“Son” – part 4 of “The Giver Quartet” by Lois Lowry

I discovered Lois Lowry when I worked as a substitute teacher in my local K-8 school district. A substitute doesn’t do grading and administrative work like a regular teacher, so during my “down” time, I read whatever was around. Later, I made a conscious decision to keep reading Young Adult fiction, in order to know what my teenaged friends were enjoying. I categorize these books as fantasy because of their (unexplained) supernatural elements.

The Giver grabbed my attention. 

The setting of The Giver is dystopian, a community where contentment is achieved by conformity and the suppression of emotions. The Giver is the first in a four book series. Son is the last, and I found it satisfying. It portrays personal growth and the (endless) battle between good and evil. Great plot! Half way through Son, I realized I had NO IDEA how the book would end.

An aspect of this book that I liked was its emphasis on preparation. If you are determined to do something difficult, can you prepare? Two contradictory scenarios play out. In one case, a young woman trains for years in order to surmount a physical/psychological challenge. Another teenager invests his time and effort in building a boat. Total failure. Soon after, he faces his enemy hastily and poorly prepared, but triumphs in a contest of wills. 

Lois Lowry wrote more than forty books, some of which have been adapted to film or stage, and The Giver was made into an opera. (I can’t imagine this.) I look forward to reading her memoirs. 

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“Run” by Ann Patchett

I found this book by accident, during my first post-Covid IRL visit to my local library! HOW did I miss it before? Run was Patchett’s second novel (2007), after the wonderful Bel Canto (2005). 

Run was ahead of its time in its consideration of race. The book triggered my curiosity about transracial adoption. 

The plot: A prominent white urban politician (and his wife) adopt two black children to “complete” their family after infertility thwarts their desire for a second child. The wife dies, and the father is left to raise a ten year old son and two preschoolers. Almost two decades later, the father learns that the birth mother of his two younger boys has “stalked” his family persistently. Perhaps this revelation had been inevitable. Everyone has to rethink his/her identity and role. A girl, the younger half-sister of the adopted boys, emerges as a major character. 

All these characters are strongly drawn and believable. The oldest son, Sullivan, is particularly interesting, reminding me slightly of Marilynne Robinson’s “prodigal” son Jack Boughton in the Gilead series, another story in which race is examined. 

I can’t think of any other novel with a one word-three letter name. “Run” has so many meanings. A politician “runs” for office. A manager “runs” an office. I “run” to catch a train. Life, in many ways, is an endurance run. Patchett’s characters are all struggling to do their best with what life throws at them. 

I’m glad that there are several more books by Patchett for me to read. 

“Ship Fever” – stories by Andrea Barrett

This is a collection. I’ve read about half the stories. Excellent! I’m postponing the title story, the longest in this anthology, until I’m ready to deal with disease and woe. Not today…

The back cover says the stories are “set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century”, but at least two are contemporary. The cover also says “…they illuminate the secret passions of those driven by a devotion to, and an intimate acquaintance with, the natural world.” Yes.

Barrett’s writing is concise to the point of compression.

“The Littoral Zone” is contemporary, it’s setting very much like a place where I have vacationed, offshore from Portsmouth, NJ. It tells the story of two scientists falling in love and dismantling their families in order to marry. It reminded me of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth. I appreciated its brevity.

I also especially liked “The English Pupil”, about Carl Linnaeus (creator of the binomial nomenclature we use to identify living organisms) in his old age, around the year 1775.

I read Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel several years ago. Loved it!

I plan to read further among Barrett’s books and other short story collections.

“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer

I had a little trouble getting into this book, because the protagonist (Arthur Less) was agonizing over turning 50. Been there, done that, LONG ago! Fortunately there’s lots of other stuff going on. Less undertakes a journey, a literal trip around the world, to get away from a romantic break up.

One stop is Berlin, my city of dreams! Not as I knew it, but recognizable. Less thinks he speaks serviceable German, but in fact he makes all kinds of mistakes. With confidence and hand waving, he gets by. He teaches for 5 weeks at an institution that sounds like the Free University of my memories.

Greer cheerfully critiques the American gay scene. A friend tells Less that the reason he (usually) doesn’t win literary awards is not that he is a bad writer but that he is a “bad gay”. Too reflective. Not sufficiently upbeat! Less accepts the advice and gamely starts to transform his recently rejected novel into a comedy.

Returning from his trip, Less finds his old love waiting for him. Happy ending! I’m glad I found this book.

“The Case of the Felonious Friend” and “The Question of the Dead Mistress” – Asperger’s Mysteries by EJ Copperman and Jeff Cohen

 

Among the forms of “identity politics” emerging in American culture is the “disability” subculture. The Americans with Disabilities Act (now almost 30 years old) prohibited discrimination based on disability and codified the concepts of accommodation and accessibility. As always, the devil is in the details. The past three decades have been spent working them out, and along with this has come a cultural shift in how “disabled” people see themselves and interact with others. So, logically, a genre of “disability literature” is appearing.

I stumbled on the Asperger’s Mystery series at the Library. The series dates from 2014 and the books I read are #2 and #5 (I think).

