A Good Family by Erik Fassnacht

I really enjoyed this book.  It took me longer to read than my average book, I think because I read so many mystery books that are written for plot development and in which characterization and psychological insight is often sacrificed.  I think I had to slow down for these carefully etched portraits of ordinary people.  But I found myself sneaking glances at the book at times when I was doing other things, thinking:  gee, do I have to do this right now?  I wonder what's happening in the story.. It wouldn't hurt anything if I read it right now, would it?

Fassnacht is not shy about dropping brand names:  NPR, Chicago magazine, 7-Up, New Balance, TrendStar.  I haven't read so many brand names since I read Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie.

When Barkley, the main protagonist of the novel, arrives at a school for his first day of work as a teacher, he looks down at his New Balance shoes.  I found myself wondering, "Is this significant?  Is this cool?  (Or does it just mean that real teachers wear real comfortable shoes?)"  I looked down at my own New Balance shoes and wondered, very briefly, if they made me cool.  I decided that any shoe with a velcro fastener can't be considered cool.

Many places in Chicagoland are mentioned in this novel, like Diversey Harbor.  I found myself thinking, if you don't know Diversey Harbor, how will you picture this place?

Fassnacht's portrait of Barkley's transition into a professional as he takes his first teaching job and deals with students, both the challenging and the troubled kind, bosses, and office politics generally, is really quite stirring. He experiments, responds to changing conditions and finds his footing. Teaching is a kind of performance, after all.

Nevertheless, the combination of familiar situations and locations, and yes, brand names, lends the novel a wonderful, intimate air of immediacy. I think that this is one of the many ways to tell a story that will resonate with readers.


 

A Question of Honor by Charles Todd (A Bess Crawford mystery)

I have to admit that I was interested in reading this novel both because of its plot, which seemed intriguing, but even more because I loved the cover, which shows The Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India.  The Golden Temple doesn't really figure in the story, however.

Charles Todd is a mother-son writing team and they write historical fiction mysteries.  They write two series, the Bess Crawford series and the Ian Rutledge series.  I had already read the Ian Rutledge novel A Fine Summer's Day.  (I can hardly believe it, but this novel is the 17th in the series, and there's a new Ian Rutledge novel out now, No Shred of Evidence.)

Bess Crawford is a nurse serving in the First World War.  She grew up in India, where her father was a regimental colonel.  The early part of the novel recounts events from her childhood in India and I found that part very interesting and enjoyable.

As an adult, she is serving at a field hospital when a stuck truck is pushed out of the mud one night by a group of men, one of whom she thinks she recognizes as a man who served under her father and who disappeared the same day police came to arrest him for murders in both England and India, forever conferring an air of scandal on the regiment Bess's father commands.

The back story of the murders in England, as Bess uncovers the mystery, is fascinating.  I found myself feeling dissatisfied with the motive for the murder and wondered if other readers would feel disappointed as well.

City of Women by David R. Gillham

City of Women is set in Berlin; it opens in 1943, in a movie theater.  Berliners are facing food and other shortages, their men at away at war, neighbors turn in each other to the authorities and an atmosphere of distrust prevails. Sigrid is lonely, harried by her mother-in-law, and meets a strange man at the cinema with whom she starts an affair.  She also meets a young woman who comes to her for aid when the police come into the cinema looking for people with false papers.  These chance encounters change her life irrevocably.

City of Women has elements that remind me of other novels. Like the Paris Architect, the first 100 pages are incredibly suspenseful, and as in both The Nightingale and Paris Architect, apolitical and war-weary individuals nevertheless become engaged in the resistance. Essentially, these individuals come to the point where they say, no more, and their concern for friends, lovers, and strangers overwhelms their sense of self-preservation.

It's partly a novel about female friendship and how that is tested by extreme situations like war.  Over the course of the novel, everything deteriorates.  Danger comes closer for everyone.

Charles Finch, the Chicago-based author of a the Charles Lenox series (an amateur detective in Victorian London), wrote a lovely and thoughtful review of this novel for USA Today.  Here's the link:  http://usat.ly/1Qcy8WL

I think most readers who enjoyed The Nightingale and the Paris Architect will enjoy City of Women as well.  I do think that the sex here is portrayed in a less delicate way that in those other novels, in part because here it's a really important mover in the plot and the changes that Sigrid undergoes.

