The Coming of Age of a Character and a Country

I really do read novels that are not about dysfunctional Irish families, though you might not think so, given my last review, posted five months ago, of Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies. Actually, both that novel and the one I'm reviewing today are equally about dysfunctional families and a dysfunctional country, Ireland, the country of many of my ancestors, a country of great beauty and great suffering, much of it at the hands of the Church.

The Heart's Invisible Furies, by John Boyne (author of The Boy in Striped Pajamas) is dedicated to John Irving, and there is more than a bit of Irving, and Dickens too, in this sprawling saga of Cyril Avery, who tells his story first from inside the womb of his unwed, sixteen-year-old mother in 1945 and then at seven-year increments until 2015. It's Cyril's wonderfully idiosyncratic, comic-tragic voice that carries the reader along on a mostly pleasurable journey, though many awful things do happen.

The novel begins with the horrifying expulsion of Cyril's mother from her local church, and the village as well, by a hypocritical, thunderously self-righteous priest who, we learn, has fathered two children himself. The villagers, including Catherine's own family, look on in passive, fearful obedience, an attitude encouraged by the Church in Ireland for most of Cyril's life. Catherine makes her way to Dublin, where she is taken in by a couple of young gay men, one of whose father beats him to death for his "perversion." Catherine gets a job and gives her child up for adoption by the Averys, an odd couple who seem to lack all parental instincts but are likable enough in their own peculiar ways, and Cyril grows up in affluent surroundings, though he is reminded over and over again that he isn't really an Avery, and he quickly learns to refer to Maude and Charles by their first names and to introduce them to others as his adoptive parents. He also realizes he is gay, and remains closely closeted, even from his best friend, Julian, with whom he falls deeply in love at the age of seven.

This sense of being an outsider even at home - though in emotional terms it's not much of a home - leads Cyril to construct a completely private interior life, but it also makes him a sharp observer of those around him who, as he grows older, come to include a large cast of supporting characters including some noted real Irish people, like the writer Brendan Behan, who appears in a particularly entertaining episode in a pub.

Cyril does try his luck at heterosexuality; he's not very good at it and his attempts have tragic consequences for the young women involved, one indirectly and one directly. These young women, like most of the characters, are well and sharply drawn, with humor and often great compassion. It is the humor that makes the book a joy to read, especially the first half, even though much of the plot is tragic or at least unpleasant. However, Cyril's coming of age mirrors that of his country, which finally legalized gay marriage in 2015, and Boyne's representation of Ireland and the poisonous influence of the Catholic Church, which inveighed against individual sin while it was, itself, mired in hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption, is brilliant.

A little past halfway I found my patience with Cyril's narration growing thin, though, and I skipped to the last page, where I was gratified to find that he does achieve his long-sought-for happy ending.

I received a review copy of this book in return for a thoughtful (I hope) and honest review.

Dark, Daring, Delicious

Forget about the clean, green, bucolic valleys and hills of Ireland's countryside. The Glorious Heresies, Lisa McInerney's debut novel and winner of the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for fiction, focuses on the gritty underbelly of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. The inner-city Cork the characters occupy is tough, irreverent, and grim, but it has its darkly comic side as well, splendidly rendered in McInerney's exuberant, lilting, and profane prose.

Some reviewers say the novel begins with a murder, but technically, when grandmother Maureen Phelan clocks an intruder on the head with a tacky religious tchotchke, it's more a case of self-defense, or at worst manslaughter. Maureen calls in her fearsome gangster son Jimmy to dispose of the body, he involves Tony, a ne'er-do-well former schoolmate, and the repercussions of Maureen's act ultimately connect not only Maureen, Jimmy, and Tony, but also Jimmy's teenage son Ryan and sex worker Georgie, who's half-heartedly trying to escape her trade and her drug habit through religion.

