Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss. I wanted to like this book – as I could appreciate a lot of what she was trying to do in it, and was impressed with its whole structure and meta moments – but ultimately I could not. Krauss is a wonderful writer in many ways, but I do not like Kafka, and I think you have to like Kafka to like this book. It contains two narrative lines – one story line in every other chapter is about Jules Epstein, an aging lawyer who when the book begins has decided to give away his vast fortune for reasons that aren’t quite clear to him. He has just gotten divorced, and isn’t very close to his adult children, and ends up in Tel Aviv trying to buy a memorial forest for his long-dead parents. Meanwhile in the other chapters we get a character named “Nicole,” who is divorcing her husband, and leaves her young sons for a trip to Tel Aviv to try to get over her writer’s block. While there, in part researching Kafka and the notion that perhaps he didn’t die but emigrated to Tel Aviv and lived there anonymously, she starts having her own Kafka-esque experience, ending up in a tiny woods cottage with an old typewriter where Kafka himself allegedly lived and wrote. The story of Epstein was excellent, and until Nicole veered into the Kafka-esque, I very much enjoyed her chapters too, but to me the Kafka-stunt that happens to the character Nicole ruined the book. It made me not care what happened to either of them, as well as disdain their angst.
Lost In The Forest by Sue Miller. I don’t remember how this book ended up on my kindle, and I don’t think I have read anything else by Sue Miller, but I enjoyed this. It’s a quiet book about a family living in the late eighties in wine country in California. When the book begins, Mark and Eva have been divorced for many years and are sharing the raising of their two daughters, Emily and Daisy. Mark is picking them up from Eva’s when he finds out that Eva’s second husband and the father of her son has just been killed in a car accident. The point of view switches from Mark to Eva to Daisy over the next few years. Eva tries to deal with her grief while flirting with the idea of getting back together with Mark, which Mark wants to happen. Daisy becomes a very prickly and hard to like adolescent who gets preyed upon by a family friend. It is all much less dramatic than I’m making it out to be, and quite well done on the whole. The realizations are everyday realizations and handled with intelligence and thoughtfulness. It was quietly good.
Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore. This was an interesting kind of biography of the life of Ben Franklin’s sister, Jane. She was close to her brother, and wrote letters to him all her life, yet of course most of her letters to him we don’t still have: just the reverse. It is fascinating to see their different circumstances – he of course escapes to Philadelphia and a career, while Jane marries at 15, has 12 kids, 10 of whom die in childhood, and has to deal with a deadbeat husband and insane sons. She’s clearly a smart and thoughtful woman – albeit one who cannot spell – and followed Ben Franklin’s every career move and published book and article while never hesitating to speak her mind to him. It is very much a “Judith Shakespeare” study of a brother and sister and raised many interesting issues while also remaining true to Jane’s personal story, as much as it can be discerned today.
The Boys In The Boat by Daniel James Brown. I did not love this book, although I seem to be in the minority, as everyone else I know who read it did. I found the history fascinating, as well as the individual stories of the boys from Washington who win Olympic gold in crew in Hitler’s Berlin. My problem was that I did not enjoy the descriptions of the many crew races themselves – and I’d say those descriptions were more than half of the book. I also do not think Brown is a particularly adept writer, as he tended to be a bit repetitive in his phrasing. I thought using the crew team was an interesting way to create a slice of life study of a very particular era – the crew team had all suffered through the depression in different ways and their families had different strategies for getting by. Brown parallels the making of the team with the events happening in Germany leading up to the Olympics, and this was provocative reading (although I didn’t necessarily agree with his portrayal of Leni Riefenstahl). Those endless race scenes though! Argh!
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan. I really liked this novel and was sad when it ended. I described it to my work colleagues and couldn’t make it sound interesting, but trust me! It is a very good book. It is basically about Anna, a young girl in NYC who starts to work in the Navy Yard during WWII and eventually becomes a diver repairing boats from under the water. The chapters switch back and forth between Anna (first as a child and then as an adult), her father Ed Kerrigan, and Dexter Styles, a gangster who crosses paths with both Anna and Ed. Egan makes all three characters believable and well-rounded and compelling, even when their actions are egregious. Ed works for Dexter Styles briefly, and then runs into problems; Anna as an adult later seeks out Styles to see if she can find out any additional information about her father. She also has to work hard to convince her bosses that she can dive, as a woman, and do that kind of work. It’s a well-done historical novel and a great story to boot.
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