In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land. Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.”
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John Updike made the life of Boston’s suburban elite his territory—emphasizing their sense of entitlement and superiority, their “clubbiness,” their alcoholism, and their sexual experimentation as a way of proving they exist. One generation later, Lily King, like her fellow Massachusetts authors Susan, George, and Eliza Minot, shares her own insights into what sometimes passed for family life in a similar, but more “Brahmin” suburban setting. Dividing her novel into three parts, Lily King tells the story of Daley Amory, daughter of Gardiner and Meredith Amory, from her eleventh birthday, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, through her forties and the election of Barack Obama. Though she lives for long periods of time during those years without contact with her alcoholic father, she never really escapes her need for him, even, on occasion, subsuming her own “best interests” to care for him. A fascinating look at the extent to which girls and women yearn for a father and the lengths to which they might go to make that father love them.
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, 2010 reviews, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, US Regional on Jun 30th, 2010
Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their significant physical challenges as limitations, and by taking them on day-trips which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops. His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. When he arrives in New York, he takes a job caring for a teenager who is near death from muscular dystrophy. In a profane and casual stream-of-consciousness style, Trevor reveals all his thoughts as they occur. By correlating these scattered thoughts, the reader soon becomes aware that Trevor is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, a young man with serious problems finding his place in the world. As he and Ed, his charge, negotiate their lives, the novel becomes a psychological study of two people learning how to channel anger into kindness.
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In deciding to explore the complex and agonizing story of her brother’s life, Cuban author Cristina Garcia abandons her usual prose and writes in poetry, a form more appropriate for the intense feelings she bears toward her brother, a sick and broken man who was routinely victimized by his family as a child. Tracing her brother’s life from his birth in 1960, when the family became one of the first families to escape to New York from Castro’s Cuba, she recreates his life through poetry, up to 2007, when the book was first published. These short poems in free verse engage the reader in filling in some blanks, and as one does, the growing horrors of this child’s life; the author’s own feelings of guilt for being unable (for whatever reason) to stop the torments her brother endured; her intense resentments against her parents, especially her mother; and her abiding sadness for the shell of a man her brother has become threaten to overwhelm the reader in the same degree that they must have overwhelmed the author.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Todd Lincoln, Edvard Munch, and even, reportedly, Mae West were only a few of the famous adherents of Spiritualism, a movement which swept the country from around 1850 through the 1920s. In CAPTIVITY, author Deborah Noyes recreates the story of this movement from its inauspicious start by two children—Margaret “Maggie” Fox, age fourteen, and her younger sister “Kate,” age eleven. These children, just by appearing in the small houses in their neighborhood near Rochester, New York, could inspire rappings by “other-worldly presences” on the walls, tables, and ceilings. Alternating with the story of the Fox children is a parallel narrative beginning in London in 1835. Clara Gill, a shy nineteen-year-old painter of animals, falls for an assistant zookeeper who is way below her “station.” The novel succeeds in creating the mood of the times and the circumstances which made Spiritualism such an attractive alternative to the traditional beliefs of the day, and the characters’ personalities often give life to these alternative points of view.
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