I dare say I can't even begin to say anything about this book without first saying: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a tequila book. You know how when you say the word tequila, at least half your listeners will go "awww" caught momentarily in some horrific tequila memory? It's almost universal. This book elicits a similar response with the exception that the memory is no NO WAY horrific. It's just that good.
So, for a girl who prides herself on her expectation management skills, having just finished some stellar Garland, I truly feel like I am tempting the fates. So, I really hunkered down and told myself as long this book did anything short of sucking I would be happy.
For anyone whose ever felt darkness coming (and who hasn't?) this is your novel.
A Spot of Bother is a novel about George, his wife Jean, their son Jamie, daughter Katie, and the necessary peripheral people that come with each. Jean is having an affair, Jamie is a (gasp) homosexual, Katie is about to marry a man she doesn't love, and George is slowly, relatively gracefully going insane. Which among them is craziest is totally a matter of opinion.
The novel covers about an eight week period after George first discovers his "cancer" at a suit fitting for the funeral of a friend. George, of course, keeps his cancer (and his crazy) secret, which really isn't that difficult when you are surrounded by some of the most self-absorbed people on the planet. To the point where I am a little surprised I was not more wholly annoyed with all of them, George included.
It's the humor that saves it. Haddon's story is damn funny. The perspective changes seamlessly between each of the family members. Often times specific events are narrated from Jean's perspective, only to be completely repeated from Katie's or George's in the very next pages. Initially, it highlights the total self-absorption of the characters, but as the novel progresses it demonstrates the evolutions of the various characters and at the same time illustrates how easy it is to miss the point - for all of us.
As the book progresses, each of the characters has to come out of themselves, to varying degrees. Jamie is probably the funniest and most methodical about it. After a anti-climatic break up and the requisite self-serving wallowing, Jamie decides he wants to fix it. He does so mostly because he realizes he's in danger of becoming one of those people "who cares about furniture more than other people" which would mean he would spend all of his time with others like him, which means they would care more about the furniture than they care about him. You see how this is going. The interior conversations Jamie has with himself about how to go about caring about other people and what it means to him on his way to actually caring about other people is priceless.
So, it's a really funny sad book. All of the "comic caper" reviews had me expecting something a little lighter to be honest. There is real sadness in this book. Sadness about what real life is really like and what it eventually becomes, expectation, fear. It is definitely funny when a grown man of a certain position in life finds himself lying in a ditch to avoid relatives on the street, except that it's really not. Part of the gift of this writer is that he can make us laugh about it, but at it's core it's a comedy about a whole lot of things most of us don't find very funny.
I would call this novel a success. It's not as tight as the previous, but c'mon. There are moments where the characters (Jean especially, I think) become grating to the point where you just don't want to hear it anymore, or you want to slap them upside their heads; however, as soon as you loose patience Haddon somehow turns it around by making you laugh or making you realize you're like that too.
I'm relieved. It's far better than I dared hoped.
Remainder - Tom McCarthy.
The premise of this book is that a unnamed, 30 year-old narrator was the victim of an accident where an unnamed "thing" fell from the sky injuring him badly. When he awakes from his coma, his life is irrevocably changed for many reasons. The two major ones being that "[he has] to understand things before I can do them" and his "settlement." That first one, although it seems somewhat innocuous on the surface, well let me not get ahead of myself.
The book opens with a first person account of our narrator getting news of the settlement that's been dangled in front of him throughout his PT. As he re-learned to walk, feed himself, dress etc nurses and doctors constantly referred to his settlement and all the comfort it would buy him. Then he receives 8 1/2 million pounds. THEN, he invests it in a fund that replaces it almost as fast as he can spend it, and spend it he does.
Our narrator now has 8 1/2 million pounds to finance his crazy. Think about that for a minute. Having the money to finance whatever brand of crazy you have. Right?
