Review Catch-Up: Medical Nonfiction & Nature Poetry
Catching up on four review copies I was sent earlier in the year and have finally got around to finishing and writing about. I have two works of health-themed nonfiction, one a narrative about organ transplantation and the other a psychiatrist’s memoir; and two books of nature poetry, a centuries-spanning anthology and a recent single-author collection.
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and voice of wisdom on end-of-life issues. I was a huge fan of her Dear Life and admire her public critique of government policies that harm the NHS. (I’ve also reviewed Breathtaking, her account of hospital working during Covid-19.) While her three previous books all incorporate a degree of memoir, this is something different: narrative nonfiction based on a true story from 2017 and filled in with background research and interviews with the figures involved. Clarke has no personal connection to the case but, like many, discovered it via national newspaper coverage. Nine-year-old Max Johnson spent nearly a year in hospital with heart failure after a mysterious infection. Keira Ball, also nine, was left brain-dead when her family was in a car accident on a dangerous North Devon road. Keira’s heart gave Max a second chance at life.
Clarke zooms in on pivotal moments: the accident, the logistics of getting an organ from one end of the country to another, and the separate recovery and transplant surgeries. She does a reasonable job of recreating gripping scenes despite a foregone conclusion. Because I’ve read a lot around transplantation and heart surgery (such as When Death Becomes Life by Joshua D. Mezrich and Heart by Sandeep Jauhar), I grew impatient with the contextual asides. I also found that the family members and medical professionals interviewed didn’t speak well enough to warrant long quotation. All in all, this felt like the stuff of a long-read magazine article rather than a full book. The focus on children also results in mawkishness. However, the Baillie Gifford Prize judges who shortlisted this clearly disagreed. I laud Clarke for drawing attention to organ donation, a cause dear to my family. This case was instrumental in changing UK law: one must now opt out of donating organs instead of registering to do so.
With thanks to Abacus Books (Little, Brown) for the proof copy for review.
You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here: A Psychiatrist’s Life by Dr Benji Waterhouse
Waterhouse is also a stand-up comedian and is definitely channelling Adam Kay in his funny and touching debut memoir. Most chapters are pen portraits of patients and colleagues he has worked with. He also puts his own family under the microscope as he undergoes therapy to work through the sources of his anxiety and depression and tackles his reluctance to date seriously. In the first few years, he worked in a hospital and in community psychiatry, which involved house visits. Even though identifying details have been changed to make the case studies anonymous, Waterhouse manages to create memorable characters, such as Tariq, an unhoused man who travels with a dog (a pity Waterhouse is mortally afraid of dogs), and Sebastian, an outwardly successful City worker who had been minutes away from hanging himself before Waterhouse and his colleague rang on the door.
Along with such close shaves, there are tragic mistakes and tentative successes. But progress is difficult to measure. “Predicting human behaviour isn’t an exact science. We’re just relying on clinical assessment, a gut feeling and sometimes a prayer,” Waterhouse tells his medical student. The book gives a keen sense of the challenges of working for the NHS in an underfunded field, especially under Covid strictures. He is honest and open about his own failings but ends on the positive note of making advances in his relationship with his parents. This was a great read that I’d recommend beyond medical-memoir junkies like myself. Waterhouse has storytelling chops and the frequent one-liners lighten even difficult topics:
The sum total of my wisdom from time spent in the community: lots of people have complicated, shit lives.
Ambiguous statements … need clarification. Like when a depressed patient telephones to say they’re ‘in a bad place’. I need to check if they’re suicidal or just visiting Peterborough.
What is it about losing your mind that means you so often mislay your footwear too?
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Green Verse: An Anthology of Poems for Our Planet, ed. Rosie Storey Hilton
Part of the “In the Moment” series, this anthology of nature poetry has been arranged seasonally – spring through to winter – and, within season, roughly thematically. No context or biographical information is given on the poets apart from birth and death years for those not living. Selections from Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats thus share space with the work of contemporary and lesser-known poets. This is a similar strategy to the Wildlife Trusts’ Seasons anthologies, the ranging across time meant to suggest continuity in human engagement with the natural world. However, with a few exceptions (the above plus Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Inversnaid” are absolute classics, of course), the historical verse tends to be obscure, rhyming and sentimental; unfair to deem it all purple or doggerel, but sometimes bodies of work are forgotten for a reason. By contrast, I found many more standouts among the contemporary poets. Some favourites: “Cyanotype, by St Paul’s Cathedral” by Tamiko Dooley, “Eight Blue Notes” by Gillian Dawson (about eight species of butterfly), the gorgeously erotic “the bluebells are coming out & so am I” by Maya Blackwell, and “The Trees Don’t Know I’m Trans” by Eddy Quekett. It was also worthwhile to discover poems from other ancient traditions, such as haiku by Issa (“O Snail”) and wise aphoristic verse by Lao Tzu (“All things pass”). So, a bit of a mixed bag, but a nice introductory text for those newer to poetry.
With thanks to Saraband for the free copy for review.
Dangerous Enough by Becky Varley-Winter (2023)
I requested this debut collection after hearing that it had been longlisted for the Laurel Prize for environmental poetry (funded by Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate). Varley-Winter crafts lovely natural metaphors for formative life experiences. Crows and wrens, foxes and fireflies, memories of a calf being born on a farm in Wales; gardens, greenhouses and long-lived orchids. These are the sorts of images that thread through poems about loss, parenting and the turmoil of lockdown. The last line or two of a poem is often especially memorable. It’s been months since I read this and I foolishly didn’t take any notes, so I haven’t retained more detail than that. But here is one shining example:
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the free copy for review.
