Many readers will find How It All Began the best novel Lively has written so far, primarily because the characters and their issues sound so familiar. With characters who comment insightfully and often ironically about their lives while dealing with their latest crises, the novel also features graceful prose and sparkling dialogue to give this novel a thematic heft which is rare in current fiction. The novel opens with the mugging of Charlotte Rainsford, age seventy-eight. Her subsequent recovery from a broken hip at the home of her daughter and son-in-law begins the cycle of change from which ripples radiate for the rest of the novel. Charlotte’s daughter Rose works part-time as a personal assistant to Lord Peters, an elderly former history professor who spends his time doing obscure historical research. Rose’s need to stay home with Charlotte at the beginning of her recuperation leads to the arrival of Lord Henry Peters’s niece, Marion Clark, who comes to Lord Peters’s estate to fill in. Marion, a successful interior designer, is having an affair with the married Jeremy Dalton, who feels no qualms about betraying his wife. When Jeremy’s wife Stella discovers a revealing text message from Marion on Jeremy’s cellphone, “The Dalton’s marriage broke up, [all] because Charlotte Rainsford was mugged.” Rippling out, the novel studies how one random event can permanently affect the lives of dozens of people.
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Dan Vyleta’s THE QUIET TWIN offers a unique perspective on the growing menace of National Socialism in Vienna, in 1939. Using an ordinary apartment building and the events which affect the seemingly ordinary characters who inhabit it as a microcosm for the terrifying realities which are about to come, Vyleta creates an almost unparalleled atmosphere of fear and dread. Otto Frei and his sister are twins, and Zuzka and her sister Dasa are twins, but the real “twins” of this novel’s title are all the individual characters who have “quiet twins” – completely different selves in private from what is known in public to everyone else, including sometimes the reader. An absorbing literary novel, which never loses its way as it progresses, it is ultimately a horror novel which out-horrors almost all others, not because of the awful events which unfold, but because the unfolding action feels so casual and so domestic in the context of the residents’ lives. Throughout the action, each character decides in a moment of crisis, that “just this once” s/he will ignore the promises made to others and the values which have always been paramount in civilized society in favor of what works best for himself/herself at that moment. The result is a societal compromise of epic proportions, one which allows the Nazi menace to take hold.
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In this readable, exciting, and historically enlightening novel with two separate plots, Audrey Schulman accomplishes an incredible task. She makes the individual plots totally compelling and uniquely character-driven as they shift back and forth in alternating chapters, always leaving the reader panting for more and anxious to keep reading toward a conclusion. What is most seductive about the novel is that the plots take place in two different time periods and settings—one, in the area of what is now Kenya in 1899, and the other, in Virunga National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, in 2000. In the first plot a man from Bangor, Maine, responsible for building a railroad from Mombasa to Kisumu, through Amboseli, must deal with two large and bloodthirsty lions, reportedly over nine feet in length, as they lie waiting to pick off railroad workers; in the second, a young scientist with Asperger’s Syndrome is charged with finding a vine that is consumed by mountain gorillas and which dramatically reduces the incidence of both stroke and heart disease in their species. If Max, the researcher is able to obtain samples of the vine, a pharmaceutical company will, among other benefits, provide armed security to ensure the survival of the gorilla population in Virunga National Park, ad infinitum. Somehow Schulman manages to connect these two disparate plots in the conclusion, leaving the reader wholly satisfied on all levels.
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Always an astute observer and subtle writer about human nature, Anita Desai is at her best here, creating a group of three novellas, each of which reveals the interplay between a main character dealing with universal issues and a second character (sometimes more) who sees the world and its values quite differently. The result is book that feels almost sacred, in the sense that it is morally serious and filled with thematically weighty stories. These stories, however, reveal subtle, unspoken lessons – neither moralistic, obvious, nor absolute. In all the novellas, the main character, approaching the end of a problem, might well conclude that what s/he wants, “[is] dead, a dead loss, a waste of time,” a statement actually made in the final novella, “The Artist of Disappearance.” For the involved reader, however, “the loss” is not the point. What the reader gains is a new appreciation of the small joys and great sorrows which fill the lives of plain people in rural India trying to find beauty and, perhaps, the fulfillment of dreams within an overwhelming reality. All the characters want to preserve something beautiful and important to them, but all must persevere against forces which consider their own goals to be more important than those of the people with whom they are dealing. Ultimately, each main character becomes an “artist of disappearance,” either physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
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Setting his latest novel on the Oronsay, a passenger ship going between Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and London in 1954, Michael Ondaatje writes his most accessible, and, in many ways, most enjoyable novel ever. Having grown up in Ceylon, from which he himself was sent to England to be educated as a boy, the author certainly understands what it feels like to be a child on a ship for three weeks, like his main character here, but author Ondaatje says that all the characters in the book are fictional, including the main character. The novel has such a ring of truth and Ondaatje’s depiction of the characters is so true to the perceptions of an eleven-year-old traveling on his own, however, that it is difficult to remember that the boy in the book is imagined and not real. Since the boy grows up and becomes an author like Ondaatje, his adult conclusions as he looks back on the importance of these events and what they have meant in the grand scheme of his life become even more vivid.
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