Our narrator has a moment of deja vu after receiving his settlement and remembers a place where he felt whole - or mostly remembers it. The first thing he sets about doing is recreating that place. Not just the apartment in which he lived though, he wants the same views, the same neighbors, the same smells, the same conversations etc. He hires Naz, a project planner of sorts, to help bring his vision to fruition. It starts out a plan to help a displaced man feel at home again, excessive but understandable. But the problem is, if you feed crazy it will grow.
The crazy spreads, oozing into other parts of his life. He ventures out of his new domicile rarely, but when he does so he ends up wanting to recreate every experience he has. Actors must be hired, locations found and reconstructed to match the places where the original occurrence happened. The re-enactments then take place round the clock so that the narrator can come and watch or participate at any time. Eventually, there are re-enactments of events that didn't happen to the narrator but interest him, and eventually the re-enactments kind of sort of take over the real, as you can imagine well-financed crazy would.
It's a good read. For the most part it speeds along except for when it intentionally comes to a crawl. The first person narration is more effective than I originally thought it might be, but as the story progresses maintaining the unnamed narrators perspective is key to accepting the events that take place in the final act of the novel. The only complaint I have about the book is that there are times where the descent into the narrator's thought process that is so key to his crazy goes on for too long. It isn't funny or scary, it flirts with boring, like the person you get stuck next to a party that wants to give you all the finer details of having planted a tree in their front yard this morning.
Ultimately, for me, what worked so well in this novel was the opening conceit: having to understand before you can do. The novel illustrates the things the narrator can eventually understand and do and those he can't and the things he thinks he does and doesn't and things he does but doesn't realize it. You get the picture.
The book opens with a first person account of our narrator getting news of the settlement that's been dangled in front of him throughout his PT. As he re-learned to walk, feed himself, dress etc nurses and doctors constantly referred to his settlement and all the comfort it would buy him. Then he receives 8 1/2 million pounds. THEN, he invests it in a fund that replaces it almost as fast as he can spend it, and spend it he does.
Our narrator now has 8 1/2 million pounds to finance his crazy. Think about that for a minute. Having the money to finance whatever brand of crazy you have. Right?
Our narrator has a moment of deja vu after receiving his settlement and remembers a place where he felt whole - or mostly remembers it. The first thing he sets about doing is recreating that place. Not just the apartment in which he lived though, he wants the same views, the same neighbors, the same smells, the same conversations etc. He hires Naz, a project planner of sorts, to help bring his vision to fruition. It starts out a plan to help a displaced man feel at home again, excessive but understandable. But the problem is, if you feed crazy it will grow.
The crazy spreads, oozing into other parts of his life. He ventures out of his new domicile rarely, but when he does so he ends up wanting to recreate every experience he has. Actors must be hired, locations found and reconstructed to match the places where the original occurrence happened. The re-enactments then take place round the clock so that the narrator can come and watch or participate at any time. Eventually, there are re-enactments of events that didn't happen to the narrator but interest him, and eventually the re-enactments kind of sort of take over the real, as you can imagine well-financed crazy would.
It's a good read. For the most part it speeds along except for when it intentionally comes to a crawl. The first person narration is more effective than I originally thought it might be, but as the story progresses maintaining the unnamed narrators perspective is key to accepting the events that take place in the final act of the novel. The only complaint I have about the book is that there are times where the descent into the narrator's thought process that is so key to his crazy goes on for too long. It isn't funny or scary, it flirts with boring, like the person you get stuck next to a party that wants to give you all the finer details of having planted a tree in their front yard this morning.
Ultimately, for me, what worked so well in this novel was the opening conceit: having to understand before you can do. The novel illustrates the things the narrator can eventually understand and do and those he can't and the things he thinks he does and doesn't and things he does but doesn't realize it. You get the picture.
