January 14, 2025 · 2:16 am

Tell Me Everything: Elizabeth Strout is Not a Unitarian. But could be.

I’ve told so many people recently to read Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything and I’m desperately anxious that other people won’t love it as much as I did, so if you hated it, or even felt kind of ambivalent about it, just let’s pretend neither of us read it and never talk about it together.

In the universe of Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton this one is a close look at Bob Burgess who cannot see himself clearly. A book about Bob, but a book about how every life – those we know and more those we don’t – has a story (and in that story, matters). And how we try to figure out what a life means (in one heartbreaking and also sideways funny scene Lucy asks Bob exactly that – what does it mean) even when this is a question as pointless as it is pressing.

How Bob saves and doesn’t save – and eats the sins – of all those around him. How he sacrifices what he barely realizes he wants in aid of those around him, knowing, somehow the right thing to do quickly and with exhaustion.

The writing, as always, is this hard-to-explain balance of direct – telling you exactly what a character is thinking, or meaning, or what a thematic moment is “about” – and the evocative – letting a gesture carry the weight of all the possible explanations: Lucy wears odd socks. LUCY WEARS ODD SOCKS.

Take Bob’s wife, Margaret, the Unitarian minister, who only in nearly losing her job realizes the humility with which she must approach the pulpit. And in nearly losing Bob realizes what he needs of her as partner. I loved Margaret for her fullness (all of the characters in these books are full) and the scene that describes her nightgown – which may be the same scene or one adjacent where Bob speculates she is a narcissist – that does this brilliant work of both telling us exactly what is happening and lets it unfold in the scene itself.

(So many Unitarian threads beyond Margaret (meaning in community; community to support individual journey; life is meaningful for the impact we have on others; etc etc and on) I just googled whether Strout is a Unitarian: she is not.)

I’m not sure whether to tell you to start with this one if you’ve not read Strout before, but maybe it doesn’t matter – grab any one of the books and enjoy a universe where the small moments are worthy and your story is, too.

2 Comments

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 5, 2025 · 2:25 am

The Grey Wolf: Weird with time and maybe place

I won’t dwell on my love of Louise Penny, nor recapitulate my reasons for enjoying the Gamache character and mystery series. Suffice to say it is comforting and I will never be critical of the books because they are warm tea and cozy socks.

The latest instalment takes on political corruption, international and domestic terrorism in aid of political instability and the church. So here we are, 2025.

It was – as the books always are – engrossing and fun and cozy. There were, however, some odd experiments with bringing the reader forward and back in time and place – within single chapters – that were – I think – unsuccessful. Maybe a tired editor. Maybe an effort to be more Literary. But for this reader ultimately confusing and strange.

That’s all I’ll say because you are not really here to find out whether you should read a Louise Penny mystery. If you don’t know by now: you should.

Leave a comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Mystery

Tagged as , , ,

January 5, 2025 · 2:13 am

The Women: I Just Knew It

(Spoilers ahead) Kristin Hannah’s The Women looked like a book I would not like. But so many best of lists promised greatness (and marketers did their best with prominently featured placement on shelves at book stores) and so I went in for it. And I should know enough of what I like now to have known better. Alas. Here we are 500 pages later and this will not be a popular post because everyone else on the internet loves this book, so okay, hate me and move on.

Why do they like it? Well as historical fiction mashed with romance it has genre going for it. With a plucky heroine in Frankie McGrath who follows a character arc we just know – we just know – from the outset is going to be fine in the end despite all the Trials and Tribulations we have character going for it. Add in the unbeatable combination of the untold story of American women in the Vietnam War with an almost-critical-but-never-quite-unpatriotic view on the American role and we have plot and theme.

And sure. There’s appreciation for the centralizing – from the boldness of the tile allllll the way through – of the role of women in the war and the way their experience after the war was forgotten, marginalized or dismissed. And how women, don’t you know, just stick together and are there for one another. And there’s something to be said for the propulsive first part that has Frankie in Vietnam with plot and character developments fast and fierce.

