saint, on the run from a botched murder.

In the divide between literary novels and genre novels, this one clearly was genre, although the descriptions were well done. I’m disappointed as the setting was perfect as so many important things were happening. And there were tons of conflict.

Finally, the novel is set in 1918 and in 1918 most people held certain racist and sexist attitudes – it seems a stretch to make those characters who were “of their time” extra evil because they subscribed to those attitudes.

Father of the Rain by Lily King

A grown daughter tries to save her alcoholic father

Once again, this book made me wonder about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction. This particular novel was a compelling read, hard to put down. (I read it at the beach no less). The story stirred my emotions. And yet – the plot took some facile unmotivated twists, nudging it, I think, towards genre fiction. An undeserved happy ending. An unrealistically sympathetic husband.


Father of the Rain falls into Roxana Robinson territory – repressed WASP porn, I guess. The main conflict (the loved one must confront the addict) follows that of Robinson’s Cost. Yet the decisions made by the mother in Cost are inevitable and devastating and believable. Here the decisions made by the daughter (who is not in the same power position as the mother) don’t seem completely motivated – she throws her professional and romantic life away, much too quickly, without reservations, to save someone who clearly can’t be saved.

It’s about Daley Amory, sensitive shy girl with a real prick of a father who drinks too much and is sexually inappropriate (that is almost the most interesting part of the novel because he never crosses the line – he just does whatever he wants to do). The father, Gardiner, is presented as a privileged man out of touch with the new diverse society – but he doesn’t feel quite real, although he’s full of evil energy and speaks his mind. He can’t accept the fact that the world has changed.

The novel is divided into three parts.  Childhood is the first section, which I like, and then the time when Daley is about to embark on her adult life, which is the meat of the book, and then the conclusion where she’s got her shit together and all the fairytale elements apart from Dad are there.

Nice clean prose. The scenes were very effective, especially the scene when Daley visits her father after her parents' separation only to find another woman and family moved in her house. We also get a glimpse of the rest of this seaside town, and the other WASPy characters who live there and grow older with have successful lives or not. There’s even a lot of debate as to whether Gardiner is truly a drunk or not. Are you one if everyone else at the country club is stumbling around?

Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott

Things always work out in the end, don’t they?

I really didn’t get this book of short stories.  I hated the first five, loved the fourth, thought the long one was very interesting and provocative, then back to the hating.  Overall, I had problems with the flippant tone and believed in many cases the stories were a waste of beautiful prose.  I mean, shouldn’t fiction speak to the heart – what’s the point of solely an intellectual connection?  Art is the depiction of emotion, isn’t it?  Why else bother?

The writing is vivid and descriptive, begging to be read aloud.  A multiplicity of characters – a high energy level.   I found the abstract words offputting and distancing.  Obviously I didn’t get the point.  The relentless happy endings were painted on like a clown’s smile.

Peace by Richard Bausch

Three GI’s wonder if war is worth it

This short novel about World War II sucked me in immediately.  There are some great scenes, really great, (I cried when the solider left home), interspersed with long passages of boredom.  Why?  The nominal plot is three GI’s climbing a snowy mountain, pursued by a faceless sniper.  The prose style is kind of Old Man and the Seaish (which works).  The secondary plot, the moral plot, is the three GI’s discussing whether they should turn in their commanding officer for a war crime, which had been depicted in the first scene.  Part of my problem was that I didn’t understand that the first scene depicted a war crime until we were well into the book.  To me it seemed like another unavoidable bad thing happening during a war.  And if I, a Hollywood Hills liberal Democrat, didn’t think the first scene depicted a war crime, I have a hard time believing the three young kids in wartime getting shot at would make that distinction.  A panicky action in the heat of battle is not a war crime.   So the stakes weren’t there for me.   Surely these guys would be more concerned about the sniper killing them than debating moral permutations.   Partly the cause of my boredom were that the characters of the three GI's and their elderly Italian guide felt straight out of central casting.  The bigoted hick, the Jewish guy from Brooklyn, the noble American, the shifty old Italian.  The narrative consciousness is that of the noble American, the good Catholic.  But here we have the problem of the essentially uninteresting nature of inherent goodness, rather than the tension of striving for goodness.  So the stakes weren't there.  The final scene stretches credulity and ends in a welter of sonorous though ultimately meaningless words

This would have made a pretty powerful short story.  Instead it turned into a short novel, flabbed up with rhetoric.

Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

In 1940’s LA, a workingman’s search for a missing woman is interrupted by a number of murders

I read a short story by Walter Mosley in the latest Tin House and it was really good which inspired me to pick this book up. I was a little disappointed as the novel was more like a typical apprentice like detective novel although with a unique setting.Mosley's most famous character, Easy Rawlins, a careful, quiet narrator/detective, is introduced. The writing was spare, well crafted and Mosley has a facility for expressing emotions without dialogue, with gestures and movements. It just wasn’t as original and surprising as the short story.

The plot felt kind of cliché, but it was a very easy read. The setting is unique. African Americans from Houston in LA. The woman who is the devil with a blue dress doesn’t feel quite real, (or quite motivated) although all the male characters do. They are perverse and full of eccentric life. I also like the way the book quietly comments on a lot of larger issues, such as racism, police brutality, the movement of poor black southerners to industrial cities, how men treat women, and alcoholism.

What makes me want to continue reading the series is the relationship between laid back Easy and his amoral friend Mouse. Maybe put together they will make up a complete man. Who is worthy of redemption? Maybe Easy Rawlins, maybe not.