Tesseract/Alex Garland
First, I love, love, loved The Beach, not the DiCaprio abomination put on large screens all across the land, but the novel in all it's "game over," weed smoking, traveling beauty. There I said it. I should have stared with: First, I wanted to hate the beach, because I did, but I didn't and so you have the first that I wrote first. Then, I read Coma. I was not as immediately stuck by that novella; it crept up on me slowly. It took me almost a week to love it. Enter The Tesseract. I know better than to expect much. Two novels I love by the same author in order with no offending trite bullshit (I'm looking at you Oates) in between? I sat it on it for months. Pulled it out and moved it around on my desk every few days. Read and reread the glowing reviews and thought, yeah, well you can't very well turn on the author of the fist great novel of Generation X now can you? (No shit, reviewers said that about TB) Then, I had to take a trip for work, one that I knew would be unfathomably noxious, so I threw it in the bag. I guess I just outed myself as still hopeful, but I promise my expectation management (something at which I EXCEL) was in full force.
I was almost all the way through page six and almost wholly apathetic, but then the novel took off. "Everything weird was the bottom line, and Sean had reached it quickly." Really? How does it take that little for the hair on the back of my neck to come to full attention and for me to be unabashedly ecstatic for what's to come? I mean really, what kind of whore am I? A sated one I am happy to tell you.
The Tesseract is a story in three parts. the primary action covers about a sixty minute window on the streets of Manila where a British seaman and a Filipino gangster are set to hash out protection payment issues. The culmination of this meeting brings together the characters from the other two segments of the story, but not before the narrative dissolves into back stories for both. It has no doubt been compared to Pulp Fiction in it's delivery. The novel does a stellar job of weaving the current moment for the three different stories with the necessary back stories as well as keeping them thinly related to one another real time. That means nothing feels cheap, no coincidence that makes your teeth itch, not little tid bit kept from the reader past the second where they should know. It's straight up, honest story telling.
The same voice narrates each of the three stories and so there is a consistency of tone regardless of the age, sex, background of the character. More importantly this allows for each character to be drawn not just from the perspective of the narrator and what the narrator knows, but from what the narrator can report about those around the central characters and their interactions. This is, for this reader, a huge part of the success of the novel. The development of each character in starts and stops from a myriad of viewpoints results in living breathing people on the page. Once you accomplish that, the rest is just easier. If characters are compelling, believable, relatable creations then everything they do becomes interesting even if it isn't. And, of course, everything that happens here is interesting.
Each of the "main" characters spends a fair amount of time in their own head, and I can appreciate the Coma-esque moments that Sean in particular experiences in his panic. The interior monologue gives the reader a glimpse into the how and why easily avoidable events aren't. It also heightens the thrill of the novel even though it makes some of the events even more predictable.
The best part of the novel though, are in these little, almost lost moments where the truly peripheral characters shine. One of the "main" characters is Rosa, an accomplished physician in Manila. Her father is deaf due to an accident. Amid the chaos that is the crescendo of her back story they share an exchange that is both heart wrenching and grounding. She has a similar experience thirty years later in a park with an unnamed stranger. These moments exist for each of the "main" characters, making their lives seem more ordinary, but at the same time more valuable.
He's done it again.
I was almost all the way through page six and almost wholly apathetic, but then the novel took off. "Everything weird was the bottom line, and Sean had reached it quickly." Really? How does it take that little for the hair on the back of my neck to come to full attention and for me to be unabashedly ecstatic for what's to come? I mean really, what kind of whore am I? A sated one I am happy to tell you.
The Tesseract is a story in three parts. the primary action covers about a sixty minute window on the streets of Manila where a British seaman and a Filipino gangster are set to hash out protection payment issues. The culmination of this meeting brings together the characters from the other two segments of the story, but not before the narrative dissolves into back stories for both. It has no doubt been compared to Pulp Fiction in it's delivery. The novel does a stellar job of weaving the current moment for the three different stories with the necessary back stories as well as keeping them thinly related to one another real time. That means nothing feels cheap, no coincidence that makes your teeth itch, not little tid bit kept from the reader past the second where they should know. It's straight up, honest story telling.