But from the moment Jamie’s near-dead body gets on the plane I knew. I just knew there was no way this book was ending with anything short of a miraculous resolution where Frankie and Jamie would end up together and ride off into the sunset. And while the sunset doesn’t quite materialize, the end is exactly that – a triumphant tying up of all loose threads into something more than a bow, something like an artistic arrangement where every string has become a thing of beauty.

I don’t know. Is it wrong to dislike a book for being so obviously saccharine? For being so outrageously committed to making sure Everything Works Out? When – and here’s an obvious point – for most in the Vietnam War everything did not work out.

Better and other complaints could be in the boring writing that is straightforwardly narrative with little to get excited about. Or the wooden secondary characters that are only present to do their specific secondary character thing – an emotionally dead mother, a traditional father, a consistent and steadfast best friend, a rakish boyfriend, an honourable fiancé – YAWN – with nary a complexity to their name. Or that the politics of the book is bland and ultimately committed to American exceptionalism.

So learn from my mistakes. Do not be drawn in by the prominent placement on any table or any best of list. This is one to skip.

Leave a comment

Filed under American literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Worst Books

Tagged as , , , , , ,

December 31, 2024 · 12:24 am

The Paris Wife and Here One Moment: Two Bad Books To Enjoy This Holiday

Say you find yourself in an unexpectedly stressful situation. Like maybe you’ve started a new job after a decade of comfort and familiarity at another one. And maybe that new job proves to be at the outer limit of what you had imagined it would involve and what you think you might be capable of pulling off. AND that job requires you to wear dress pants Every. Day. And say that as that job is starting your dad falls off a ladder and spends two months in hospital with differering diagnosis and prognosis such that you are just certain enough that you should be uncertain. Say, too, that your partner’s job – also stable and predictable – for the last decade is suddenly also now different. And your furnace breaks. And your children attend a school that generously offers to hold holiday theme days of different kinds each day in December such that you are absolutely going to forget sparkly hat day in a way that will undoubtedly feature heavily in future therapy sessions because my god the tears.

What would you read then? Take out menus? Horoscopes predicting when this could possibly end? Great Canadian Baking Show show descriptions before you watch yet another episode where someone battles the stress of their dough rising on time?

Forgive the long lead in. I am certainly aware that my life has not been as stressful as whether the dough will rise.

Should you find yourself in this circumstance you might also read The Paris Wife or Here One Moment. Both are great bad books. What’s a bad book, Erin? A bad book is one that you read knowing you are reading only for plot propulsion. You are reading to be taken for a ride that will not involve any introspection on your own life, not require you to empathetically inhabit the challenging experience of anyone else. You will not learn anything new about the world, other people, or yourself. You will, instead, be entertained. You make your arguments – go ahead – that this is not, after all, a bad book. And I will persist in my belief that unless a book makes you feel something it’s a bad one. Even if it’s a joy to read.

And these are both joys to read. Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife an utterly ridiculous thriller romp of a young woman arrived at a fancy Parisian apartment to meet her brother, Ben, only to discover him missing. The rest of the book follows her amateur – and overwrought – attempts to track him down. Lots of gasps and dun dun duns and so many moments of absurdity. Though absorbing enough that even if it is fancy-hat-day-and-you-forgot-the-hat you can be taken out of your circumstances.

And Liane Moriarty might best be known for those books that are plot driven and well written enough that you are not distracted by bad writing (which is sometimes the case in The Paris Wife) and has a thematic core at the centre – though very, very clear in the theme. Like you do not have to worry about subtly or nuance or layers here. The theme is as bold as your mother-in-law in asking about when you might start a diet kind of bold. In this one it’s a maybe fortune teller on board a flight predicting the cause and date of death for the passengers on board. And then how those passengers live differently (or not) in the wake of her prediction offers the theme of what choices we make (or can make) and what we owe to random fate or luck.

Anyway. Should you find yourself in any one stressful situation enjoy one of these terrible books and know with absolutely certainty they will not add one bit to your concerns and may even – briefly – help you escape them.

5 Comments

Filed under Fiction