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

I've struggled to figure out what to say about this novel.  It's interesting to me because it is about old age and "end of life" issues.  That's not a super popular topic for novels.

I enjoyed the novel because I found that Jill McCorkle used details and voices for her characters that made them seem authentic and alive to me.  I liked her writing style.

Finally, I greatly admired the fact that McCorkle portrayed real drama in the lives of nursing home residents and showed that in this stage of life the inner life continues to be passionate and interesting.

There is a murder in this novel, but this novel is not a mystery and the murder is not solved.  To me, the brutality and tragedy of this murder seemed like an alarming departure in tone from the rest of the novel.

I read this book with a book group and some (not all) were offended by its portrait of aging.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

I loved this novel about several generations of a family that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I recognized the themes that I've seen in other Anne Tyler novels: the longing for closeness, disappointments and grievances, rejections and frustrations.

There were several things I really loved here.  One was the legacy of the past represented by the story of how Abby's in-laws met and married, and the seemingly random nature of both this marriage and Abby's own. One was the decades-long conflict between the emotionally withholding, frequently absent and commitment-phobic son and his increasingly perplexed mother, a conflict finally dissolved by grief.

Another thing I loved was Tyler's language, and the way she told the story.  While the novel's not short, it seemed to me to be a novel written in a style with great economy and realism.

This novel really spoke to me, although she was revisiting themes she has explored before.  The tension between the past and the present, the coexistence of love and exasperation, the constant rub of disappointed idealism and how the passage of time alters our passions and perceptions, feels authentic and familiar.

The other novels I've read by Anne Tyler were her first, If Tomorrow Ever Comes, The Accidental Tourist, and The Breathing Lessons, which featured a parental anxiety like Abby's.

Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson

This is a novel in the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson, a Yorkshire-born Canadian crime writer.  I'd read a good review and I thought I might enjoy it.

Inspector Banks is called to the scene of a suspicious death.  A man in his sixties has been found on an old railway right-of-way that has been converted into a paved walk.  The embankment is steep enough, and the site far enough away from the nearest village, that the place seems strangely isolated and is mostly frequently by dogwalkers.

The deceased, Gavin Miller, is a disgraced college professor who had fallen on hard times.  And he has 5,000 pounds in his pocket when he's found.

The occasion of Miller's dismissal on sexual misconduct charges produces three suspects; a former student is another; and finally, the circle Miller knew as an undergraduate at the University of Essex provide another two. The character Miller, like the author himself, travels to Canada for his master's degree.

Banks is divorced and spends a lot of his free time at home, listening to jazz and pop while sipping Laphraoig and listening to the rain on his conservatory roof. Loving Van Morrison - and wondering what a Veedon Fleece is - comes up twice in the novel, as well as references to Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and other bands of the '60's and '70s.

I found the opening somewhat clunky and prosaic - both the pace at which the tale was told and the character of Inspector Banks himself. (Inspector Banks is refreshingly normal, strategizing ways to get home without driving after going to the pub, for instance.)  Yet I quickly fell under the spell, which is saying quite a lot, I think. I recall that when I read Harlan Coben's Six Years, the unpacking of the mystery - and the many road trips, between New England and Virginia, if I remember correctly - seemed a bit tedious. (I suppose the TV equivalent is folks getting in or out of their cars.)

SoHo Sins by Richard Vine

There's so much to say about this novel I hardly know where to begin.

First, it's published by by the Hard Case Crime imprint of Titan Books, self-described as one that "brings you the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, from lost pulp classics to new work by today's most powerful writers, all in handsome and affordable editions.  The yellow ribbon represents your assurance of quality" (from the back cover).

These crime paperbacks always have the kind of covers used for cheap crime pulp fiction from the 50's and 60's and I know I'd always wanted to read one since I saw a Lawrence Block novel perhaps a year ago.  When I came across this ARC copy of Soho Sins, I was a goner.  In fact, this cover has a Marilynesque woman in a red dress sitting on the ground in alley, gazed upon by a man wearing a fedora and a brown overcoat - right next to a garbage can.

