Sure, there are villains in both the real and fictional worlds. I don't deny that, and I don't want to read stories without conflict - heaven forbid! These three novels contain plenty of conflict and trials. But their authors also give us the nuance and complexity and, yes, compassion that enriches a worthwhile reading experience.
Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity, turns the classic "Snow White" inside out, calling into question how we see ourselves and others in the racist society of mid-20th-century New England. In a reversal of the usual pattern, Boy Novak runs away from New York City and her brutally abusive father to a small town where she meets and marries Arturo Whitman, a talented artisan with a beautiful young daughter, Snow. Boy never imagined herself as an evil stepmother, but when she and Arturo have their own baby girl, Bird, the Whitman family secrets are revealed and events spin out of Boy's control. Ultimately, Boy learns some secrets about her own background, and this become more than a novel about race and passing, as other kinds of identities become blurred, and even the worst villains turn out to be more complicated than we thought.
Oyeyemi's transformative take on the traditional fairy tale and the way she weaves that story of the tyranny of the mirror and standards of beauty into something even more relevant to today is wonderfully inventive. To quote the New York Times reviewer, it is "[g]loriously unsettling." Add to that Oyeymi's marvelous style, "jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others," and this becomes a reading experience that, for me at least, drew me in and wouldn't let go. I don't know if she's planned a sequel (I suspect not), but if she does write one, I'll be first in line!
Jason Gurley's Eleanor (2016) takes a tragic family narrative and makes it more than a poignant, deeply moving story by incorporating elements of speculative fiction that enhance rather than distract from the human elements that make it so moving. It's about loss and love and how, in families, people can both damage and save one another.
Eleanor is intricately crafted and works on many levels: the naturalistic stories of Eleanor, her sister, her mother, and her grandmother, and other, more magical realities where Eleanor meets strange and mysterious characters who may be more than they appear. This is a tender and powerful, haunting and genre-defying novel, and Jason Gurley is a generous, open-hearted, and compassionate writer.
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George is easily the most romantic and sentimental of these three novels, and that may be why it has been such a bestseller. This is the second time I've read it, though (my book group will be discussing it next Friday), and I have decided there is a solid core to this novel that the Washington Post reviewer dismissed as a "confection." Yes, it's set in fantasy locations - Paris, the coast of France, Provence - that are described in gorgeous, delicious detail. Yes, the characters are generally nice, decent, and attractive in various ways, some fairly quirky. But that doesn't make it mindless fluff.
This is a road story, a quest story, with a hero who needs to learn to live again, after twenty years of loneliness and grief. Jean Perdu is the fifty-year-old owner of the bookshop, or rather the book barge, the Literary Apothecary, moored on the Seine, where he not only sells books but, because of his ability to read people as well as literature, he prescribes books that will be helpful to his customers who are experiencing "minor to moderate emotional turmoil." Some of us can relate to that, I think. I have read novels years ago that I thought were wonderful, but not mentioning them to certain people for fear they might open personal wounds, but insisting that someone else read a certain book because I knew it was just what that person needed. (And having that person confirm later that I was right.) Perdu can prescribe for others, but he is unable or unwilling to heal himself, until a letter from the past confronts him with a truth that changes everything. So he unties his boat and sets off down the rivers and canals of France to find . . . what? He doesn't know.
There is no Holy Grail for Jean Perdu, but there are large and small discoveries, about the world and himself, that will help him to reclaim his life and find happiness again. The assortment of new friends, new places, and new experiences is mostly delightful, due at least in part to Nina George's writing and her excellent translator, Simon Pare (it was first published in German), and sometimes very sad. But the greatest sadness is within Jean Perdu (perdu is, after all, French for lost), as he struggles to open himself to life once again, and each step he takes toward that goal, and toward helping his companions find what they are looking for, kept me turning the pages.
It is a lovely book, light enough to read on the beach, on a plane (or on a boat), thoughtful enough to make some worthwhile observations about life and relationships, not only with others but with ourselves. For example:
Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.
Reading, however, is a very good habit. I hope your summer reading is going well.
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