State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

A woman must enter the jungle to find two people but ends up finding much more.

Much like Margaret Atwood, Ann Patchett combines exceptionally evocative literary description and imagery with a deep technical understanding of plot. That’s why her books are so hard to put down. The first image in State of Wonder is a blue airmail letter, a letter that sends our main character, Dr. Marina Singh, immediately packing for the jungle.  Not a scene in the book is wasted. The minor characters are also cogs in the plot, moving the story along.  

This book was wonderful, deeply satisfying, although only for the first four fifths. Dr. Marina, a mixed race Minnesota medical researcher, is apparently the only person who can be sent into the jungle to discover what happened to her lab mate, Anders, when he failed to return from his jungle assignment. Their employer, a pharmaceutical company, is interested in the status of their company’s billion dollar investment in drug research being completed at a hidden Amazonian lab. (Question: couldn’t the head office find the lab with a close perusal of Google maps?). The lab is overseen by the elderly terrifying Dr. Swenson, who was involved in a prior tragedy in Marina’s medical career. The establishment of Marina’s inner and outer conflict is set up brilliantly.

There’s so much to think about in this wonderful book – motherhood and industrialization and innocence and evil and nature. The plot serves as a frame to deliver at last Marina into a beautiful bizarre grove of otherworldly trees – trees that give life (and visions) to the tribe. The story is really about Marina’s discovery of herself and what she wants.

In the last part of the book, however, the cold mechanics of the plot take over, and the quick twists at the end are possibly unsupported. The final twist is unbelievable, actually, and is not emotionally true for the character of Dr. Marina. I think more open endedness and a touch of tragedy would have served the story better. The plot snaps into place so certainly it snuffs out the life of the story. We were headed for someplace great.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Three children visit separate Hells after their mother’s death

The story is about the Bigtree siblings, left adrift after their mother’s death devastates them emotionally and economically.  Their mother, Hilola Bigtree, was the star attraction alligator wrestler at Swamplandia!, the family business. When she dies, the tourists stop coming.  The novel is about what happens next.

Why didn’t I like this more? It sounded right up my alley – Ava Bigtree, the 13 year old alligator wrestler/narrator in a tale where she must descend into the world of the dead to rescue her beloved older sister Ossie who happens to have a date to marry a ghost. And yet, I couldn’t emotionally connect with Ava. The relentless whimsy of the opening section bored me. I much preferred the third person anarchic narration of her brother Kiwi’s adventures on the mainland.

I think I was not drawn to Ava because Ava did not have an internal conflict or struggle to match her vivid external struggle and journey through the swamp. She didn’t feel vulnerable and any vulnerability she possessed felt imposed on her.

The novel was slow going at first, but then I started to recognize the outlines of book’s majestic architecture and got more excited. But there never was a payoff. We had a scarlet alligator, a Birdman who can visit the dead, a rich heiress rescued from a pool of blood – and none of these truly eccentric and great details built to a conclusion. When something terrible happened to Ava near the end of the book, I didn’t care. The novel never came to an emotional climax for me. In the final section, the matter of fact explanation for the mysterious events put us 100 percent back in the world of reality. Apparently all the magical happenings stemmed from Ava’s gullibility and Ossie’s chemical brain imbalance.

It was a love poem to Florida, I’m pretty sure. That part worked. And I loved the fact that all the alligators were called Seth. But reading this book frustrated me.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

A child cast out of a seemingly idyllic commune cannot get over the rupture

This is the story of Bit, the first child born on the commune of Arcadia in upstate New York.   He is quiet, tiny and precocious. In this novel, we see the world through his eyes – the heroic men and women – mother Hannah and father Abe, the young people who abandoned the straight world and tried to build a new one free of distortions and hang-ups. Only guess what – human nature reasserts itself and there is just as much greed, hypocrisy and power struggle in Arcadia as in the real world.

The first part of the book describes the life on the commune.  The inevitable collapse of Arcadia feels a bit forced and the story peters out after the family leaves.  Also, the forward momentum of the story is not helped by the use of Bit as the narrative consciousness – he’s passive and Christlike.

I have been reading Lauren Groff’s short stories and admired her facility with language, the gorgeousness of it, though sometimes I felt the core of a story was too sentimental, non nutritious. But here the prose was determinedly not showy, sticking to a muted palette of metaphor, the turnips, the tofu, the mud – the stuff you find on a commune. I didn’t buy Bit’s love affair and subsequent child with Helle, the troubled child of Handy, the creepy commune founder. She’s a heroin addict and it wasn’t emotionally set up for me why Bit would be in love with her or have a child with her.

In some ways the most moving part of the story was at the end when Bit's caring for his terminally ill mother was described. She had always been depicted as physically strong and extremely self sufficient. That part felt real and was very moving.

I liked it but the different sections didn't quite gel for me.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A murder mystery twists its way through a philosophical discourse on divine love

Such characters! Such passion! This wasn’t what you’d call a light read – each page was bursting with things to think about, to ponder and savor. The nature of evil, the nature of love, the enslavement of the soul by ego and lust.   Reading this book felt like a pilgrimage and I was deeply grateful to participate. (But I won't be picking it up again any time soon. It required too much devotion.)

The Brothers Karamazov is about a completely despicable, completely entertaining father and his four sons. Each son represents a different aspect of human nature; Dmitri, the hot tempered soldier, Ivan, the intellectual man of reason, Alyosha, the sexually innocent mystic, and Smerdyakov the cynical bastard; however, they are all Karamazovs, that is, tainted by the father's sensual vices, prey to corruption. These are the men – but the women! All that fainting and crying. The brain fevers! Men and women derange each other. Except for shrewd Grushenka. And of course saintly childlike virginal Alyosha.