When I started reading The Case of the Felonious Friend, I found the language, which is in the first person from an Asperger’s point of view, to be unpleasantly choppy. But an early plot twist caught my attention and I got used to the author’s cadence. A very good mystery read, with the advantage of being set in New Jersey, which I found amusing!

The protagonist, Samuel Hoenig, has spent his life learning how to get along with “neurotypicals”, that is, those of us who aren’t on the Asperger’s/autism spectrum. It’s a struggle, and he works hard at it, with help from his mother and a psychologist. He owns a successful business called Questions Answered. He has two close neurotypical friends (his work partner and a taxi driver named Mike). Samuel is the only character with Asperger’s in The Question of the Dead Mistress. There’s a romance in the works. If this series unfolds like other mystery series (for example, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone books), it could go on for MANY more volumes.

I’m not giving the plots away. If you like mysteries, read these books! Another good series with an Asperger’s protagonist is Graeme Simsion’s Don Tillman/Rosie series. That’s romantic comedy, not mystery. I reviewed one of these here.

A young person with Asperger’s syndrome is much in the news recently – Greta Thunberg of Sweden, 16 year old climate activist. She has kicked the conversation on climate change to a new level (crisis), addressing international bodies with an enviable level of composure. She’s a notable leader in our difficult times.

So what does it mean to be neurotypical? Hard to say, when “normal” cannot be defined. Usually, it refers to anyone NOT on the autism spectrum. But a new concept, that of “neurological diversity” is emerging, and it is broader. It might include brain injury survivors and stoke victims, who think and function differently from their earlier baselines, and who may (or may not) consider themselves to be disabled. It might include dyslexics. Oliver Sachs wrote about many people whose brains seem to operate “differently”.

I recommend the Asperger’s Mysteries for mystery lovers and anyone looking for new and interesting avenues in contemporary fiction.

 

“The Green Mile” by Stephen King.

My son, a Stephen King fan, knows that HORROR is not my genre, whether in books or movies. I’m such a wimp! Don’t scare me! I already suffer from enough anxiety.

Robert told me “The Green Mile” was more like fantasy. But I couldn’t read the whole book, I stopped before I got half way through. King is a compelling writer, and his tale of death row prisoners and executions in the Depression South was more than I could cope with. He created some great characters, especially the death row manager, who carefully eased the path of the miserable, violent men he ultimately executed. He narrates the story from the perspective of his old age.

What makes this “fantasy”? A condemned prisoner arrives who seems to have supernatural powers, a strange, poor, mentally challenged man who may accomplish miracles.

But I couldn’t face reading about another electric chair execution, so I can’t tell you more! Maybe I should check the Internet Movie Database for the plot. “The Green Mile” was made into a highly successful movie starring Tom Hanks.

Robert’s next book recommendation was considerably more cheerful.

“Arsenic with Austen” by Katherine Bolger Hyde

I finally found fiction to relax with! Wait, I shouldn’t say it that way… The heroine is a Professor of English (at Reed College in Oregon, no less) and she would disapprove of a preposition at the end of a sentence.

Emily Cavanaugh is an appealing protagonist, and the frequent literary references (ranging from the Old Testament to JK Rowling) in this mystery amused me. When stressed, Emily retreats into the worlds of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope. When confronted with murder, she relies on Dorothy Sayers. Emily is a bibliophile who suffers from a level of technophobia even worse than my own. She would never condescend to blog. Horrors! Such an ugly neologism!

Two of the themes of this book are old grudges and land development. It works. There’s romance, too.

This is Ms. Bolger’s first novel and I look forward to more. She is calling her series “Crime with the Classics”. I don’t think she can go wrong.

“Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett

This is the fourth book by Ann Patchett that I have read, and I felt disappointed. Too “ordinary”. Patchett’s suburbia is a dull place. A man and woman fall in love and divorce their spouses in order to marry. He has four children, she has two. They constitute the “common wealth” of the title. All six children suffer.

I couldn’t help comparing this book with Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

Each deals with children. In each case, events at a party are pivotal. Patchett describes a christening party that turns into a dark, ironic version of the Biblical story of loaves and fishes. A marriage is destroyed. Ferrante’s event is a wedding party, at which the groom betrays the bride, then rapes her.

In each tale, a child is lost. In Commonwealth the oldest of the six children dies from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. His confused siblings watch uncomprehendingly. Every parent’s nightmare. But the loss described in the last of the Neapolitan novels is even worse – a tiny girl disappears, from a bright street on a sunny day. She’s gone. Her death cannot even be confirmed. Foul play is suspected. Ferrante has a knack for dealing with the most harsh blows that life can inflict.

In each story, someone tells or publishes a story that “belongs” to another person, with disturbing repercussions. Elena (Ferrante gives her own name to her heroine) writes about her friend Lila’s factory employment, bringing down retribution and violence. One of the neglected daughters in Commonwealth tells her lover, a prominent author, about the tragic death of her older stepbrother. He appropriates the story but denies its origins. His book is made into a movie, causing terrible pain to the family.

In my earlier blog post about Ferrante, I described My Brilliant Friend as being worthy of the category of “literary fiction”. The rest of her quartet also meets that standard. Commonwealth, in my opinion, doesn’t make it. Too bad, because I would certainly include Patchett’s wonderful Bel Canto in that category, and I plan to continue to read her work.