December Releases by Anita Felicelli, Lise Goett, Brooke Randel & Weike Wang
December isn’t a big month for new releases, but here are excerpts from a few I happened to review early for U.S. publications BookBrowse, Foreword Reviews, and Shelf Awareness: Speculative short stories, loss-tinged poetry, a family memoir based on Holocaust history, and a satirical short novel about racial microaggressions and class divides in contemporary America.
How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli
These linked speculative stories, set in near-future California, are marked by environmental anxiety. Many of their characters have South Asian backgrounds. A nascent queer romance between co-op grocery colleagues defies an impending tsunami. A painter welcomes a studio visitor who could be her estranged husband traveling from the past. Mysterious “fog catchers” recur in multiple stories. Memory bridges the human and the artificial, as in “The Glitch,” wherein a coder, bereaved by wildfires, lives alongside holograms of her wife and children. But technology, though a potential means of connecting with the dead, is not an unmitigated good. Creative reinterpretations of traditional stories and figures include urban legends, a locked room mystery, a poltergeist, and a golem. In these grief- and regret-tinged stories, heartbroken people can’t alter their pasts, so they’ll mold the future instead. (See my full Foreword review.)
The Radiant by Lise Goett
In the 25 poems of Goett’s luminous third poetry collection, nature’s beauty and ancient wisdom sustain the fragile and bereaved. The speaker in “Difficult Body” references a cancer experience and imagines escaping the flesh to diffuse into the cosmos. Goett explores liminal moments and ponders what survives a loss. The use of “terminal” in “Free Fall” denotes mortality while also bringing up fond memories of her late father picking her up from an airport. Mythical allusions, religious imagery, and Buddhist philosophy weave through to shine ancient perspective on current struggles. The book luxuriates in abstruse vocabulary and sensual descriptions of snow, trees, and color. (Tupelo Press, 24 December. Review forthcoming at Shelf Awareness)
Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust by Brooke Randel
Randel’s debut is a poised, tender family memoir capturing her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s recollections of the Holocaust. Golda (“Bubbie”) spoke multiple languages but was functionally illiterate. In her mid-80s, she asked her granddaughter to tell her story. Randel flew to south Florida to conduct interviews. The oral history that emerges is fragmentary and frenetic. The structure of the book makes up for it, though. Interview snippets are interspersed with narrative chapters based on follow-up research. Golda, born in 1930, grew up in Romania. When the Nazis came, her older brothers were conscripted into forced labor; her mother and younger siblings were killed in a concentration camp. At every turn, Golda’s survival (through Auschwitz, Christianstadt, and Bergen-Belsen) was nothing short of miraculous. This concise, touching memoir bears witness to a whole remarkable life as well as the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. (See my full Shelf Awareness review.)
Rental House by Weike Wang
Their interactions with family and strangers alike on two vacations – Cape Cod and the Catskills, five years apart – put interracial couple Keru and Nate’s choices into perspective as they near age 40. Although some might find their situation (childfree, with a “fur baby”) stereotypical, it does reflect that of a growing number of aging millennials. Wang portrays them sympathetically, but there is also a note of gentle satire here. The way that identity politics comes into the novel is not exactly subtle, but it does feel true to life. And it is very clever how the novel examines the matters of race, class, ambition, and parenthood through the lens of vacations. Like a two-act play, the framework is simple and concise, yet revealing about contemporary American society. (See my full BookBrowse review.)
November Releases Including #NovNov24: Bennett, Pimlott, Rishøi, Shattuck
Two belated novellas: one a morbid farce set at an old folks’ home; the other a sweet Norwegian tale that offers sisterhood and magic as ways to survive a rough upbringing. Plus a lovely poetry pamphlet about the early days of widowhood and a linked short story collection spanning several centuries of art and relationships in New England.
Killing Time by Alan Bennett
I’d only previously read The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett; I perpetually have him confused with Arnold Bennett, by whom I know more. It could be debated whether this is a novella by word count, but even if more of a short story, for me it counts for #NovNov24 because it’s in a stand-alone volume, as publishing partner Faber produced for Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day last year.
I polished this off in one sitting. Bennett’s black comedy is set at a posh home for the elderly, the Edwardian mansion Hill Topp House. (Residents know to be on their best behaviour lest they be demoted to an inferior neighbouring facility, Low Moor.) When a prospective client calls, Mrs McBryde enthusiastically lists the assets:
We have a choir and on special occasions a glass of dry sherry. It’s less of a home and more of a club and very much a community. We go on frequent trips out. Only last week we went to a local farm where they have a flamingo. … We don’t vegetate at Hill Topp. And the cuisine is not unadventurous. It’s not long since we had a Norwegian evening.
The dialogue is sparkling, just like you’d expect from a playwright. As in the Hendrik Groen books and Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, the situation invites cliques and infantilizing. The occasional death provides a bit more excitement than jigsaws and knitting. Ageing bodies may be pitiable (the incontinence!), but sex remains a powerful impulse.
Here is where readers might start to feel disconnected from Bennett’s dated humour. The window cleaner turned gigolo is somewhat amusing; the repeated gag of a flasher, not so much. “Has she seen the sights yet?” two ladies ask. And a jesting conversation about clerical sexual abuse scandals seems particularly ill considered given recent news.