The dwindling power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, along with its cruel legacy with regard to unwed mothers (as shown in the film The Magdalen Sisters) provide much of the foundation to The Glorious Heresies. The moral gap left by the fading of religion is described by one of the characters: "There's nothing there. No confessor, no penitent, no sin, no sacrament. Just actions to be burned away." For many in the book, that gap is filled by alcohol, drugs, and violence. There's not much to be had by way of redemption, but McInerney's narrative genius, tough gallows humor, and the absolute pleasure she offers in her use of language make it a novel well worth savoring. Lisa McInerney is indeed a glorious new talent.

Another American Epic We Know Little About

When I was very young, we watched Broken Arrow on television. I had never heard of the Apache Wars and had only heard the name "Geronimo" when some kid yelled it while jumping off the high dive at the public pool. But I knew that Tom Jeffords the honest Indian agent and Cochise the noble chief were friends because they were both good guys. Decades later, I'd venture to say most Americans don't know much more than that. Here in Tucson, we live in what was called Apacheria, I've hiked Cochise Stronghold in the Chiricahua Mountains, and I've generally felt at least somewhat knowledgeable about some of the region's history. But Paul Andrew Hutton's The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History has been a real eye-opener.

It was the lengthy subtitle that caught my attention. I didn't know much about the "longest war," which lasted from 1861 to 1890, or anything about either the Apache Kid or Mickey Free, the captive boy who would grow up to become a legendary Apache scout, moving back and forth between Natives and whites, useful to both sides but not quite trusted by either.

Hutton is a highly respected historian and the book is packed with fascinating and informative anecdotes. I couldn't count how many times I said to myself, "Wow! I did not know that!" about something that I really thought I should have known, especially since I wrote my dissertation on representations of the frontier, much of it in relation to captivity narratives, those stories of settlers, mostly women, captured by Indians and living for various lengths of time among them. But Hutton is more than an academic expert whose work is grounded in phenomenal amounts of research; he is a remarkable storyteller who brings his characters to life, not as cardboard cutouts or names to be memorized for multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test questions, but as real, complex, sometimes contradictory individuals, with real, logical reasons for their actions, which were largely motivated by understandable grief and vengeance, and/or greed.

People have been talking a lot about empathy recently, and about the value of reading good fiction because it helps us to develop empathy, and I completely agree with that assessment. History, if it's fairly presented and well told, can certainly have the same effect, and this book, which is much more than information, which is often heartbreaking and/or horrifying, clearly illustrates this point.
I received a review copy of The Apache Wars from bloggingforbooks.com in exchange for an honest review. I recommend it to anyone who's interested in American history at a deeper, messier, more real level than the superficial and self-serving nationalism so many of us were taught in school.

Sometimes Good Enough Is Good Enough

I'd describe June by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore as a vacation book: not too demanding or deep, with a good-sized cast of characters representing a fairly large cross-section of entertaining stereotypes, with a plot that's complex enough to keep the reader turning pages. I read it in a couple of days when I was feeling fairly miserable with spring allergies and it kept me entertained and occasionally surprised, and I do like surprises in novels. That said, I probably won't recommend it to the more literarily snobbish of my friends. I read it because I received a free copy from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review; pickings were slim at the time and this tale of hidden passions, unexpected inheritance, and scandalous movie stars seemed like the most interesting thing on offer. If it's ever made into a movie, I'll go see it. But I won't expect Shakespeare, and you shouldn't either.

The story begins in a neglected mansion, Two Oaks, where the heroine, Cassie, is hiding out from the world following the death of her grandmother June and a break-up with an artist boyfriend who could just as well have been left out of the story for all he adds to it. Two Oaks itself is represented as sentient in the early pages, which seems like it might promise some Haunting of Hill House-type thrills, but the house-as-character idea gets dropped abruptly when Cassie, who's been letting the mail pile up by the front door, finally answers the doorbell to learn she's inherited the entire multi-million-dollar estate of a recently-deceased movie star who made a movie in her hometown when Grandma June was a young woman.

