Tag Archives: fiction

September 6, 2026 · 1:22 pm

Whistler: I Loved It

Did I love Ann Patchett’s Whistler for the book itself or for the experience of reading it? Hard to say. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book in deep immersion. You can blame the pandemic, or parenting, or divorce, or the interet, or the deterioration of all our attention spans wrought by smartphones or all of the above, but long gone are the easy days of picking up a novel and just… reading it until it ends. Now I read in fragmented chunks of a chapter at breakfast, a few pages before passing out asleep, a few pages when I sit myself down and firmly insist I Am Going To Relax And Read.

Cue bringing Whistler on a six day canoe trip. Here, I thought, will be where I read. And for the first four days I had the same problem as at home, only here the distractions were the need to hang bags in trees to keep them from the bears or the pure exhaustion of having portaged for 75km. Until the fourth day when we were spoiled with only two hours of paddling and arrived at a site where I could hang my hammock and just… read. And guys, I read that book and was immersed in it and time disappeared and everything was bliss.

You knew there was going to be an Until.

Until the book itself failed me. Oh but it’s perfection in narration – story telling at its best with funny and full characters that make their truth known in small actions and perfect dialogue. A plot that understands its scope – girl reunites with long forgotten third step father and recalls and then explores a trauma they shared alongside revisiting and reinterpreting family dynamics and forging new ones – and executes with brilliant pacing. Terrific writing that is neither showy nor wasted.

*spoilers ahead

But then Patchette can’t seem to clinch it. Unwilling, I guess, to kill Eddie *which BY THE WAY the only time I stopped reading was to take a break to tend to the fire because I knew (or thought I knew) that Eddie was about to die and I couldn’t accept it and didn’t want to. Oh there’s an elegant and literary way of explaining this ending – the precision of knowing ‘when to stop,’ and the genius of exploiting the core theme that we are all writing our own stories, we are all deciding at any given moment what part of our story matters to ourselves and to others and what to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people (I am not kidding, the theme here is brilliantly done and stays with you) but it felt like such a cop-out, like an unwilligness to give this reader what she yearned for: a big cathartic cry on a hammock overlooking an Alogonquin lake lol

Alas, I was left to imagine my own ending – and if I were in a book club that read a book we could talk about it. For now, maybe you tell me: what was it like to read this one? what did you make of the ending?

Yours in the temporary bliss of deep reading. And here’s hoping this sets the pattern by reminding me of the exquisite joy of being in a great book.

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September 6, 2026 · 12:54 pm

Land: Bor-ing (tell me I’m wrong)

You have seen Maggie O’Farrell’s Land. It is front and center on display tables and people are talking about it. Her first book, Hamnet, was a big deal and so this next book was bound to generate attention. Only problem is, at least in my opinion (and isn’t that why you’re reading this) Land is overhyped boring.

Oh the book starts out with promise. The writing is – really – extraordinarily beautiful. Subtle, specific and aching. I am for sure recommending you do not read this book the whole way through but you should read the first 50 pages for the pure enjoyment of the prose. And the plot from the opening is similarly promising: we’re in 19th century Ireland and a boy and his father are out making a map, strange circumstances in the forest and the father goes mad. All kinds of questions surface: what caused the madness? what will happen to the family given the precarity of their existence without the father’s income?

If only these were questions that could sustain 500 pages OR if only these questions were further complicated. Alas. What then follows is a sort of generational history of the plot of land and the people who had lived there. Which I regret to inform you does not constitute an interesting plot. Yes, of course, each family or person who lived on the land has unique stories and yes, of course, the book aims to remind the reader of the richness in history and longevity of the natural world that we so boldly claim to own or occupy. And in the case of Land the history of the land holds those of great acts of cruelty and suffering – including a lot about the Great Famine that I didn’t know and legit found interesting/haunting. However. You may be eager to read a genealogy of a place and if that’s the case you might well enjoy Land. If you are expecting something where characters develop or Things Happen you best look elsewhere. This is a novel that took the idea of ‘setting’ and ‘literary devices’ just… didn’t bother to sketch out how the rest of the elements of fiction might need to come into play.

I’m sure I’m wrong – I have to be because everyone else seems to love this book – so tell me why and how.

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September 1, 2026 · 4:53 pm

Go Gentle: I guess you do need a man

I was thrilled on starting Maria Semple’s Go Gentle to see an idea C. and I have bandied about for year – a ‘coven’ of women looking after one another – made literal. Adora, our protagonist, has cultivated an apartment building full of independent women who are committed to living their fully-realized, independent lives, while also looking out for one another (as they are and as they age). Here it is, I thought, the expression of every adult woman’s secret fantasy of a life led where the countertop is clean and self-actualization has come from a sense of worthiness owed only to existence rather than… anything or anyone else.