The story is most interesting and fresh once Covid comes onto the scene. Some perish early on; the survivors, ungoverned, do their best. I loved the detail of a resident turning a velvet dress into 60 masks. Two objects, one of them depicted on the cover (it’s not a grenade as I thought at first!), come to have particular importance. I liked this but thought by favouring broad humour it sacrificed characterization or compassion. You’ll enjoy it if you’re fond of wicked comedy by the likes of Alan Ayckbourn. [112 pages]
With thanks to Profile Books for the free copy for review.
After the Rites and Sandwiches: Poems by Kathy Pimlott
The 18 poems in this pamphlet (in America it would be called a chapbook) orbit the sudden death of Pimlott’s husband a few years ago. By the time she found Robert at the bottom of the stairs, there was nothing paramedics could do. What next? The callousness of bureaucracy: “Your demise constitutes a quarter off council tax; / the removal of a vote you seldom cast and then / only to be contrary; write-off of a modest overdraft; / the bill for an overpaid pension” (from “Death Admin I”). Attempts at healthy routines: “I’ve written my menu for the week. Today’s chowder. / I manage ten pieces of the 1000-piece jigsaw’s scenes / from Jane Austen. Tomorrow I’ll visit friends and say // it’s alright, it’s alright, seventy, eighty percent / alright” (from “How to be a widow”). Pimlott casts an eye over the possessions he left behind, remembering him in gardens and on Sunday walks of the sort they took together. Grief narratives can err towards bitter or mawkish, but this one never does. Everyday detail, enjambment and sprightly vocabulary lend the wry poems a matter-of-fact grace. I plan to pass on my copy to a new book club member who was widowed unexpectedly in May – no doubt she’ll recognise the practical challenges and emotional reality depicted.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi (2021; 2024)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Caroline Waight]
Ten-year-old Ronja and her teenage sister Melissa have to stick together – their single father may be jolly and imaginative, but more often than not he’s drunk and unemployed. They can’t rely on him to keep food in their Tøyen flat; they subsist on cereal. When Ronja hears about a Christmas tree seller vacancy, she hopes things might turn around. Their father lands the job but, after his crew at a local pub pull him back into bad habits, Melissa has to take over his hours. Ronja hangs out at the Christmas tree stand after school, even joining in enthusiastically with publicity. The supervisor, Tommy, doesn’t mind her being around, but it’s clear that Eriksen, the big boss, is uncomfortable with even a suggestion of child labour.
It’s touching to see Melissa take on a caring role and to meet the few indisputably good people who help the sisters, such as their elderly neighbour, Aronsen. Ronja’s innocent narration emphasizes her disbelief at their father’s repeated failings and also sets the story up for a late swerve into what seems like magic realism. I’m genuinely not sure what’s supposed to happen at the end, but the sisters find themselves alone in a wintry storm and the language of miracles is used. Rishøi’s debut will surely be compared to Small Things Like These and other classic holiday novellas. I found it a little obvious and saccharine, but if you find the right mood and moment it might just tug at your heart in the run-up to Christmas. [182 pages]
With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck
“history is personal, even when it isn’t”
The dozen stories of Shattuck’s fiction debut form a “hook-and-chain” structure of five couplets, bookended by a first and last story that are related to each other. The links are satisfyingly overt: A pair might take place in the same house in different centuries, or the second will fill in the history of the characters from the first. In “Edwin Chase of Nantucket,” the eponymous figure recognizes his bereaved mother’s loneliness and does her a kindness. “Silver Clip,” which follows, is separated by 200 years, but its accounts of a young painter living in his ancestral island home reprises the motifs of grief, compassion and memory. “Graft,” about a woman spurned in the 1880s, and “Tundra Swan,” in which a man concocts a swindle to pay for his son’s rehab in the present day, are connected by a Cape Cod orchard. Artefacts and documents also play important roles: a journal accounts for a mysterious mass death, a radio transcript and a photograph explain a well-meaning con, and an excerpt from a history textbook follows up on the story of the religious cult in “The Children of New Eden.”
My favourite individual story was “August in the Forest,” about a poet whose artist’s fellowship isn’t all it cracked up to be – the primitive cabin being no match for a New Hampshire winter. His relationships with a hospital doctor, Chloe, and his childhood best friend, Elizabeth, seem entirely separate until Elizabeth returns from Laos and both women descend on him at the cabin. Their dialogues are funny and brilliantly awkward (“Sorry not all of us are quietly chiseling toward the beating heart of the human experience, August. One iamb at a time”) and it’s fascinating to watch how, years later, August turns life into prose. But the crowning achievement is the opening title story and its counterpart, “Origin Stories,” about folk music recordings made by two university friends during the First World War – and the afterlife of both the songs and the men.
From the start I was reminded strongly of North Woods by Daniel Mason, and particular sequences recall Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman and An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass. It’s a slight shame for Shattuck that what he was doing here didn’t seem as original to me because of my familiarity with these predecessors. Yet, to my surprise, I found that The History of Sound was more consistent than any of those. With the exception of a few phrases from “Graft” (“living room,” “had sex” and “boring” don’t strike me as 1880s lingo), all of the stories are historically convincing, and the very human themes of lust, parenthood, sorrow and frustrated ambition resonate across centuries and state lines. Really beautiful. (See Susan’s review too.)