The same voice narrates each of the three stories and so there is a consistency of tone regardless of the age, sex, background of the character. More importantly this allows for each character to be drawn not just from the perspective of the narrator and what the narrator knows, but from what the narrator can report about those around the central characters and their interactions. This is, for this reader, a huge part of the success of the novel. The development of each character in starts and stops from a myriad of viewpoints results in living breathing people on the page. Once you accomplish that, the rest is just easier. If characters are compelling, believable, relatable creations then everything they do becomes interesting even if it isn't. And, of course, everything that happens here is interesting.
Each of the "main" characters spends a fair amount of time in their own head, and I can appreciate the Coma-esque moments that Sean in particular experiences in his panic. The interior monologue gives the reader a glimpse into the how and why easily avoidable events aren't. It also heightens the thrill of the novel even though it makes some of the events even more predictable.
The best part of the novel though, are in these little, almost lost moments where the truly peripheral characters shine. One of the "main" characters is Rosa, an accomplished physician in Manila. Her father is deaf due to an accident. Amid the chaos that is the crescendo of her back story they share an exchange that is both heart wrenching and grounding. She has a similar experience thirty years later in a park with an unnamed stranger. These moments exist for each of the "main" characters, making their lives seem more ordinary, but at the same time more valuable.
He's done it again.
Last Dragon/JM McDermott
Man I dig this book. I mean really, really dig.
It's confusing as all hell. I'll say that right up front. You're actually expected to read!?!?! There are no "markers" for the narrative. You know what means? None of those annoying conversations between characters to sum up the action thus far, no dates or times at the beginning of chapters, no establishing of age or location overtly. Halle - fucking- lujah. I'll trade three parts confusion for no parts being led by the nose any day of the goddamn week. Make that every day...
The whole novel gets delivered in short (3 page max) vignettes told (mostly) from the voice of Zahn, now an old woman, assumed to by dying. She is retelling her experience as a young warrior charged with hunting down her own grandfather and killing him. Of course nothing is ever that easy and a task that like that can't be accomplished alone.
One of the things that impressed me about this novel is that the narrative effectively mirrors (what I can believe are) the near death ramblings of a once great warrior. The non-linear, hazy feel of the novel reinforces this initial conceit from beginning to end. On top of that, the narrative is well-paced and some of the descriptions are fantastically compelling, to the point where you start to realize the parts most important to the now dying Zahn are far more colorful than those warrior Zahn might have highlighted then, which is a sign of pretty rich writing in my humble. It's not all perfect. There are some language issues that are distracting scattered throughout the novel. The vocabulary available to second language speakers in short order is often times unrealistic, especially when considered next to the language struggles described on other occasions. Also, the terms aren't always consistent or convincing, but these are small complaints.
I don't read a lot of fantasy, which is to say almost none. I've read other places that this novel breaks form with a lot of fantasy writing and has not been especially well received. Not knowing much about the genre it's hard for me to comment, but I will say for a reader with zero in terms of expectation I really enjoyed this book. The characters for the most part "pop" and remain true to form throughout the novel. Even the unlikable are compelling and the maze of secrets that underlie much of the story are reasonable and well-delivered.
I don't know, this doesn't make it sound all that likable really, does it? And yet, I really like it. There's something about it. Clearly, I can't put my finger on it, but it was wholly worth the read.
It's confusing as all hell. I'll say that right up front. You're actually expected to read!?!?! There are no "markers" for the narrative. You know what means? None of those annoying conversations between characters to sum up the action thus far, no dates or times at the beginning of chapters, no establishing of age or location overtly. Halle - fucking- lujah. I'll trade three parts confusion for no parts being led by the nose any day of the goddamn week. Make that every day...
The whole novel gets delivered in short (3 page max) vignettes told (mostly) from the voice of Zahn, now an old woman, assumed to by dying. She is retelling her experience as a young warrior charged with hunting down her own grandfather and killing him. Of course nothing is ever that easy and a task that like that can't be accomplished alone.