The story is set in the past - in the eighties or nineties. Jack is a gallery owner and art dealer, and an owner of several buildings in Soho, in New York City, as the real estate market there heated up.

He recalls a wealthy couple he knew, and his gratitude to them for befriending him, "taking him up," after his wife had died. What they shared was a passion for art, and this is backdrop for this murder noir.

The wife is killed; the husband immediately confesses. But it's not that simple: while he'd always strayed, at the time of his wife's death, he'd been seeing a beautiful young artist for several years and his wife was planning divorce. The other wrinkle, more profound, is that the husband, Phillip, has a degenerative brain disease that is robbing him of his memory.

There are other suspects: There's Phillip's first wife, living in the suburbs and trying to continue her career as an artist while raising their now twelve-year-old daughter. She's never quite gotten over her ex-husband.

There's the wife's shady performance artist lover, young and good-looking but involved in underworld business ventures, with members of the Italian mafia and Chinese gangs.

Then there's the cabal:  the circle of executives at Phillip's tech company that have a lot to lose as Phillip deteriorates and something to gain from his wife's death.

Phillip's lawyer hires a private eye who's an old friend of Jack's and who insists that Jack use his access to the art world, and Phillip, to help him with his inquiries - all the while making sardonic remarks about the ill-gotten gains of Jack's wealthy clients.

About 75% of the way into the novel, when I realized that the shady boyfriend's illegal doings were pornography I thought about bailing on the novel. (I did ask myself what it was that I expected, after all, when I picked up a crime paperback with a pulp fiction cover.) I decided to stick with it and was rewarded with another couple of major twists to the plot, all the way to the last pages.  Whew!

Richard Vine is the nom-de-plume of this debut novel author, an editor of a fine art magazine.

The story reminded me a little of Bonjour Tristresse, although this was far more shocking.  If tales of domestic crises are too tame for your beach reading. this jaw-dropping, totally not-in-the-best-of-taste roller coast ride might be the perfect vacation read for you.

The Revenant/The Hateful Eight

It surprises me that two Western movies were nominated for Academy Awards this year.

I loved the cinematography of The Hateful Eight; it made a great impression on me and is a large part of why I enjoyed the film.  I think the acting was wonderful, too.

The Revenant was also very beautifully photographed, and the locations in which it was shot were spectacular.

Both films were terrifically entertaining, perfect summer movies.  The Revenant was based on a true story, but after reading a few articles on the Internet, I concluced that the only overlap between the movie and reality is that fur trapper Hugh Glass really was horribly mauled by a grizzly and really did survive, was abandoned by his companions, and subsequently recovered enough to walk into camp 80 miles away.

I wonder if, in our age of anxiety, it is more comforting to look backward than to look forward.

The dictionary definition of revenant, by the way, is one who returns from the dead or long absence.

Heirs and Graces by Rhys Bowen

I enjoyed this book, and was impressed by how closely it seemed to hew to the Agatha Christie formula:  plenty of suspects, class tension between the local constabulary and the suspects, a drawing room unmasking of the murderer.  I also thought it was well-written and nicely paced.  It's part of the Royal Spyness series, and there was a little expositionary background offered to help folks who hadn't read the rest of the series to be introduced to all of the returning characters.

In this series, the detective is a duke's daughter who is 35th to the throne, and the murder takes place at a aristocratic home in rural Surrey, complete with fox hunt, so it did feel like very much like something that a Downton Abbey fan might enjoy.

I read it with a book group and several folks described it as fluff.  I found myself wondering why that was, exactly, when to me, the book seemed like such a classic Agatha Christie-type mystery.

I'm not sure but I'd guess that tastes have changed, and Agatha Christie-type mysteries seem tame compard to today's suspense thrillers.

Also, this particular book had a surprising ending, one that I didn't at all anticipate, but it perhaps just didn't have the bite and menace that Christie mysteries have.

Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta

This book was recommended to me by an enthusiastic reader of fiction.

I found it original and refreshing and truthfully, a little opaque.  The review I read in Entertainment Weekly after I finished the novel helped me to understand that love of cinema is a theme that runs through the novel
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I thought it merited description as a novel about the way we live now, and about the tension between art and morality, but it is not comforting fiction.  It is also about friendship.  Spiotta captures the complex dynamic between two friends who are as different and as close as Carrie and Meadow -- sometimes competitive, sometimes judgmental and impatient but nevertheless striving to be loyal, caring and supportive.