[Some you-couldn’t-make-it-up trivia about Shattuck: he’s married to Jenny Slate (author of Little Weirds et al., as well as an actress known to me as Mona Lisa from Parks and Recreation); and he runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793.]
With thanks to Swift Press for the free copy for review.
Which of these November releases catches your eye? What others can you recommend?
Literary Wives Club: Euphoria by Elin Cullhed (2021)
Swedish author Elin Cullhed won the August Prize and was a finalist for the Strega European Prize with this first novel for adults. Euphoria is a recreation of Sylvia Plath’s state of mind in the last year of her life. It opens on 7 December 1962 in Devon with a list headed “7 REASONS NOT TO DIE,” most of which centre on her children, Frieda and Nick. She enumerates the pleasures of being in a physical body and enjoying coastal scenery. But she also doesn’t want to give her husband, poet Ted Hughes, the satisfaction of having his prophecies about her mental illness come true.
Flash back to the year before, when Plath is heavily pregnant with Nick during a cold winter and trying to steal moments to devote to writing. She feels gawky and out of place in encounters with the vicar and shopkeeper of their English village. “Who was I, who had let everything become a compromise between Ted’s Celtic chill and my grandiose American bluster?” She and Hughes have an intensely physical bond, but jealousy of each other’s talents and opportunities – as well as his serial adultery and mean and controlling nature – erodes their relationship. The book ends in possibility, with Plath just starting to glimpse success as The Bell Jar readies for publication and a collection of poems advances. Readers are left with that dramatic irony.
Cullhed seems to hew to biographical detail, though I’m not particularly familiar with the Hughes–Plath marriage. Scenes of their interactions with neighbours, Plath’s mother, and Ted’s lover Assia Wevill make their dynamic clear. The prose grows more nonstandard; run-on sentences and all-caps phrases indicate increasing mania. There are also lovely passages that seem apt for a poet: “Ted’s crystalline sly little mint lozenge eyes. Narrow foxish. Thin hard. His eyes, so embittered.” The use of language is effective at revealing Plath’s maternal ambivalence and shaky mental health. Somehow, though, I found this quite tedious by the end. Not among my favourite biographical novels, but surely a must-read for Plath fans. 
Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida in 2022 – our first read in translation, I think? And what a brilliant cover.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Marriage is claustrophobic here, as in so many of the books we read. Much as she loves her children, Plath finds the whole wifehood–motherhood complex to be oppressive and in direct conflict with her ambitions as an author. Sharing a vocation with her husband, far from helping him understand her, only makes her more bitter that he gets the time and exposure she so longs for. More than 60 years later, Plath’s death still echoes, a tragic loss to literature.
See Kate’s, Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews, too!
Coming up next, in March: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus – I’ve read this before but will plan to skim back through a copy from the library.
#MARM2024: Life before Man and Interlunar by Margaret Atwood
Hard to believe, but it’s my seventh year participating in the annual Margaret Atwood Reading Month (#MARM) hosted by indomitable Canadian blogger Marcie of Buried in Print. In previous years, I’ve read Surfacing and The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride and Moral Disorder, Wilderness Tips, The Door, and Bodily Harm and Stone Mattress; and reread The Blind Assassin. I’m wishing a happy belated birthday to Atwood, who turned 85 earlier this month. Novembers are my excuse to catch up on her extensive back catalogue. In recent years, I’ve scoured the university library holdings to find works by her that I often had never heard of, as was the case with this early novel and mid-career poetry collection.
Life before Man (1979)
Atwood’s fourth novel is from three rotating third-person POVs: Toronto museum curator Elizabeth, her toy-making husband Nate, and Lesje (pronounced “Lashia,” according to a note at the front), Elizabeth’s paleontologist colleague. The dated chapters span nearly two years, October 1976 to August 1978; often we visit with two or three protagonists on the same day. Elizabeth and Nate, parents to two daughters, have each had a string of lovers. Elizabeth’s most recent, Chris, has died by suicide. Nate disposes of his latest mistress, Martha, and replaces her with Lesje, who is initially confused by his interest in her. She’s more attracted to rocks and dinosaurs than to people, in a way that could be interpreted as consistent with neurodivergence.
It was neat to follow along seasonally with Halloween and Remembrance Day and so on, and see the Quebec independence movement simmering away in the background. To start with, I was engrossed in the characters’ perspectives and taken with Atwood’s witty descriptions and dialogue: “[Nate]’s heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians” and (Lesje:) “Elizabeth needs support like a nun needs tits.” My favourite passage encapsulates a previous relationship of Lesje’s perfectly, in just the sort of no-nonsense language she would use:
The geologist had been fine; they could compromise on rock strata. They went on hikes with their little picks and kits, and chipped samples off cliffs; then they ate jelly sandwiches and copulated in a friendly way behind clumps of goldenrod and thistles. She found this pleasurable but not extremely so. She still has a collection of rock chips left over from this relationship; looking at it does not fill her with bitterness. He was a nice boy but she wasn’t in love with him.
Elizabeth’s formidable Auntie Muriel is a terrific secondary presence. But this really is just a novel about (repeated) adultery and its aftermath. The first line has Elizabeth thinking “I don’t know how I should live,” and after some complications, all three characters are trapped in a similar stasis by the end. By the halfway point I’d mostly lost interest and started skimming. The grief motif and museum setting weren’t the draws I’d expected them to be. Lesje is a promising character but, disappointingly, gets snared in clichéd circumstances. No doubt that is part of the point; “life before man” would have been better for her. (University library)
This prophetic passage from Life before Man leads nicely into the themes of Interlunar:
The real question is: Does [Lesje] care whether the human race survives or not? She doesn’t know. The dinosaurs didn’t survive and it wasn’t the end of the world. In her bleaker moments, … she feels the human race has it coming. Nature will think up something else. Or not, as the case may be.