One of the things that impressed me about this novel is that the narrative effectively mirrors (what I can believe are) the near death ramblings of a once great warrior. The non-linear, hazy feel of the novel reinforces this initial conceit from beginning to end. On top of that, the narrative is well-paced and some of the descriptions are fantastically compelling, to the point where you start to realize the parts most important to the now dying Zahn are far more colorful than those warrior Zahn might have highlighted then, which is a sign of pretty rich writing in my humble. It's not all perfect. There are some language issues that are distracting scattered throughout the novel. The vocabulary available to second language speakers in short order is often times unrealistic, especially when considered next to the language struggles described on other occasions. Also, the terms aren't always consistent or convincing, but these are small complaints.
I don't read a lot of fantasy, which is to say almost none. I've read other places that this novel breaks form with a lot of fantasy writing and has not been especially well received. Not knowing much about the genre it's hard for me to comment, but I will say for a reader with zero in terms of expectation I really enjoyed this book. The characters for the most part "pop" and remain true to form throughout the novel. Even the unlikable are compelling and the maze of secrets that underlie much of the story are reasonable and well-delivered.
I don't know, this doesn't make it sound all that likable really, does it? And yet, I really like it. There's something about it. Clearly, I can't put my finger on it, but it was wholly worth the read.
Ice Queen/Alice Hoffman
I don't know why this novel brought Wally Lamb to mind, but it did. The prose are not lush like Lamb's and the story is not as dramatically delivered as Lamb tends to be - this is Hoffman after all. It might be something about the descriptions. In this novel, Hoffman gives the reader a glimpse into the internal life of the characters you rarely see and would never expect. Lamb, I think, does that as well, differently though.
Initially, the conceit of this novel seemed a little too easy to me and having just finished Alvarez the spareness was somewhat jarring, but within twenty or so pages Hoffman had me. Our Ice Queen is a single New Jersey librarian who made a wish when she was a child that ended her life as she knew it ad rendered her emotionally frozen and obsessed with death. Many years later, she is stuck by lightening and the great thaw begins.... See, you're rolling your eyes just a little aren't you? But it's a faerie tale people, and a good one.
I read some reviews that focus on the rebirth of Ice Queen. Her slow thaw to the world around her and what she's allowed herself to miss in her frozen state definitely drive the narrative. The thaw being the catalyst for all the action of the novel. The Ice Queen agrees to participate in a study with other survivors of lightening strikes, ultimately searching out the reclusive Lazarus, whose strike basically set him on fire, permanently. She's frozen, he is boiling, the middle ground is pretty obvious. In the meantime, there is a parallel story line between our narrator and her older brother, who shared in the tragic events set in motion by the young narrator's wish, and their relative estrangement. The study she joins is part of his work; therefore, drawing them closer while at the same time highlighting their distance. And so the narrator evolves into someone else, she sheds her cocoon and ...
but I was more struck by other elements. Hoffman's imagining of a faerie tale and the primal fears that drive such tales evolves into exploration of sorts for the source of that primal fear. The Ice Queen's strike might have sparked some heat into her frozen veins but it also gave her a quantifiable, comparable sort of damage. One that, I would argue, gave her a space from which to see others'. On some level, don't our fears generate as a direct result of our individual damage, or rather how we qualify that damage? It doesn't require the same event between two people for their fears to mirror one another, just a similar processing of their damage...or does it? I can't say I know for sure, but it is the thing at which this novel seems to be driving at - straight through your heart.
Initially, the conceit of this novel seemed a little too easy to me and having just finished Alvarez the spareness was somewhat jarring, but within twenty or so pages Hoffman had me. Our Ice Queen is a single New Jersey librarian who made a wish when she was a child that ended her life as she knew it ad rendered her emotionally frozen and obsessed with death. Many years later, she is stuck by lightening and the great thaw begins.... See, you're rolling your eyes just a little aren't you? But it's a faerie tale people, and a good one.
