The Expats
by Chris Pavone. I decided to read
this, Pavone’s first book, after enjoying his second, The Accident, last
month. The Expats apparently was
even more of a best seller, and is being made into a movie, but I didn’t like
it as much. What I liked about The
Accident is that it was very smart and stripped down. The Expats is baggier and a little more
obvious, and contains one of my main pet peeves, which is to jumble up the chronology of the scenes for no apparent reason other
than cheap suspense. That is, the
book starts with a scene towards the end of the timeline of the plot, and then
jumps back to the beginning, and continues this jumping backward and forward in a way that is not necessary to the plot. It’s a crutch and used too much, in my opinion. The story is basically this: Kate moves to Luxembourg with her I.T.
husband and for the first time is a stay at home mom to her two young
boys. She is befriended by the
expat community there, but soon becomes suspicious of a couple with whom they spend a lot
of time. It turns out the
reader should take Kate’s suspicions seriously, since the career she resigned
was as a CIA agent – and an assassin.
Kate begins to dig into the background of her new friend, Julia, and as
she does, begins to realize that her husband might not just be the naïve tech
guy she thought he was. You get
the gist. It’s a fun read, too,
but not the most skilled of books.
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson. I’m
still really working out what I think about this novel. Kate Atkinson is one of my favorite
writers and I think her previous novel, Life After Life, is brilliant. A God In Ruins centers on Teddy Todd,
the brother of Ursula, the main character of Life After Life. I do think you need to have read the
first book to really appreciate the second. I’m not sure I would have cared enough about the characters
if I were meeting them for the first time in this book. The two points I keep returning to mull
over are this: first, in Life
After Life, Ursula keeps redoing her life as things go wrong. She is born again and has to live
through certain events again until she gets them “right.” What IS “right” is never really
resolved or spelled out in that book.
Yet in A God in Ruins, Atkinson picks one version of events to continue
forward. (She talks about this in
an epilogue, and what she says there is fascinating and complicated.) Atkinson also backtracks a bit about
choosing the one course at the end of this novel too. I like that she does this more than I dislike it, but it
brings up so much to ponder about both novels, and I’m not done doing so
yet. The second snag I keep
returning to is that in this novel, Teddy’s life is sad in a mundane way that
becomes very depressing. He made a
vow during WWII that if he made it through the war, he would be kind and
delight in the small things of life.
He does this , and isn’t unsatisfied. But his relationship with his wife (Nancy Shawcross) is
rather sad (if very ordinary) and they have a dreadful daughter who is a
narcissist at best. I keep
thinking of what this all means in the context of Life After Life (and all of
Teddy’s promise): it is not unlike
Eliot’s Middlemarch, in a way, in that it is a book about what happens in the “happily
ever after part” – after the wedding, after the war, etc. Atkinson is a brilliant writer and also
a really good story-teller. She
goes back and forth from the war to after the war, to Teddy’s midlife and the
end of his very long life, and does it all with skill and not mere
manipulation. Teddy was a fighter
pilot in the war and she delves into this in detail. So in a nutshell:
in this as always, Atkinson’s writing is superb. I’m still mulling over how this fits in
with and changes Life After Life, as its sequel. It can be read on many levels
though and enjoyed, albeit in a bittersweet way, as the story of one man’s life
after life: the “after” he thought
he’d never make it to see.
In Your Prime: Older, Wiser, Happier by India Knight. This is
a fun advice book about enjoying middle age. I don’t know much about India Knight, although I know she is
English, lives in London, is in her late forties, and is known primarily as a
nonfiction writer, although she’s also written novels. This particular book concentrates on
the physical, and her advice runs the gamut from what to do during menopause,
to what face cream to use, to more general, state-of-mind metrics. She’s opinionated and fun, and whereas
some of the topics are obvious to the point of being surprising that anyone
would need to be told this stuff, as the book progressed I fell into the rhythm
of it and found it enjoyable on the whole (even though I fell into a category
that she often scoffs at in the book – old people with young kids. Harrumph.) She’s witty and bossy:
it’s an amusing, “how true” kind of read.
The House At Riverton by Kate Morton. I read Morton’s fourth novel, The Secret Keeper a month or
so ago and enjoyed it, so decided to read her remaining novels in order in
which they were written. This is
her first, and it really wasn’t up to the same level of writing as her
fourth. (So, progress! I guess that’s a good thing). It seemed a bit derivative of Downton
Abbey to me (although it came first), and the characters fell a little
flat. Most were stereotypes of
both downstairs and upstairs folk – the noble butler, the hardworking,
self-effacing ladies’ maid, etc.
And the life that the main character, Grace, goes on to have seemed a
stretch, as did the main reason for the central plot twist of the novel – which
was why Hannah would stay in her loveless marriage. It was an okay light read and in it Morton shows promise in
her ability to tell an “intriguing” story, but overall the characters weren’t
well done and the plot twists were too made up out of thin air. Basically, the story is told by Grace,
a one-time ladies maid and house servant, at the end of her long life. She wants to unburden herself of a
secret which she kept since the 1920’s, and decides to tell the details to her
grandson via tape. She then
discloses her experiences working for an aristocratic family on the down and
out pre and post WWI. She ends up
working for the older sister, Hannah, after she gets married and moves to
London, and plays a part in a deception that proves fatal.
The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout. I loved this book. Elizabeth Strout’s writing
is wonderful, as is her character creation. I looked forward to reading
it each night and was sad when it was over. She writes about the Burgess
family, three adult siblings from Maine. The Burgess brothers left Maine
to live in NYC, while their sister, Susan, stayed in their home town of Shirley
Falls. Both brothers are lawyers, but the oldest, Jim, became famous in
the nineties for successfully defending a pop star, while the other, Bob, ended
up doing nonprofit law. We learn right away in the book that when Bob was
4, he released the brake in a parked car, causing it to roll down a hill and
kill his father. This of course haunts him, and he seems to have lived
his life in a bit of a muddle and in awe of Jim. When the story begins,
Bob and Jim return to Maine to help out their nephew, who has gotten into
trouble involving the Somali community in his hometown. The return sets
off a series of events that upends the relationship between the siblings, but
also changes how they appear to the reader. It’s an interesting plot, but
I think her characters are genius. We see things from all the siblings’
point of view, as well as Jim’s wife and Bob’s ex-wife. They are somehow
better than real, and Strout is able to reveal their foibles and weaknesses
while remaining kind. It’s a sad book at times, and there is a rather
strange prologue framework in which the “author”, also a Mainer living in NYC,
decides while gossiping with her mother to write about the Burgess Boys from
their hometown. This “author” never appears again in the book, so I’m not
quite sure if that extra layer of narrative is needed. It’s a truly
delightful book.
