This is my symphony

What Is Left the Daughter
Howard Norman

I chose this book, plain and simple, for the title. I have a kind of fascination with daughters, being one and all. And so it was with some disappointment that I realized the novel was really a father’s letter to his daughter, a daughter he had never lived with and hadn’t seen for twenty-some years. Now Wyatt’s story is compelling–I was just expecting a female protagonist. Set in Nova Scotia, I loved the bleak sky, grey sea, and heavy salt air that clung to every event and seeped into each character.

Wyatt Hillyer is orphaned at 16 when both his parents commit suicide, jumping to their deaths from bridges separated by only a few miles. Both, it seems, loved the same woman. (Now that got my attention!) Wyatt accepts an offer from his aunt and uncle to move to small town Middle Economy and become apprenticed in Uncle Donald’s tobaggon shop. Wyatt immediately falls in love with his (adopted) cousin Tilda in true unrequited love fashion. Tilda, intent on becomming a professional mourner, is preoccupied and hardly notices Wyatt. Tilda eventually marries Hans Mohring, a student from Germany, just as Canada poises on high alert at World War II’s advent.

Uncle Donald becomes obsessive about possible U-boat attack in Canadian waters–so much so that he and Aunt Constance separate, Uncle Donald moving into his workshop. Tragedy does finally strikes in the Northumberland Strait and sets the plot unraveling. Both Wyatt and Donald spend time in prison, baby Marlais (she of the “daughter” in the title) is born, and Wyatt finds himself seperated from Tilda by an ocean.

I must admit, though, that I struggled for over one hundred pages to keep reading the book–not because of any plot or character weakness, but because of the writer’s voice. The characters speech was quaint, overly formal, or maybe just Novia Scotian. It was off-putting. But I was so drawn to Wyatt and the setting that I let go the fight. And glad I am that I did.

Next up: Swamplandia! by  Karen Russell–so far, a bit John Updike-ish, which is not a bad thing!

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Heidi w. Durrow

The review was glowing, the novel won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, it was on Best Fiction lists for the year–and yet I passed over this one for months. I shouldn’t have. I’ll be honest–I like plots that haven’t been done before (although I suppose in some ways there’s even a brush of Hunchback of Notre Dame here) which is why the book appealed to me. Rachel Morse, 11-years-old, survives her young family’s murder/suicide: a jump from the roof of their Chicago apartment building. Rachel’s Danish mother had recently moved her children to the United States to be with her boyfriend, a man who has difficulty accepting her biracial children. Mourning the loss of her marriage to an African American GI, struggling to keep her alcoholism under control, homesick for Denmark–it was all too much. And now young Rachel must live with the gruesome truth that she lived because the bodies softened her landing.

As if losing mom and siblings wasn’t enough, Rachel is taken cross country to live with her paternal grandmother in Portland, Oregon. There, Rachel, light-skinned and blue-eyed, is immersed in black culture–her white mother and Danish roots never mentioned. Rachel’s quiet longing for what she has lost threads its way through her life as she grows to love (and, sadly, lose) vivacious Aunt Loretta and her activist husband Drew, and, of course, her demanding Grandma. The only biracial girl in school, she tries to find her place despite the taunts and teasing of other girls. Dare she reveal her quick mind and devotion to school? Can she hold on to the fragments of Danish sometimes surface–and tie her to her mother? Is she black? Or white?

Parallel to Rachel’s story is the story of the only witness to the family’s fall: young Brick. Devastated by what he saw, Brick becomes devoted to the memory of Rachel. He eventually leaves his addict mother on a cross-country quest to find the girl who fell from the sky. And it is their eventual meeting becomes the catalyst for both to heal.

Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen

A few years ago, following the recommendations of almost every book reviewer, I opened Jonathon Franzen’s Corrections with high expectations–winner of the National Book Award; Time’s Great American Novelist. About 40 pages later, I was done. Now I’m no wimpy reader, but Franzen’s prose was dense and I didn’t feel that “Me! Me!” tug from the characters. A fellow English teacher, and an abashed Franzen fan, dropped the book off at my house saying, “No rush–whenever I got to it … ” Such a soft sell. After getting tired of  the 3 inch tome staring back at me from my reading shelf, I broke down. How bad could it be, after all?

Let me begin by saying that this time I finished the novel. And I’m actually quite proud of that because I was tempted many times to quit. Was the prose still dense? Yes–though maybe not so much. Did I feel that tug from the characters? Yes–although when Patty and Walter Berglund showed their true colors I felt hornswoggled. The summary in PW is accurate enough for anyone not familiar with the story: two young liberals build an idyllic life together: model marriage, precocious kids, This Old House renovations–they had it all and did it all. Or so it seemed. But sugar-coating only cracks and crumbles under the weight of reality,and what lies beneath is often rotting. And so it was with Patty and Walter. Their lack of emotional intelligence led to repression, jealousy, betrayal, adultery.

I don’t need Pollyanna or happy endings. But I do need to feel as though characters I live with throughout a novel have some redeemable characteristics. And here I found none. After their lives collapse, both Patty and Walter try to reinvent themselves, but still find little happiness, and their reunion at the novel’s end feels thin. In many ways, Freedom was the twin of We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. But I left Oates’ novel satisfied at the family’s reconciliation and reinvention. I don’t know what I’m missing with Franzen’s novels, but I just don’t get it.

tinkers
by Paul Harding

So much of what the blurbs on the back cover of tinkers relate is true; the novel is “elegiac”, “heartbreaking”, “compelling”. I would add meditative. Tinkers is beautiful, plain and simple, and the first sentence had me immediately: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” What follows is three pages of George “seeing” his house crumble around him, settling and sinking, tile by tile and brick by brick. As one whose mind nibbles around about the mystery that is death, whose husband works with hospice patients weekly, I found the descriptions of George’s death strangely comforting, although admittedly outlandish.

Harding strings the stories of George, his father Howard, and Howard’s father, the minister, like charms on a bracelet. The older men both harbor unmentionable diseases. Great grandfather slid into dementia, and slides out of Howard’s life, one day vanishing entirely. Years later, Howard, besieged with grand mal epileptic seizures, finds a brochure for a mental asylum on his wife’s dresser, and he, also, rides (quite literally) out of his son’s life. Both men wrote enigmatic observations about nature, baffling to the reader in sense–but beautiful and dream-like all the same. It is George alone who remains surrounded by his extended family at life’s end, breaking with his father and grandfather. All the men tinker in some way, Howard most literally as a rag and bone man. George tinkered with clocks and taught building trades; the minister tinkered with words. All were gypsies of a sort.

It is perhaps those lovely passages themselves that hindered me from falling headlong into tinkers. I found the passages distracting, interfering with the movement of the story. Perhaps that was Harding’s purpose? To blur the lines between narrators? Gorgeous writing. Satisfying characters. But while that may be the way of oh-so-unconventional and outre, the novel wasn’t as compelling as more traditional narratives–it kept getting in the way of the story.