WHISTLER by Ann Patchett

 

I have never read a book by Ms. Patchett. I may read another after reading this one. It is, above all, a restful, meditative story peopled by nicely delineated characters. Throughout, you are hit with phrases that can be pulled out and thought about. Some carry a touch of twisted humor as in “You miss out on a lot of experiences if your parents stay married,” and some go deeper as in “by recognizing impermanence, you might have a happier life and an easier death.”

The story is simple on the surface. Daphne Fuller and her husband are walking through New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which by no coincidence houses a thorough history of human relations as depicted in art. By chance, Daphne’s former stepfather, Eddie Triplett, encounters them.  Daphne was only nine when her mother divorced Eddie and went on to remarry and have more children. The pair renew their brief time together and begin to confront an auto accident that they experienced together. Bits and pieces of the past are slowly recovered they begin to see how long-buried actions of love and courage influenced their lives and all of their families’ lives.   An aphorism is trotted out. “Everything is sentimental. All of it matters and none of it matters.” I identified with this when Daphne’s husband has to help his sister empty out and sell their mother’s house. We spend a life accumulating memories and things, and then we have to deal with the emptying out. Selling the family home for many of us has been a traumatic experience.  You won’t ever enter it again or sleep there again.  It’s a feeling “ like you’re going to fall into the past and it’s never going to let go of you.” You must come to grips with the fact that “Everything will end. Get used to that.  No one wants change, but it will.”

What more do you need in a good novel? Ms. Patchett creates substantive, believable characters. In stages they are both human and humorous while they demonstrate an affirmation that love and acceptance are the glue that holds human life together.  

I give it 4 out of 5.   

 

Review--Smiley, Jane. Lidie: The Further Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

 

Smiley, Jane. Lidie: The Further Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

This is a 2^nd novel covering the life of Lidie Newton. In pre-Civil War Illinois, she is a tall and kind of horse-faced woman from a poor family who is thrown into dependence upon her sisters after the violent death of her abolitionist husband in the Kansas Territory. The opening of this book moves slowly because it spends a good deal of time on the backstory of Book One, which covers information on her family life in Quincy, IL before the war and her tragic marriage.

 As we meet her, Lidie is still mourning the violence that took her husband, but is now ready for more of life. She is a woman who thrives on assisting others, and she now finds herself assisting her niece Annie in developing a career as an actress. This happens because a successful local production catches the eye of a touring British producer/actor. He is so convinced of Annie’s talent that he sends Annie and Lidie, now functioning as Annie’s protector and maid, across the Atlantic to his home in Liverpool. His stated intention is to develop Annie’s talents before launching her toward potential stardom in London.

 You must now accept that the producer has a remarkable nose for latent talent or just more money than sense. The two women want to change their lives so intently that they literally take new names for their overseas adventure. Annie becomes Anne Revere and Lidie becomes Helen Longbourn, a name built up out of a Jane Austen novel. After they arrive in England, they live as guests in the producer’s elegant home. Lydie (now Helen) not only assists Annie(now Anne) in her theatrical development but also becomes a sort of family dogsbody. She runs errands for everyone. She does the shopping for the cook, picks up purchases for the master of the house and his wife, and even stands in for the butler on occasion. This gives her time to walk Liverpool’s streets and soak up its general history, its beauty, its commerce, and its religious and ethnic diversity. This is presented in great detail and was for me interesting as a contrast to life in a small midwestern town in the mid-19th century.

While I admit to finding this entire plot angle a stretch, Anne Revere’s theatrical talent does seem to be real. Lidie, however, develops in a wholly different track. She finds intellectual enlightenment in Britain, where slavery has already been abolished. She also finds some male contacts in town that add relational uncertainty. Barnsby, the family butler, John, the pastor of a small church, and Regie, a gardener from another household all start to see her in more intimate terms. This puts her life in more flux than Annie’s, although both women are still pursuing a more independent life than most women in the 19^th century.   

Lidie’s story presents an unsuspected finish that may be as big a stretch as the finding of a drama queen in a tiny Illinois town in the 1860’s. Is it giving too much away, to say that it all seems to be a setup for a third book featuring the further further adventures of the same characters.

I give it a three out of five.  

Bertie's Theory of Ice Cream by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Welcome once again to the gossamer world of Andrew McCall Smith. The 2025 addition to his 44 Scotland Series is titled Bertie’s Theory of Ice Cream, and all the familiar characters have new adventures that connect them to life’s notoriously crooked and uncertain paths. McCall Smith sets the tone when he has Bertie maintain that ice cream is better when shared. And so, since uncertainty is certain, it is best to get on with the eating of it before it melts.

 Irene Pollack, Bertie’s mother, has taken up with a Scottish fisherman and is now splitting her time between a small north-east coast village and Edinburgh. Bertie has remained in the city with his father Stuart, and Stuart’s mother Nicola. He continues to have problems at school with classmates Olive and Pansy, who have forced him to join their Jane Austen book club.  There is more hilarity when Angus discovers that Sister Maria-Fiore has hidden a piece of the famous Stone of Scone in the Scotland Street Garden. We also get updates on lightning-struck Bruce, who has recovered and is back to his old self-centered ways.  His latest real estate venture comes to a halt when his proposed modifications run afoul of listed building requirements. Another recurring theme is the inner psychological makeup of dogs.  At one point, we learn that Angus’s dog Cyril is really just a “sophisticated sausage.” You will also meet,  Ralph, a “vegan dog” who has deserted Mathew and Elsbeth’s new neighbors for the more meat-loving household of Mathew and Elsbeth’s. They seem to have an endless supply of sausages.  