I suppose I should have been warier on reading the glaring plot hole that is Adora’s financially successful career as a… consulting philosopher. Cue the legit lol. But yes, of course, the extremely wealthy family (or AI company) must have a philosopher on staff to advise on the moral questions of the day. But of course.

And you know, Adora’s particular brand of Stoic self-discipline will find cultural resonance. And the plot – such as it is – invites some delightful romps through art heists and FBI raids and descriptions of billionaire mansions that we all just love to read.

There’s a not unserious section on the #metoo moment of Adora being sexually assaulted on the job and signing the NDA and taking the hush money. And were it not for the absolutely incongruous idea of Adora as a comedy writer turned Stoic philosopher (which, okay, in itself isn’t an unbelievable change, just that the novel does not offer Any Accounting for This Character Development) the section might have offered something more than a bizarre sense that this was what the book was meant to be ‘about’ and that this was ‘serious stuff’.

Only then do we land on the romance. The kind where Adora is finally – finally – complete. Because she finds a man. A man who gets her and always has and with whom she can be fully herself. And barf gag barf. Oh it’s hard. As someone who now has a partner with whom I finally and can fully be myself I don’t mean to downplay the Yes! of discovering that there is another person with whom you can love and be loved. It *is both a surprise and a joy. But it is also not the prerequisite for connection and joy. And in another book, I’d be all for this kind of celebratory character arc. But come onnnnn: in a book that opens with the promise of connection in and through women-caring-for-women to end with a woman-saved-by-the-love-of-a-man… just… ugh.

Oh and I know you’ll tell me that Adora continues to express herself as an independent woman simply “augmented” by this love. Where ‘giving in’ to love is in the titular expression “going gentle” in lieu, I suppose of a feminist “rage” that insists on independence and contemplates the idea that community might be All By Itself a worthy construct for meaning. Lol lol. And you’re right, that’s what the book tries to sell us in its closing. AND YET if ever the marketing pitch team for hetero-monogamy* is in search of a sell-piece, I offer you Go Gentle.

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August 17, 2026 · 9:55 am

Buckeye: Neighbours making neighbourhoods

Truly as I sat down to write this I got a text from a neighbour and friend who is looking after my garden while I’m away and took out my garbage bins and generally is great for helping give care. These are neighbours who also – thank god – send their children unaccompanied to the park with mine and cultivate the kind of interdependent independence that childhood thrives on – a kind of freedom that parents using GPS tracking watches and hyper-surveillance of children find suspect.

It’s a weird, and very small thread of Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye to attach to, but I was – am – so glad for the way the kids in this book grow up free to roam on bikes and until the streetlights come on and with many, many other children such that they create and cultivate micro communities of relationships. And glad that my kids have tiny opportunities for this, too.

Okay, that’s not really what this book is about and is more about when it is about – following the generation of youth who fight in and live after WWII the book explores how their childhood is shaped by their damaged or absent veteran fathers, then by their own experience fighting, and then watching their own children conscripted for Vietnam. Of course I knew this was a generation that moved through these global conflicts – but following it through the microcosm of two families – two deeply and surprisingly intertwined families – made the permeation of those conflicts into the character of individuals and their world more tangible.

It is also a book about how the mores of the time shaped sexuality and its expression, gender roles, race (ish – this is a rather lightly treated theme and pretty reduced to extremes and headlines) and (barely) class.

These pieces of ‘the times’ also inform how the characters make or don’t make their choices.

[Aside: I got distracted and called away from finishing this post and here it is a month later and I’m doing my best to recall what else I wanted to say about the book But]

One choice – or the same choice made over and over again – centers the book. How a choice for (or against) fidelity to a spouse cascades across a life; how a choice for (or against) the truth (and what exactly is the truth – is it not lying or is it proactive honesty?) explodes relationships and alters lives; how (beyond the individual) choices of global politics made (again and again) find new and familiar patterns.

I enjoyed the book, but if my, now several weeks later impression, holds, its not one that will shatter or shake you. Just a pleasant one for a cottage or a beach or – as the waning days of summer arrive – to read in half hour snippets before collapsing to sleep. Like a well told story of the realist variety where the writing is good but not distractingly good, where the characters are interesting and have an arc but are not people you spend any time outside the book thinking about, and where the plot is one you could describe over the table at a trivia night and everyone would agree that sounds interesting but is not, in the end, that interesting. It is a fine book.

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