I read some reviews that focus on the rebirth of Ice Queen. Her slow thaw to the world around her and what she's allowed herself to miss in her frozen state definitely drive the narrative. The thaw being the catalyst for all the action of the novel. The Ice Queen agrees to participate in a study with other survivors of lightening strikes, ultimately searching out the reclusive Lazarus, whose strike basically set him on fire, permanently. She's frozen, he is boiling, the middle ground is pretty obvious. In the meantime, there is a parallel story line between our narrator and her older brother, who shared in the tragic events set in motion by the young narrator's wish, and their relative estrangement. The study she joins is part of his work; therefore, drawing them closer while at the same time highlighting their distance. And so the narrator evolves into someone else, she sheds her cocoon and ...
but I was more struck by other elements. Hoffman's imagining of a faerie tale and the primal fears that drive such tales evolves into exploration of sorts for the source of that primal fear. The Ice Queen's strike might have sparked some heat into her frozen veins but it also gave her a quantifiable, comparable sort of damage. One that, I would argue, gave her a space from which to see others'. On some level, don't our fears generate as a direct result of our individual damage, or rather how we qualify that damage? It doesn't require the same event between two people for their fears to mirror one another, just a similar processing of their damage...or does it? I can't say I know for sure, but it is the thing at which this novel seems to be driving at - straight through your heart.
Saving the World - Julia Alvarez
When is the last time you read a novel where at the end the great flaw in the love story wasn't laid bare to the reader? The dead spouse's lover doesn't come forward, the step-mother isn't hiding some awful secret in her past, no ghost of dead child lurking just a few pages ahead? I'm almost programmed to be guessing which of the myriad of possibilities it will be as soon as any character is established as truly in love with anyone. Julia Alvarez provides two such stories in one little novel. Go figure.
Saving the World is, on the surface, the story of Alma Huebner, happily-married one time author. She has a wonderful little life in Vermont that she came to lateish (39 gasp) with a husband who may be fussy but who loves her, good friends nearby, and an ailing surrogate mother across the yard. Her only problem is that her teeth have started to itch. She's struggling to finish a novel for which she's already taken the advance, she is too easily irritated with her loving husband and is becoming judgmental of her friends. Pretty standard every day stuff. That's the thing, Julia Alvarez, in the first half of this novel, does a stand up job of demonstrating how the everyday can be desperate, compelling, overwhelming, even when we know it isn't - when it's someone else's everyday.
The parallel story to Alma's is the book she's actually writing. It's not a book she had any intention to write, it just started. It's the imagining of the life a barely mentioned woman in the historical accounts of a Spanish expedition in the early 1800s. The kind of thing that's gotten popular lately. Alma, as her life gets to be too much for her, finds solace in her imagined Isabel (which might be one of the most romantic Spanish names in my humble). Isabel has a love story of her own. Again, it is far from perfect, never for a second idealized by the author (although often times by the character), and again there is no stunning twist. So we have these two women juxtaposed beautifully, most effectively in the moments where Alma seems the fictional imagining of someone who tells story for a living and Isabel flesh blood.
I don't generally love the two stories in one format. I generally find myself interest in only one of the two and skimming the other. Not this time. I was not equally interested, but my interest in both stories waxed and waned so that I stayed involved in both. That may be an incredible gift of pacing and it may be a result of my attention span, I'm not sure which. Neither story is happy, but they are woven together in a way that is totally satisfying and I'm prone to sad so your mileage may vary.
Saving the World is, on the surface, the story of Alma Huebner, happily-married one time author. She has a wonderful little life in Vermont that she came to lateish (39 gasp) with a husband who may be fussy but who loves her, good friends nearby, and an ailing surrogate mother across the yard. Her only problem is that her teeth have started to itch. She's struggling to finish a novel for which she's already taken the advance, she is too easily irritated with her loving husband and is becoming judgmental of her friends. Pretty standard every day stuff. That's the thing, Julia Alvarez, in the first half of this novel, does a stand up job of demonstrating how the everyday can be desperate, compelling, overwhelming, even when we know it isn't - when it's someone else's everyday.