Carrie and Meadow are filmmakers and lifelong best friends.  Meadow creates documentaries that offer a fresh perspective on topics such as the Kent State shootings. Carrie's work is more conventional.

Amy, whose nickname is Jelly, is a woman who engages in what the author calls, in her "Acknowledgements," as "proto-'catfishing'".  She calls men in the movie industry and talks to them about their work and other topics.  She calls herself Nicole in these phone calls, and she starts them by pretending it's a wrong number.  She loves these conversations and they are thoughtful conversations, but ones in which she is manipulating the person on the other end to be increasingly interested in her.  Spiotta describes how Jelly sits while she's talking on the phone, how she arranges herself to be comfortable or changes position while she's talking on the phone.

Spiotta's last book, Stone Arabia, was a finalist for the National Book Book Critics Circle Award.

The Big Short/Steve Jobs

Both of these movies were adapted from books.  The Big Short was adapted from the book by Michael Lewis, and Steve Jobs was adapted from the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

As The Big Short began, I found myself wondering: how can this work?  I was very pleasantly surprised.  I think it worked very well.  I found it very enjoyable.

The scene in which Margot Robbie, sitting in a bathtub full of bath bubbles, explains selling short, would probably be worth the price of admission alone to some viewers.

The movie captured the story of the book, the individual stories of these iconoclastic individuals who bet against the system and won.  I think it also captured what I would call the "sheep" mentality of seemingly many bankers who assumed that low quality mortgage-backed securities could not fail because no one refused to sell them and sellers didn't have much trouble selling them, either.

The ending was sobering, as the filmmakers pointed out that no one has gone to jail for selling something worthless or putting families into mortgages they could not afford, and that nothing else has changed, either.

I found Steve Jobs to be less successful.  The tremendous compression of event into the three acts was kind of overwhelming.  One exception, I think, were the scenes between Jobs and Scully.  That, I think, was completely successful in conveying the very complicated relationship the two men had.  In retrospect, I think Jeff Daniels' acting was just sublime .. an accomplishment all the harder to achieve, I think, because it was a very "playey" film, that felt like the film of a play.  In retrospect, I have to say I think the acting was great.

The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

I'm reading this now.  I'd gotten interested in it because the plot seemed so clever, and because I saw that it was a popular book club book.

Lucien is an architect living in Paris, two years into the German occupation.  He's a man with few political convictions, and he's somewhat desperate because he hasn't had an architectural commission since the Germans invaded.  The city of light is now bleak and dreary.  Many of the population have fled and it's difficult to get any but the most basic food.

He's approached by a wealthy industrialist, Manet, with a surprising commission.  Manet wants Lucien to design an undiscoverable hiding place for a Jew on the run from the Gestapo.  Lucien is shocked, angered and terrified by this request.  Manet sweetens his well-paid offer with the promise of a commission to design a factory to be built for the Nazi war effort.  Lucien, a frustrated modernist, can't resist the lure.

I thought that this would be a suspenseful book, and it is - I've left off reading at Chapter 25 because I'm so terrified.

I was resolved to finish, and so I have.  The book became even more terrifying.  Lucien experienced so many reversals of fortune, as did the people around him.

I was amazed when I came to the final chapter.  I thought I was still many pages from the end.  It turned out that that was because I was reading a paperback book club edition, with book group discussion questions, an interview with the author, and an "Acknowledgment".

I was interested in all of them.

One of the book discussion questions, number 14, was this:  "If you were a gentile living under the Nazis in World War II, do you think you would have had the courage to hide Jews?  What consequences are you willing to face to help others?"  I spent a lot of time, while reading the book, thinking about this question.

I think one reason I spent so much time thinking about this is that Lucien was initially very unwilling to help Manet in his effort to hide Jews.  Lucien was terrified by the very idea.  He thought that the chances that they all would be caught were very great, and he knew that they would all be killed.  As a matter of fact, the novel opens with a death.  It underscored the terror of living in Paris under the Occupation. While the Germans were not intent on killing the French, they were ruthless in making examples of anyone they could to frighten the French into abandoing all hope of fighting back.