The posthuman prospect is echoed in Interlunar in the lines: “Which is the sound / the earth will make for itself / without us. A stone echoing a stone.”
Interlunar (1984)
Some familiar Atwood elements in this volume, including death, mythology, nature, and stays at a lake house; you’ll even recognize a couple of her other works in poem titles “The Robber Bridegroom” and “The Burned House.” The opening set of “Snake Poems” got me the “green” and “scales” squares on Marcie’s Bingo card (in addition to various other scattered ones, I’m gonna say I’ve filled the whole right-hand column thanks to these two books).
This one brilliantly likens the creature to the sinuous ways of language:
“A Holiday” imagines a mother–daughter camping vacation presaging a postapocalyptic struggle for survival: “This could be where we / end up, learning the minimal / with maybe no tree, no rain, / no shelter, no roast carcasses / of animals to renew us … So far we do it / for fun.” As in her later collection The Door, portals and thresholds are of key importance. “Doorway” intones, “November is the month of entrance, / month of descent. Which has passed easily, / which has been lenient with me this year. / Nobody’s blood on the floor.” There are menace and melancholy here. But as “Orpheus (2)” suggests at its close, art can be an ongoing act of resistance: “To sing is either praise / or defiance. Praise is defiance.” I do recommend Atwood’s poetry if you haven’t tried it before, even if you’re not typically a poetry reader. Her poems are concrete and forceful, driven by imagery and voice; not as abstract as you might fear. Alas, I wasn’t sent a review copy of her collected poems, Paper Boat, as I’d hoped, but I will continue to enjoy encountering them piecemeal. (University library) 
October Books: Ballard, Czarnecki, Moss, Oliver, Ostriker, Steed & More
Apparently October is THE biggest month of the year for new releases. A sterling set came my way this year, including two beautiful novella-length memoirs, a luxuriantly illustrated work dedicated to an everyday bird species, two very different but equally elegant poetry collections, and a book of offbeat comics. Time and concentration only allow for a paragraph or so on each, but I hope that gives a flavour of the contents and will pique interest in the ones that suit you best. Plus I excerpt and link to my BookBrowse review of a poignant story of sisters and mental illness, and my Shelf Awareness review of a fantastic graphic novel adaptation.
Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking by Maddie Ballard
This collection of micro-essays considers sewing and much more. Each piece is headed by a pattern name and list of materials that Ballard made into an article of clothing for herself or for someone else. Among the minutiae of the craft, she slips in so many threads: about her mixed Chinese heritage and her relationship with her grandmother, about the environmental and financial benefits of making one’s own clothing, and especially about the upheaval of her twenties: the pandemic, a break-up, leaving a job to go back to school, finding roommates. I can barely mend a sock and I’m clueless when it comes to fashion, yet I can appreciate how sewing blends comfort and creativity. Ballard presents it as a meditative act of self-care:
I lower the needle and the world recedes. The process of sewing a garment – printing the pattern, tracing and cutting, sewing the first and the second and the fiftieth seam – is a lesson in taking your time.
Like gardening, sewing is an investment in the future – in what sort of person your future self will be, and how she will feel about her body, and what she will want to wear.
Similar to two other very short works of nonfiction I’ve read from The Emma Press, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow and Tiny Moons by Nina Mingya Powles (Ballard, too, is from New Zealand), this is a graceful, enriching book about a young woman making her way in the world and figuring out what is essential to her sense of home and identity. I commend it whether or not you have any particular interest in handicraft.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Encounters with Inscriptions: A Memoir Exploring Books Gifted by Parents by Kristin Czarnecki
When Kristin Czarnecki got in touch to offer a copy of her bibliomemoir about revisiting the books her late parents gifted her, I was instantly intrigued but couldn’t have known in advance how perfect it would be for me. Niche it might seem, but it combines several of my reading interests: bereavement, books about books, relationships with parents (especially a mother) and literary travels.
The book starts, aptly, with childhood. A volume of Shel Silverstein poetry and A Child’s Christmas in Wales serve as perfect vehicles for the memories of how her parents passed on their love of literature and created family holiday rituals. Thereafter, the chapters are not strictly chronological but thematic. A work of women’s history opens up her mother’s involvement in the feminist movement; reading a Thomas Merton book reveals why his thinking was so important to her Catholic father. The interplay of literary criticism, cultural commentary and personal significance is especially effective in pieces on Alice Munro and Flannery O’Connor. A Virginia Woolf biography points to Czarnecki’s academic specialism and a cookbook to how food embodies memories.
It seems fitting to be reviewing this on the second anniversary of my mother’s death. The afterword, which follows on from the philosophical encouragement of a chapter on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, exhorts readers to cherish loved ones while we can – and be grateful for the tokens they leave behind. I had told Kristin about books my parents inscribed to me, as well as the journals I inherited from my mother. But I didn’t know there would be other specific connections between us, too, such as being childfree and hopeless in the kitchen. (Also, I have family in South Bend, Indiana, where she’s from, and our mothers were born in the first week of August.) All that to say, I felt that I found a kindred spirit in this lovely book, which is one of the nicest things that happens through reading.