The parallel story to Alma's is the book she's actually writing. It's not a book she had any intention to write, it just started. It's the imagining of the life a barely mentioned woman in the historical accounts of a Spanish expedition in the early 1800s. The kind of thing that's gotten popular lately. Alma, as her life gets to be too much for her, finds solace in her imagined Isabel (which might be one of the most romantic Spanish names in my humble). Isabel has a love story of her own. Again, it is far from perfect, never for a second idealized by the author (although often times by the character), and again there is no stunning twist. So we have these two women juxtaposed beautifully, most effectively in the moments where Alma seems the fictional imagining of someone who tells story for a living and Isabel flesh blood.
I don't generally love the two stories in one format. I generally find myself interest in only one of the two and skimming the other. Not this time. I was not equally interested, but my interest in both stories waxed and waned so that I stayed involved in both. That may be an incredible gift of pacing and it may be a result of my attention span, I'm not sure which. Neither story is happy, but they are woven together in a way that is totally satisfying and I'm prone to sad so your mileage may vary.
Our Lady of the Forest - Guterson
Our Anne. She's a pill popping runaway who picks mushrooms to get by because it's better than sharing a bed with her mother's meth addicted boyfriend at his leisure. Her desperation, is however, effectively downplayed in the novel. The matter of factness of her experience is laid bare in a way that isn't exactly shocking but makes it all acceptable. She shares the camp where she squats outside Seattle with Carolyn, the college educated, self-loathing, skeptic who takes full advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. Our Anne's priest is a struggling 30ish man who is exceptional only for his vow of celibacy and how that puts sex front and center in his life. His struggles are far less exalted than current events may lead one to expect - racy novels and impure thoughts being the worsr of his crimes.
The impact of the novel comes from the speed and thrall of events after the first of three promised apparitions by the Virgin Mother herself to Our Anne, as she comes to be known. I was a kid when Mary appeared to (was it six?) kids in Medjugoria. I remember them on 60 Minutes. I had friends who went to visit and came home with golden rosary beads. For reals. The hysteria around events like these vary, I'm sure, and that's the crux of this novel.
Guterson, without getting to preachy for my tastes, gives the reader insight into the effects of these "miracles" on a small fringe community and town on whose edge they live. Pilgrims begin arriving within 24 hours of the first vision and then the miracles begin, large and small: a woman is cured of warts, a lost sheep finds his path, a church that couldn't get financied gets built in under a year, a priest reasserts his faith and focus. And what of the apparitions? Real or imaginary? Does it matter? More importantly, has anyone really changed? Did we expect that they would? Do we need them to? The novel is as much about examining those questions as it is about telling a story, which is does well. As with all stories that deal with these kinds of issues (in my experience), it ends a little too easily, too neat, but it's compelling. Guterson gets less lost in the landscape then he did in my last read of him, for which I am grateful.
I have to confess, I am somewhat drawn to all thingsreligious and ghosty - that might have effected my read.
The impact of the novel comes from the speed and thrall of events after the first of three promised apparitions by the Virgin Mother herself to Our Anne, as she comes to be known. I was a kid when Mary appeared to (was it six?) kids in Medjugoria. I remember them on 60 Minutes. I had friends who went to visit and came home with golden rosary beads. For reals. The hysteria around events like these vary, I'm sure, and that's the crux of this novel.
Guterson, without getting to preachy for my tastes, gives the reader insight into the effects of these "miracles" on a small fringe community and town on whose edge they live. Pilgrims begin arriving within 24 hours of the first vision and then the miracles begin, large and small: a woman is cured of warts, a lost sheep finds his path, a church that couldn't get financied gets built in under a year, a priest reasserts his faith and focus. And what of the apparitions? Real or imaginary? Does it matter? More importantly, has anyone really changed? Did we expect that they would? Do we need them to? The novel is as much about examining those questions as it is about telling a story, which is does well. As with all stories that deal with these kinds of issues (in my experience), it ends a little too easily, too neat, but it's compelling. Guterson gets less lost in the landscape then he did in my last read of him, for which I am grateful.
I have to confess, I am somewhat drawn to all thingsreligious and ghosty - that might have effected my read.
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