Lucien is persuaded to accept this dangerous commission because food is getting more and more expensive in Paris, and his dependence on his wife's savings has hurt their marriage, already strained by his wife's inability to have children.  The far more powerful reason is that he not only has not had any work since the start of the war but he has never been successful in getting his career going; he's never had a major commission and he has never been able to build a building in the style he most admires, the modern style professed by the Bauhaus architects.

As the novel wears on, however, while he continues to be ruled by his ego, and often notes in his own mind that architects are very influenced by their egos, Lucien changes.  His experience awakens feelings that he didn't know that he had.  He's quite a different person by the end of the novel.

In The Nightingale, Isabelle was a resistance fighter.  She escorted downed pilots across the Pyrenees.  She was a heroine, but she was quite different from Lucien.  She knew, as soon as France was invaded, that she had to do something to fight back.  Lucien is more like Isabelle's sister, who became increasingly worn down by the war but the escalation of food shortages, murders and deportation formed in her a resolve to fight back.

While war certainly brings out the worst in us, as you would expect chronic fear and deprivation to do, in this novel it brings out the best in Lucien.

In the interview with the author that was printed in the back of my copy, I learned that he is an architectural historian who's written several books about architectural history.  I was delighted to learn that he is an Anne Tyler fan, as I have been since I found a discarded copy of If Tomorrow Ever Comes someplace. Belfoure said that as a native of Baltimore, as Tyler is, he has enjoyed recognizing the places she names in her novels.

In his Acknowledgement, author Belfoure thanked his editor at Sourcebooks (the publisher).  I was so glad to see this, as I think that editors have an important in shaping books.

I read this book with my book group and one member called it a real "page turner" and no one seemed to find any fault with it which is a distinction in itself.

Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

I read this on Saturday.  I enjoyed it very much.  I'm struggling to figure out which elements made me enjoy the experience.  I find myself wondering if I'm stuck in a Downton Abbey mindset:  when, for instance, Maggie Hope is roundly rebuked for not dressing for dinner, I think, "Hmm.. that's interesting .. dressing for dinner is still important in 1941."

I wonder if the quality that I enjoy is that it doesn't seem too real, and it doesn't seem too frightening. I know from reading the acknowledgments that MacNeal did some research, especially in reading the memoir of the real-life governess who cared for the royal princesses in Windsor Castle.  Maggie, despite her disappointment at spy school, is someone who is surprising lucky, competent and capable.  She always comes out on top!

I knew from reading reviews that at least one critic thought that the second book in the Maggie Hope series was not as strong as the first; I can't say that I perceived much difference.  In both books, the mystery is, who can be trusted?  And while I was much less surprised by the big reveal in the second novel, I did not predict all the twists and turns.  It may be that the guilty parties were too obviously signaled by the author -- I'm not sure.

As the novel opens, Maggie is excited -- but exhausted -- to be at spy school in Scotland.  Sadly, her physical strength is just not great enough, and she is in danger of failing to pass the physical strength and endurance tests.  At the same time, there's a murder at Claridge's Hotel that suggests not only that there may be a spy or spy network at Windsor Castle, but that there may be a connection to the spy at Bletchley Park that Edmund Hope, Maggie's father, has been working undercover to try to discover.

Frain, the head of MI-5, pulls Maggie out of spy school to pose as a math tutor to the teenage Princess Elizabeth, who is living, with her sister Margaret, at Windsor Castle.  The Luftwaffe bombings have made London unsafe for them.  Maggie's job is to discreetly keep her eyes and ears open while avoiding any suspicion.  This is the perfect job for Maggie, who is a talented mathematician who once aspired to attend MIT.

Of course, on her first night, Maggie is roundly criticized for not dressing for dinner.  She begins to meet the many folks working at Windsor Castle -- the librarian, the ladies-in-waiting, the governess, the cook, the falconer .. the list goes on and on.

I think I appreciated the details like knowing that the Royal Mews is located on top of the castle and that that is where the falcons are kept.

Maggie saves the day, as usual, but this time with a big assist from a stout-hearted and enterprising Princess Elizabeth.

In the next book,  His Majesty's Hope, Maggie is dropped into France, and the story begins in Germany.  Stay tuned!