With thanks to the author for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Starling: A Biography by Stephen Moss
Moss has written a whole series of accessible bird species monographs suitable for nature buffs; this is the sixth. (I’ve not read the others, just Moss’s Wild Hares and Hummingbirds and Skylarks with Rosie, but we do have a copy of The Robin on the shelf that I’ve earmarked for Christmas.) The choice of the term ‘biography’ indicates the meeting of a comprehensive aim and intimate detail. The book conveys much anatomical and historical information about the starling’s relatives, habits, and worldwide spread, yet is only 187 pages – and plenty of those feature relevant paintings and photographs, too. It’s well known that starlings were introduced to Anglophone countries as part of misguided “acclimatisation” projects that we would now dub cultural imperialism. In the USA and elsewhere, the bird is still considered common. But with the industrialisation of agriculture, starlings are actually having less breeding success and thus are in decline.
Overall, the style of the book is dry and slightly workmanlike. However, when he’s recounting murmurations he’s seen in Somerset or read about, Moss’s enthusiasm lifts it into something special. Autumn dusk is a great time to start watching out for starling gatherings. I love observing and listening to the starlings just in the treetops and aerials of my neighbourhood, but we do also have a small local murmuration that I try to catch at least a few times in the season. Here’s how he describes their magic: “At a time when, both as a society and as individuals, we are less and less in touch with the natural world, attending this fleeting but memorable event is a way we can reconnect, regain our primal sense of wonder – and still be home in time for tea.”
With thanks to Square Peg, an imprint of Vintage (Penguin Random House) for the free copy for review.
The Alcestis Machine by Carolyn Oliver
Carolyn is a blogger friend whose first collection, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble, was on my Best Books of 2022 list. Her second is again characterized by precise vocabulary and crystalline imagery, often related to etymology, book history, or pigments (“You and I are marginalia shadowed / by a careless hand, we are gall-soaked vellum / invisible appetites consume.”). Astronomy and technology are a counterpoint, juxtaposing the ancient and the cutting-edge. I loved the language of sea creatures in “Strange Attractor” and the oblique approach to the passage of time (“Three popes ago, you and I”). The repeated three-word opening “In another life” gives a sense of many worlds, e.g., “In another life I’m a florist sometimes accused of inappropriate gravity.” Prose poems relay childhood memories. Love poems are tantalizing and utterly original: “If I promise not to describe the moon, will you / come with me a ways further into the night? / We’ll wash the forest floor / of ash and find a fairy ring / half-eaten, muted crescent bereft of power.” And alliteration never fails to win me over: “Tonight, snow tumbles over sophomores and starlings” and “the pillars in the water make a pillory not a pier”. Some of the collection remained cryptic for me; there was a bit less that grabbed me emotionally. But it’s still stirring work. And how flabbergasted was I to spot my name in the Acknowledgments? (Read via Edelweiss)
The Holy & Broken Bliss: Poems in Plague Time by Alicia Ostriker
“The words of an old woman shuffling the cards of her own decline the decline
of her husband the decline of her nation her plague-smitten world”
Out of pandemic isolation come new rituals: watching days and seasons pass, fighting for her own health but mostly her husband’s, and lamenting public displays of hate. Lines feel stark with honesty; some poems are just haiku length. Elsewhere, repetition and alliteration create a wistful tone. Jewish scripture and mysticism are the source of much of the language and outlook. Music and nature, too, promise the transcendent. Simple and remarkable. Here’s a stanza about late autumn:
It is almost winter and still
as I walk to the clinic the gingkos
sing their seraphic air
as if there is no tomorrow
With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.
Forces of Nature by Edward Steed
Steed is a longtime New Yorker cartoonist who produces single panels. This means there is no story progression (as in a graphic novel), just what you see on one page. Some of the comics are wordless; many scenes are visual gags which, to be entirely honest, I didn’t always grasp. Steed’s recurring characters are unhappy couples, exiles on desert islands, and dumb cops or criminals. His style is deliberately simplistic: the people not much more advanced than stick figures and the animals especially sketchy. There are multiple attempted prison breaks and satirical depictions of God and the Garden of Eden. Many of the setups are contrived, and the tone can be absurd or prickly, even shading into gruesome. These comics weren’t altogether my cup of tea, though I did get a laugh out of a few of them (a seasonal example is below). Endorsed if you fancy a cross between Edward Gorey and The Book of Bunny Suicides.
With thanks to Drawn & Quarterly for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for BookBrowse:
Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner – “No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister” is a wry aphorism that appears late in Lerner’s debut novel. Over the course of two decades, there is much heartache for the Shred family, but also moments of joy. Ultimately, a sisterly bond endures despite secrets, betrayals, and intermittent estrangement. Through her psychologically astute portrait of Olivia (“Ollie”) and Amy Shred, Lerner captures the lasting effects that mental illness can have on not just an individual, but an entire family.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
The Worst Journey in the World, Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down: The Graphic Novel by Sarah Airriess – The thrilling opening to a cinematically vivid adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 memoir. He was an assistant zoologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Even before the ship entered the pack ice, the journey was perilous. The book resembles a full-color storyboard for a Disney-style maritime adventure film. There is jolly camaraderie as the men sing sea shanties to boost morale. The second volume can’t arrive soon enough.