We could go on with plot details, but I must admit that the adventures of Bertie and his sidekick Ranald are more delightful than the more erudite adult characters like Angus, Domenica, Mathew, and Elsbeth. No matter. As we near the end, when things grow more reflective, all the participants gather to share a meal that concludes with Angus’ poem about love and human community.

“To the land I love so much it hurts,” he says. There is always Scotland.

                                   

I love these books and the characters that McCall Smith populates them with.  I give it a 4.75 out of five.

Suspect by Scott Turow

 

This “legal thriller” from 2022 by established author Scott Turow supplies courtroom, bedroom, and investigative action in roughly equal doses. It is told from the viewpoint of Clarice “Pinky” Granum, who is an investigator for a lawyer named Rik Dudek. Dudek has been hired to defend Lucia Gomez a high flying long-time successful police chief who has been accused of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions.

Pinky has had a checkered career and is now a tattooed bisexual who is still looking to find the right lover and the right fit into today’s society. When a mysterious man, who has just moved into her apartment building, attracts her, she finds her work for lawyer Rik now merging with her obsession. The guy, who has now become her lover, turns out to be a security expert in the employ of the Ritz--a former cop and old enemy of the Chief.

The Ritz is the head of an extensive criminal network that runs to real estate fraud, sex, and drug peddling in the city. The police chief’s trial is barely underway when one of the trial witnesses is murdered, possibly by the Ritz. Pinky and her guy are now center stage and each positioned to either help solve the case or crash and burn.      

Most of the characters in this book, even the supposed good people, are just too sleazy for me.  I simply could not like Pinky or the Chief. Rik Dudek, the lawyer, never rises to the fore and the arch villain, the Ritz, was so shadowy that he never came alive in my mind either. 

Definitely not Turow’s best work.

I give it a 2.5   

Stoppard Gets a Theatre

 A friend in London has just informed me, coming on the heels of the renaming of the Shaftsbury Theatre  the Judy Dench, that the Duke of York's Theatre has just been renamed The Top Stoppard. The naming will be celebrated by the limited run of Stoppard's marvelous play ARCADIA.

This blog has featured a quote from ARCADIA as its namesake since it was started many years ago. This honor is well deserved. 

Strangers in Time by David Baldacci

 

As most avid readers know, David Baldacci is one of America’s most prolific writers. He has been translated into over eighty languages and has sold over 150 million copies of his books worldwide. And I must confess that I do not remember reading a single one of them until now. The jacket, featuring a recognizable image of London, pulled me in, and the plot did keep me turning the pages even though it depended on the rather improbable intersection of the three main characters--all from radically different layers of British society--during the Blitz.   

A young girl of means, Molly Wakefield, who has been shipped out of the city to avoid the bombing, returns to the family home in posh Chelsea at the age of fifteen. Her mother is in a mental institution in Cornwall and her father has disappeared. She connects with Ignacious Oliver, a mysterious bookstore proprietor in Covent Garden, and a fourteen-year-old street urchin, Charlie Matters, who has lost his family and is now living rough.  All three bond as the destruction goes from bad to worse. Molly’s Chelsea home is leveled by bombs; Charlie is running from the law because of possible involvement in the death of a policeman; and Ignacious, while mourning the death of his wife, has a strange visitor who comes and goes at all hours. The trio all end up living in Oliver’s bookstore as the German attacks increase in ferocity.    

Every time you think WWII has been picked clean of plots, an author returns to the well with a new twist. Baldacci manages this with practiced ease. The mystery of Oliver's visitor ultimately merges with Molly's father's disappearance, and the ending produces more sadness and violence. I still find the coincidences that throw these three characters together a bit much, but the history remains compelling.

In sum, Strangers in Time is a workmanlike thriller that holds you right up to the last pages.  It is not  great literature, but it sure is vintage Baldacci.   

I give it 3.5 out of 5

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

 

Finished reading THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans yesterday. Ms. Evans’ novel is a hot best seller and one of the best reads of the year. It has some similarities to Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden in that both books feature a singular main character who is hiding an element of the past that is slowly revealed as the book progresses. The difference is that Evans uses letters (an epistolary form) to reveal the world of Sybil Van Antwerp and her friends and family.

Sybil is, a divorced and now retired lawyer, who spent her working life as a legal clerk to a highly successful judge. She is now experiencing retirement alone and exposed to all those things that she may have given up to serve him. Her marriage has produced two living children and one who died at the age of eight. She is also an orphan, working through how much she wishes to know about her DNA, her birth parents, and her previously lost family.

A hand-written letter writer all her life, Sybil is now facing blindness and the loss of her ability to write and read responses without help. The letters she has sent over the years are carefully and beautifully composed in a style that would make Jane Austin proud. They inch us slowly forward in time and reveal the path of her own failures and successes in relationships, marriage, and parenting. Central to the plot are the little clues to the identity of one person she often writes a letter to, but never puts in the mail. As her sight declines, she begins to see more clearly the lingering grief that has haunted her and how forgiveness can heal her suffering soul. 

This may be an especially engaging book for older readers who may, like Sybil, be spending some time assessing their past. It may also be attractive to a younger reader who is thoughtfully contemplating the future. For every reader there is a lucid analysis of the impact of a female’s career choices and behavior on her future.  There is also an implicit shout-out to the efficacy of the very act of writing letters by hand--an act that has almost disappeared from our culture.

This is a significant novel. I give it a five out of five and not just because she apparently wrote the entire book in a closet from 4:30-7:30 AM while raising two small children and working full time.

Jim De Young