Where Those Interviews Can Go: The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens

One of my favorite assignments in the English composition class I teach to college freshmen asks them to conduct three interviews, ideally with their oldest living relatives. I offer to let them "borrow a senior citizen" if they don't have candidates either in their own families or at least those of their friends or roommates. Invariably, when they write their end-of-semester reflection, they mention the interview experience as a highlight of the semester.

When I mentioned this project to a book club friend, she told me I had to read The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens. The protagonist Joe Calvert is fighting the odds after a difficult family life. He never knew his father, and his mother is an alcoholic who often leaves his autistic half-brother unattended, putting increasing pressure on Joe. But he has worked to save money for college, where he ends up in a biography class with a course-long assignment, similar to mine. Since he knows none of the older generation of his family, he goes to a local nursing home seeking a subject to interview.

Resistant at first to his project, the personnel match him up with Carl Iverson who, after spending thirty years of a life sentence for the rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl, has been paroled, when he reaches the final stages of cancer. While Joe at first finds him repugnant, based on Iverson's alleged crime, he begins to see holes in the story that led to his sentencing and begins to investigate the crime himself.

He ends up working with his neighbor Lila, who ignored him but befriended his brother Jeremy. Over the course of the narrative, he struggles to keep up his studies and hold down his job in a bar, with obstacles from his alcoholic mother, who often leaves Jeremy alone and defenseless.

Eskens weaves an intriguing story that reminds readers that everyone has a story--and it's not usually the story we expect to hear.

Where Those Interviews Can Go: The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens

Review of Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians

Of course we judge books by the cover! Not since elementary school have readers been satisfied by those library-bound generic blue and green covers. I'm often drawn to cover art, and I've even heard that books with blue on the cover sell better than others. I have also heard plenty of evidence that the human eye is drawn to text. (Why else do I lean in close to try to read strangers' tattoos?)

For my people, though, Cathleen Schine's recent novel The Grammarians appealed to me strictly on the basis of the title. The novel tells the story of twin sisters Daphne and Lauren Wolfe, who shared a private twin language from the time they were babbling infants, as well as an intense fascination with language. Their philology only increases when their father brings home a huge used copy of Webster's New International Dictionary, which he places on the stand the girls call an altar. Ironically, they discover the volume is missing the page where the word altar would have been defined.

Schine's chapter divisions are marked by entries from Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language,  often words strangely related to their unique relationship. As the girls grow up, much of the time sharing an apartment and even wearing matching clothes into young adulthood, they also make awkward attempts to separate. Laurel has a nose job, which Daphne takes as a direct affront. They have a double wedding--challenging since Daphne isn't even dating anyone when Lauren becomes engaged. Daphne lands a receptionist job at a small newspaper, where she moves first into a copy editing position, and eventually becomes a language columnist writing for Vogue. Laurel, lacking any actual qualifications, lands a job teaching kindergarten at a private school until she turns lines from government publications into found poetry.

Sometimes the jumps in time are surprisingly abrupt, skipping years, even decades. Shine surrounds the girls not only with loving, quirky parents but with an extended family and a set of work friends and spouses that often serve as ideal foil characters.

The best part of the book for me, the part I want to discuss with other readers who also love words, is the girls' razor sharp fascination with language. The longer I read, the quicker I anticipated the girls' response to misuse of words and phrases. While I am often disappointed when a plot line is predicable, my own recognition of the Wolfe girls' sensitivity to language gave me the satisfaction of an omniscient narrator. "I knew you'd catch that one!" I wanted to cheer each time the girls homed in on some misuse or when they found themselves fascinated by the flexibility of words with multiple meanings. In fact, by the end of the book, I'd made a list. Now if only I had a twin with whom to share it.

Review of Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians

Tom Hanks' Uncommon Type: A Study in Voice

I picked up the audiobook of Tom Hanks' short story collection Uncommon Type on a whim. I knew he'd been in Nashville promoting the book, but I hadn't heard much about it from my reading circles. Since the narrator of a book can make or break the experience, I was pleased to note that Hanks was reading his own work.

Just as the audience has to suspend disbelief when seeing the same actor in different roles--think Forrest Gump, Big, You've Got Mail--hearing the familiar voice delivering these stories might have been a distraction. It wasn't.
The first story "Three Exhausting Weeks" introduces a four characters that reappear in a couple of later stories, four friends who couldn't be more different from one another. The narrator has minimal pressure to work, having inherited money after his mother's death, leaving him time for adventures with his friends: Anna, the only female in the group, and two males--Steve Wong, a prodigious bowler and new citizen MDash.

Hanks manages to inject a little magical realism and time travel in some stories, while the others are realistic, even nostalgic. In only one story does the narration shift from Hanks alone to a cast that comes across like reader's theatre, or an episode of "Guy Noir, Private Eye."

The sole element that unites the story is the presence of at least once vintage manual typewriter in each story. I found myself listening for it the way Hitchcock fans kept an eye peeled for his cameo shot in each film.

The stories stand on their own with out the celebrity factor. In fact, the dramatist's eye for the specific and tangible, as well as his ear for clever dialogue made for a surprisingly pleasant reading experience.

Tom Hanks' Uncommon Type: A Study in Voice

Furious Hours: The Book Harper Lee Didn't Write

Since I've never denied that Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is on the short list of my favorite books--to read and re-read as well as to teach--I was eager to pick up Casey Cep's book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

The books begins not with Lee but with the story of Willie Maxwell, who returned to South Alabama after military service first to do work in a local plant and then to become the Rev. Willie Maxwell. The book details a series of mysterious deaths--two wives, a neighbor (and the late husband of wife number two), a nephew, and a step daughter. In each case, he was never convicted, thanks primarily to his lawyer Tom Radney.