Autumn Reads: Don Freeman, Seamus Heaney, Jo Lindley, Alice Oseman
I keep a whole box full of future seasonal reads. Winter is the largest contingent because it includes Christmas, cold, snow and ice; followed by summer, which also covers heat, sun and so on. Every once in a while, I’ll come across a spring-related book. Autumn may be great for misty canal walks, vibrant leaves and variegated squashes, but it’s the hardest of the seasons to find books for. I’ve read all the obvious ones by now. Some of the below connections are more abstract but not too much of a stretch, I hope.
Corduroy by Don Freeman (1968)
Autumn is when I wear the most corduroy, sometimes (accidentally) head to toe.
I knew I’d read this as a child, but didn’t expect individual pages to feel so familiar. It must have been on frequent rotation in my house growing up. Corduroy the bear is among the toys on offer in a large department store. One morning Lisa, a little Black girl, picks him out, but her mother says no, they’ve spent too much already – and besides, the toy is damaged. He didn’t realize until her mother said: his green overall is missing a button. That night he rides the escalator to go look for the button, thinking he’ll never be loved until he’s complete. His adventure doesn’t turn out as planned, but Lisa hasn’t stopped thinking about him. Long before Toy Story, here was a sweet book about what toys get up to when we’re not around. And the repeated expressions of the bear’s meek wonderment – “This must be home,” “You must be a friend” – gave me the warm fuzzies. (Little Free Library)
Field Work by Seamus Heaney (1979)
Harvest is a secondary theme in this poetry collection, which also has an overall melancholy tone that seems appropriate to the season of All Souls. Two poems are headed “In Memoriam” and another is titled “Elegy.” Even when they are not the stated topic, the Troubles rear up, as in the first section of “Triptych”: “Two young men with rifles on the hill, / Profane and bracing as their instruments. // Who’s sorry for our trouble?” The countryside can nevermore be an idyll when armoured cars and bombs could be anywhere. “The end of art is peace,” a late line from “The Harvest Bow,” may well be the poet’s motto (so long as “end” is interpreted as “goal”). There is a sequence of 10 sonnets and several poems devoted to animals. I experience Heaney’s poetry as linguistically fertile and formally rigorous; probably best heard out loud. (Secondhand – Oxfam, Marlborough)
Autumnal passages I marked:
“We toe the line / between the tree in leaf and the bare tree.” (from “September Song”)
“the sunflower, dreaming umber” (from “Field Work”)
“A rowan like a lipsticked girl” (from “Song”)
“the sunset blaze / of straw on blackened stubble, a thatch-deep, freshening barbarous crimson burn” (from “Leavings”)
But none of those stood out to me as much as “Oysters,” the opening poem, which I photographed here. I’ve read and savoured every line of it five times now. It’s gold.
Hello Autumn by Jo Lindley (2023)
Depicted as elfin children, the seasons take turns wearing a single crown. Autumn is a timid soul worried about what might go wrong. But when one of the others is at risk, he rushes to help even if it might take him outside his comfort zone. By doing so, he realizes how much there is to enjoy in every season. This is part of a didactic series (Little Seasons/Best Friends with Big Feelings) about coping with anxiety. I’m surprised it wasn’t classified in the mostly-nonfiction “Family Matters” section of the children’s library, which includes books on feelings, illnesses, death, divorce, siblings, first experiences, etc. It was a little heavy-handed for me and I wasn’t sure why the characters had to be elves. (Public library)
Heartstopper: Volume 1 by Alice Oseman (2019)
I’ve been rereading the series through the hardback reissue; I’m now on Volume 5 (and WHERE is Volume 6, huh?). I’ve included the first book because of the falling leaves motif on the cover, which fits the back-to-school vibe. (Public library)
What I thought this time: Just as cute the second time around. All the looks, all the blushes, all the angst! I’d forgotten the details of how Nick and Charlie met and got together. Single best page: when Tori appears out of nowhere and says to Charlie of Nick, “I don’t think he’s straight.”
Original review: It’s well known at Truham boys’ school that Charlie is gay. Luckily, the bullying has stopped and the others accept him. Nick, who sits next to Charlie in homeroom, even invites him to join the rugby team. Charlie is smitten right away, but it takes longer for Nick, who’s only ever liked girls before, to sort out his feelings. This black-and-white YA graphic novel is pure sweetness, taking me right back to the days of high school crushes.
R.I.P., Part II: Duy Đoàn, T. Kingfisher & Rachael Smith
A second installment for the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (first was a creepy short story collection). Zombies link my first two selections, an experimental poetry collection and a historical novella that updates a classic, followed by a YA graphic novel about a medieval witch who appears in contemporary life to help a teen deal with her problems. I don’t really do proper horror; I’d characterize all three of these as more mischievous than scary.
Zombie Vomit Mad Libs by Duy Đoàn
The Vietnamese American poet’s second collection strikes a balance between morbid – a pair of sonnets chants the names and years of poets who died by suicide – and playful. Multiple poems titled “Zombie” or “Zombies” are composed of just 1–3 cryptic lines. Other repeated features are blow-by-blow descriptions of horror movie scenes and the fill-in-the-blank Mad Libs format. There is an obsession with Leslie Cheung, a gay Hong Kong actor who also died by suicide, in 2003. Đoàn experiments linguistically as well as thematically, by adding tones (as used in Vietnamese) to English words. This was a startling collection I admired for its range and pluck, though I found little to personally latch on to. I was probably expecting something more like 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le. But if you think poetry can’t get better than zombies + linguistics + suicides, boy have I got the collection for you! (Đoàn’s first book, We Play a Game, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lambda Literary Award for bisexual poetry.)