Why does this book feel so immediate to me when it was written over a hundred years ago, in a completely different society, with oppressed serfs and oppressed women? Duelling and horseriding? Why is the dialogue here so fascinating when it walks away from the murder mystery plot to consider the concepts of good and evil, and the nature of divine love? In modern novels, that type of extraneous dialogue would derail the forward momentum of the story for good. Perhaps because in the modern novel the topics are so slight and the stakes are so low and here good and evil mean life and death.

The comic scenes are legitimately comic. And the murder plot makes complete sense. The child conceived of rape murders the rapist. And were the architects of the Russian Revolution like Ivan? Everything is allowed.

The ending I found strange and poetically fit. Just after describing an upcoming jail break escape, instead of telling us how it turns out, Dostoevsky instead leaves us at the sweetly melancholy funeral of a child. Hurrah for Karamazov!

Damascus Gate by Robert Stone

In Jerusalem, you can’t stand on the side; you must claim your tribe.

I was both disappointed by and fascinated by this book. I couldn’t put it down, though I kept wondering – is this genre fiction or is this literary fiction? Unlike the Dennis Lehane novel which I now believe falls squarely into the genre camp, the story of Damascus Gate and especially its setting of Jerusalem, was compelling and deeply interesting. Robert Stone grapples with essential questions about history, spirituality and identity. On every page, I learned something, though I didn’t get a lot of aesthetic pleasure from the read, because the characterization and the dialogue fell below acceptable standards.

The characterization is sketchy, unless we want to consider the city of Jerusalem as a character.   This might be connected to the dialogue scenes going on too long and not illuminating character but rather conveying information in a way in which if the information wasn't so interesting would be highly monotonous. Also, there feels like there are hundreds of similarly obsessed characters and I got confused. And not one of these hundreds possesses a sense of humor.

Part of the reason I wasn’t fully engaged is that the primary character or narrative conscious, Christopher Lucas, is extremely passive. At every turn, he is being acted upon, beaten up as a child because he is a Jew, abandoned by his girlfriend, unable to get an erection, beaten up as an adult for being a Jew, beaten up as an adult for not being a Jew. I didn’t feel his pain, and couldn’t root for him as he was starting to annoy me. And then the love of his life, Sonia Barnes, a half black, half Jewish Sufi, came across as really dull. I didn’t understand why these people were attracted to each other. The best characters are the evil ones, I think, the end-of-timers, the cynics, the ones creating the mischief. The various subplots had more appeal than Christopher's search for identity. Unfortunately the engine of the plot was a very “genre-y” hidden bomb search, which got silly at the end. (But don’t they always get silly at the end?)

The most striking thing about this book was its strong sense of place – Jerusalem – a unique city claimed by three major religions, a cauldron of bloody hatreds. Finally, despite the boring central characters, there are beautiful passages of description.

Lying Low by Diane Johnson

You can’t hide forever.

A lightly fictionalized Davis, California in the early 70’s is the setting for this wonderful novel, with its colorful food coops, Photophobia “chicks” and bomb making anarchists. The story is about four scarred (and scared) people living in an old Victorian, hiding out from full participation in life, in some cases because of a quite legitimate fear. Theo and Anton, brother and sister, own the historical home. Theo is a retired ballet dancer, bossy and frightened. They have two boarders, two young women; the secretive leaving no fingerprints Lynn, distracted by lust, and the immigrant fiercely optimistic Ouida, who is determined to participate fully in America. There are mysteries from the past and dangerous secrets to be confronted.

I loved the way the fully realized characters intermeshed and the way the sentences were thoughtful and beautifully written. The satirical plotting went down easily and inevitably. One of Diane Johnson’s trademarks, (or narrative weaknesses perhaps) is the gigantic set piece to close the novel, which sometimes clanks too loudly with a farcical heavy handedness. This novel definitely contains a set piece at the end, though this time it felt more realistic, sadder. This novel ended on a note of sharp melancholy. But optimistic. Yes.

The three primary female characters are completely developed and motivated—the men, not so much. They are a little bit like one note plot points.  Overall, the book is a commentary on America, and on not wasting your life because of fear.

Great House by Nicole Krauss

What is the response when someone tries to erase not only you, but your identity?

I had bailed early on Krauss’s earlier book, The History of Love, thinking it too saccharine, but Great House for some reason I kept checking out of the library, never actually getting around to starting it. But I’m so glad I finally did. Krauss is a beautiful prose stylist. This is the proper way to do the linked short story structure, I think, not some heap of prose huts around a campfire, but interconnected parts that build and rise to a towering insight. And I think the insight is, Keep the faith.

The somewhat flimsy plotting relies on an old desk which moves among generations and continents and characters, touching the lives of four families. Characters either borrow the desk, or give away the desk or pine for the desk. What does it mean to hold something in safekeeping? What are the responsibilities? Is anything ever really yours?

I liked the doubling, the tripling of characters and themes. Three writers, three baby boys. Three people who look disconcertingly like the tortured to death Daniel Varsky. I liked the mystery – why does the book open with a woman confessing to “Your Honor”? Although, in retrospect, perhaps it got a bit too mysterious, as not all the references and hints were neatly wrapped up by the final page.

Most of all I liked the writing.