Did June and Jack Montgomery have an affair all those years ago, and is Cassie really Jack's secret granddaughter? Jack's two daughters don't want to believe it, so they show up to demand a DNA sample, and wind up moving in, along with a couple of personal assistants, and taking over Two Oaks. That's not such a bad thing, since one of the assistants actually cleans the place up, and her uninvited houseguests get Cassie to stop drinking so much and start eating better. The unrealistic extended visit basically serves as a narrative device to let the possible relatives get to know each other and to allow time for extended flashbacks to the time June and Jack spent together.

It works pretty well. Cassie herself isn't very interesting, but her houseguests liven things up in the chapters set in the present, and the story of Jack and June is enlivened by June's tomboy friend Lindie, who facilitates their romantic assignations. If many of the other characters seem rather flat - the greedy, manipulative small-town developer, the neurotic, manipulative actress (there's more than one of those), for example - well, that's often the case in books like this. The plot keeps moving until the final revelation, and even after that, to a heart-warming conclusion that I liked at the same time that the more critical side of me couldn't help saying, "Oh, this is kind of sappy. But what the hell. It's nice." The author even allows the house a brief return to sentience at the end, to round things off. You know, like in those writing classes where the teacher told you to tie things up with a reference to the introduction. And it's okay. Not great, but not bad, and sometimes that's good enough.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

I like The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher. After all, I have read 220 of its 412 pages. But for now, it's going on the shelf, though I'm sure I'll finish reading it, someday. Let me tell you first about the book, and then about why I'm laying it aside.

The Roaring Twenties were about more than jazz and flappers and bathtub gin. Following the great loss of life in WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, people desperate with grief wanted to believe they could contact their dead loved ones, leading to a boom in spiritualism. Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, made it his mission to unmask and debunk fraudulent mediums. At the same time, Scientific American magazine began a contest offering $5,000 in prizes for mediums who could prove their skills and effects did not depend on trickery. Several were quickly proved to be fakes, but Mina Crandon, better known as "Margery," the pretty wife of a Boston doctor, seemed to be the real thing, and most of the book turns on the ongoing investigation of her alleged powers and the people and personal relationships involved in that investigation.

Some years ago I absolved myself of feeling guilty for not finishing every book I started. There are many reasons for laying a book aside. Maybe, as with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there's an association with something that has nothing to do with the book. A friend brought that book to me at Thanksgiving dinner one year and then behaved very badly, so that whenever I picked it up I thought of him and it poisoned my enjoyment. But after a few months I tried again and loved it. Maybe it's something in the book itself; a scene in Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko horrified me to the point that I couldn't go on, but a year later I picked it up and finished it, though I began reading from a point after that scene. No need to re-traumatize oneself. (Although I generally enjoy and admire Silko's writing, I kind of agree with a friend's assessment that there should be a support group for people who've finished reading Almanac of the Dead.)

I have no such dramatic reasons for bailing on The Witch of Lime Street, which is well written, engaging, and should make a very entertaining movie. Jaher's research is impressive and his prose is smooth, informative without being pedantic, and, as the Wall Street Journal reviewer claims, "[filled with] flamboyant, enigmatic, and complex characters." But it moves slowly, covering the same ground over and over, and while I wanted to know how it ended, I lost count of the number of séances I'd sat through and went to a couple of reference books and Google to find out how the whole thing ended (though I'm not going to tell you).

Pacing isn't the only problem; the title is misleading, at least as far as I've gotten. Houdini appears early in the book, and he's quite interesting, but then he disappears though I'm sure he'll show up for the climax. And while there are lots and lots of séances, there's no seduction, unless you count the intellectual and emotional seduction practiced by fraudulent mediums. But that too may appear later on.

My final verdict? I like it, but not enough to stick with it when there are more appealing things on my TBR pile.