Cep shifts between main characters, describing Radney's political career, including an unsuccessful run for Alabama Lt. Governor. The author deftly weaves together her extensive research on the parties involved in the trial before turning her attention to Lee.

The ironic twist comes when Maxwell is killed at the funeral of his step-daughter (and yes, Maxwell was the obvious suspect). Who defends the shooter Robert Burns? Maxwell's lawyer Radney. The trial held in Alexander City draws lots of attention, but most significantly that of Harper Lee. The author, already well-known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, sat through the trial and gathered extensive research of her own, intending to overcome her writer's block and turn it into her second book.

Cep takes the reader through Nell Harper Lee's history before, during, and after there writing of Mockingbird. This including her lifelong connection to Truman Capote first as childhood friends and later as collaborators as Lee assisted Capote in his research for In Cold Blood. She paints a complex and candid picture of the author's life and even her struggle with alcohol.

Eventually, Cep manages to do what Lee could not: find a way to tell this complicated story that evoked as much rumor and innuendo as fact.

Furious Hours: The Book Harper Lee Didn't Write

The War to End All Wars--and the Next One: The Alice Network and the Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

 I can't always call them coincidences--those occurrences when I find myself encountering similar elements in more than one book I am reading. (For the record, everything I've read recently has mentioned migration patterns of monarch butterflies and the activities of hummingbirds.)

When I started reading Kate Quinn's novel The Alice Network, I was just following up on recommendations from several friends. (Thank you, Mary June!) This novel follows Charlie St. Clair, a flighty American girl who, after coming home from college pregnant, is taken to London by her parents to take care of her "little problem." She has other ideas, though, since her closest cousin has disappeared. She traces her to a crusty anti-social woman with maimed hands who at first   refuses to help her, but then agrees

to pursue leads, driven a handsome, rough-hewn ex-com in her employ.

The story then shifts back and forth between Charlie's search and the back story of Eve Gardiner, who had served as a spy in what was called "The Alice Network" in German-occupied France.

Simultaneously, I had started reading The Impossible Lives of Great Wells by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Andrew Sean Greer. This novel followed a woman who undergoes electro-shock therapy in 1985 after losing her twin brother to AIDS and her lover, who simply leaves her for someone else. As she goes through the series of treatments, she is sent back first to 1918 and next to 1941. While she's the same person, surrounded again by her brother Felix, her lover/husband Nathan, and even her favorite aunt, she sees her live unfold differently each time, set against the back drop of WWI and WWII.

As she moves between lives, she realizes that her other selves are moving into the lives she has left. While I don't like gimmick for gimmick's sake, I enjoyed Greer's take on how one change in our lives can have ripple effects and how changing our time and place can cause changes in us as well.

Both novels--so different from one another--gave me a look at the effect of both great wars both on the front and on the home front.

The War to End All Wars--and the Next One: The Alice Network and the Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl:

Anyone in Nashville who loves books and good writing has probably heard the name Margaret Renkl. Her book launch at Parnassus Books was an event! With the release of her book Late Migrations, plenty of other readers should know the name soon. I read one of the short pieces from the book in the Oxford American magazine, "The Imperfect Family Beatitudes." I was hooked.

The book, which can be classified as part flash memoir, part essay collection, digs back into Renkl's family history, recording stories told by her grandmother (e.g., "In Which Grandmother Tells the Story of the Day She was Shot), making inferences about the author's mother's depression, and chronicling events from her childhood (e.g. "Things I Knew When I Was Six" and "Things I Didn't Know When I Was Six.")

With none of the essays or sketches more than three pages, she also weaves in her keen observations of plant life, Monarch butterflies, and--literally--the birds and the bees. And while each piece is short, this is not one of those books to be stacked with the Readers Digest copies in the powder room for quick reads. I found myself turning "one more page, one more essay" without a break. She makes use of specific but unpretentious language to describe the world around her--from Lower Alabama to Nashville.

Her occasional literary allusions are delightful for literary sorts without being off-putting to any of her readers. As a result, she has produced a reading experience that will have readers ticking off a list of people who must read the book next.

Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl:

Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich never writes the same book twice. That should go without saying of any author, but plenty seem to write a variation of the same book over and over. (I'll not name names for diplomatic reasons.) Her most recent novel Future Home of the Living God starts as the story of a young woman Cedar Songmaker exploring her roots and meeting her birth mother. She does find it odd that as the child of a Native American mother, a non-native family had been able to adopt her, usually prevented by law to maintain ethnicity.

She meets Mary Potts, Senior. (since her own birth name was Mary Potts), Mary's husband,  and her own half sister, a troubled teenager with a drug habit whose clothing seems more like costuming.

Readers learn early that Cedar is pregnant and single, though she reveals some details about the baby's father early in the tale. Gradually, though, Erdrich's tale takes a dystopian turn, first merely suggested, and then explained for fully: Something has gone wrong in nature and evolution seems to be reversing. Not only are plant and animal life affected, but something strange seems to be happening with pregnancies and the delivery of new babies. In fact, as government control increases, pregnant women are expected to turn themselves in or to be arrested and held at special hospitals--conveniently housed in prison facilities.

Cedar is challenged to protect herself and her unborn baby, drawing on help and support--often by stealth--from both the family that raised her and the family of her birth mother. The biggest challenge is learning whom to trust, particularly as citizens are granted incentives to turn on one another.

One interesting thread in the novel comes as Cedar embraces Catholicism, the faith of her birth mother, despite her Songmaker family's agnostic or atheistic beliefs. She observes other-worldly visions by Mary Potts, Senior, and other members of her community.

Erdrich is at her best when she puts her characters into complicated situations that force them to decide between trusting themselves or the members of the network they have built around them. For someone wanting a light summer read, this isn't it; for anyone wanting to be unsettled and engaged, this is a good choice.

Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God