FOR LOVE OF VEGETABLES

Martha Stewart's Vegetables: I love this book! As soon as I unpacked it I opened it to gorgeous centerfold of two kohlrabi bulbs: one purple, one green, wonderful, natural works of art. And the whole book is just as beautiful; each recipe has a photo on the facing page that appeals to the eye as well as the stomach. I know there are people out there who don't like vegetables, and I'm very sorry for them. I also think this might be the cookbook to change their minds. The recipes are delectable, none of them look difficult, and they include vegetables from the everyday - peas, carrots, potatoes - to the less familiar, such as fennel, rutabagas, parsnips, and more. And they're not necessarily just side dishes. Main dishes of various kinds include vegetables in more than supporting roles (some but not all are vegetarian), as do breads, soups, salads, and desserts. I am definitely going to try the corn ice cream, and the rainbow carrots and chard stems below.

The organization of the book is also interesting, and brilliant. Unlike most cookbooks that are organized by the above categories - breads, soups, etc., etc. - this one is organized by types of vegetables: bulbs, roots, tubers, greens, stalks and stems, pods, shoots, leaves, flowers and buds, fruits (a category that includes more than just tomatoes; take a look at the Blistered Eggplant with Tomatoes, Olives, and Feta, above), and kernels. Leafing through to see what category various veggies fall into is part of the fun, but if you want to go straight to bok choy, the index is excellent.

More than just recipes, the supporting text offers excellent background information on each vegetable, along with useful information on selecting, storing, prepping and basic cooking, and other foods that pair well with, say, Jerusalem artichokes or fennel (or peas, carrots, and potatoes for that matter). This beautiful book offers an approach to clean eating, using healthy, natural ingredients to delight the palate and maybe even convert the veggie-phobic.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

I just learned that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. While I'm sure the other finalists are worthy of consideration, it's hard for me to imagine a more deserving work. This is a book I found impossible to put down. I thought of its protagonist, Cora, even when I wasn't actually reading - wondering whether she would escape or even survive the dangers that beset her on her journey to freedom from slavery and the looming threat of slave catchers. This book made me care that much, not only on an intellectual or empathetic level, but deeply, in the most visceral recesses of my consciousness. It is that good.

Whitehead, who grew up in Manhattan, has said that when he was much younger, he imagined the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad, with tracks, engines, and passenger cars, that ran through real tunnels, rather like subways. In this novel he takes that childhood fantasy and makes it real; Cora, a young slave woman, escapes with another slave, Caesar, via the railroad. Cora's odyssey north takes her to various states - South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana - each of which is like another world. While one state initially seems safe and welcoming, for example, the citizens of another indulge in ritualized brutality that almost surpasses what Cora left behind on Randall, the Georgia plantation she escaped from. 

In interviews, Whitehead has readily acknowledged the influence of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the vastly different worlds he creates for Cora to experience. As different from one another as Swift's Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa, etc., the states become illustrations of various historical outrages against those of other races: the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, and more. And although in this fabulist fiction Whitehead may take liberties with the details of history, what he describes can seem so uncomfortably real that I found myself thinking I should look up, for example, antebellum North Carolina's racial policies.

A friend told me she was afraid to read this book because she thought it would be gory. It's not. Really. Don't be afraid. Given that it is about slavery, violence is inescapable, of course, but Whitehead is a master of compulsively readable, nuanced prose that blends modern pacing with a sensibility that, to quote the nineteenth-century writer of a narrative captivity, "draws a veil over things" too painful or sensational or offensive to recall, except that the veil reveals enough so that we know exactly what is going on. Although we may be spared the graphic splatterpunk some writers indulge in, the horror remains. I admire Whitehead's writing more than I can express. 

The Underground Railroad is and is not fiction. I suspect there were at least as many Randalls in the slave-holding South as there were benign Taras (in Gone with the Wind). Absolute power like that exercised by slaveholders does not bring out the best in people. Scholars agree that there is such a thing as historical, generational trauma, and the United States is plagued by it. We can see its aftermath in recent events on the nightly news, and we need to try to understand it (and each other) rather than deny it. We are a diverse society and we are all in this together. We need books like The Underground Railroad. Much has been written lately about how reading literary fiction helps people to become more thoughtful and empathetic. I can think of no better place to start than with this brilliant novel.