To be published in the USA by Alice James Books on November 12. With thanks to the publisher for the advanced e-copy for review.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (2022)
{MILD SPOILERS AHEAD}
This first book in the “Sworn Soldier” duology is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Set in the 1890s, it’s narrated by Alex Easton, a former Gallacian soldier who learns that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying and goes to visit her at her and her brother Roderick’s home in Ruritania. Easton also meets the Ushers’ friend, the American doctor Denton, and Eugenia Potter, an amateur mycologist (and aunt of a certain Beatrix). Easton and Potter work out that what is making Madeline ill is the same thing that’s turning the local rabbits into zombies…
At first it seemed the author was awkwardly inserting a nonbinary character into history, but it’s more complicated than that. The sworn soldier tradition in countries such as Albania was a way for women, especially orphans or those who didn’t have brothers to advocate for them, to have autonomy in martial, patriarchal cultures. Kingfisher makes up European nations and their languages, as well as special sets of pronouns to refer to soldiers (ka/kan), children (va/van), etc. She doesn’t belabour the world-building, just sketches in the bits needed.
This was a quick and reasonably engaging read, though I wasn’t always amused by Kingfisher’s gleefully anachronistic tone (“Mozart? Beethoven? Why are you asking me? It was music, it went dun-dun-dun-DUN, what more do you want me to say?”). I wondered if the plot might have been inspired by a detail in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, but it seems more likely it’s a half-conscious addition to a body of malevolent-mushroom stories (Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, various by Jeff VanderMeer, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley). I was drawn in by Easton’s voice and backstory enough to borrow the sequel, about which more anon. (T. Kingfisher is the pen name of Ursula Vernon.) (Public library)
Isabella & Blodwen by Rachael Smith (2023)
I’d reviewed Smith’s adult graphic memoirs Quarantine Comix (mental health during Covid) and Glass Half Empty (alcoholism and bereavement) for Foreword and Shelf Awareness, respectively. When I spotted this in the Young Adult section and saw it was about a witch, I mentally earmarked it for R.I.P. Isabella Maria Penwick-Wickam is a precocious 16-year-old student at Oxford. With her fixation on medieval history and folklore, she has the academic side of the university experience under control. But her social life is hopeless. She’s alienated flatmates and classmates alike with her rigid habits and judgemental comments. On a field trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum, where students are given a rare opportunity to handle artefacts, she accidentally drops a silver bottle into her handbag. Before she can return it, its occupant, a genie-like blowsy blue-and-purple witch named Blodwen, is released into the world. She wreaks much merry havoc, encouraging Issy to have some fun and make friends.
It’s a sweet enough story, but a few issues detracted from my enjoyment. Issy is often depicted more like a ten-year-old. I don’t love the blocky and exaggerated features Smith gives her characters, or the Technicolor hues. And I found myself rolling my eyes at how the book unnaturally inserts a sexual harassment theme – which Blodwen responds to in modern English, having spoken in archaic fashion up to that point, and with full understanding of the issue of consent. I can imagine younger teens enjoying this, though. (Public library)
The mini playlist I had going through my mind as I wrote this:
- “Running with Zombies” by The Bookshop Band (inspired by The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon)
- “Flesh and Blood Dance” by Duke Special
- “Dead Alive” by The Shins
And to counterbalance the evil fungi of the Kingfisher novella, here’s Anne-Marie Sanderson employing the line “A mycelium network is listening to you” in a totally non-threatening way. It’s one of the multiple expressions of reassurance in her lovely song “All Your Atoms,” my current earworm from her terrific new album Old Light.
Three on a Theme: Trans Poetry for National Poetry Day
Today is National Poetry Day here in the UK. Alfie and I spent part of the chilly early morning reading from Pádraig Ó Tuama’s super Poetry Unbound, an anthology of 50 poems to which he’s devoted personal introductions and exploratory essays. He describes poetry as “like a flame: helping us find our way, keeping us warm.”
Poetry Unbound is also the name of his popular podcast; both were recommended to me by Sara Beth West, my fellow Shelf Awareness reviewer, in this interview we collaborated on back in April (National Poetry Month in the USA) about reading and reviewing poetry. I’ve been a keen reader of contemporary poetry for 15 years or so, but in the 3.5 years that I’ve been writing for Shelf I’ve really ramped up. Most months, I review a couple poetry collections for that site, and another one or more on here.
Two of my Shelf poetry reviews from the past 10 months highlight the trans experience; when I recently happened to read another collection by a trans woman, I decided to gather them together as a trio. All three pair the personal – a wrestling over identity – with the political, voicing protest at mistreatment.
Transitory by Subhaga Crystal Bacon (2023)
In her Isabella Gardner Award-winning fourth collection, queer poet Subhaga Crystal Bacon commemorates the 46 trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the United States and Puerto Rico in 2020—an “epidemic of violence” that coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The book arose from a workshop Bacon attended on writing “formal poems of social protest.” Among the forms employed here are acrostics and erasures performed on news articles—ironically appropriate for reversing trans erasure. She devotes one elegy to each hate-crime victim, titling it with their name and age as well as the location and date of the killing, and sifting through key details of their life and death. Often, trans people are misgendered or deadnamed in prison, by ambulance staff, or after death, so a crucial element of the tributes is remembering them all by chosen name and gender.
The statistics Bacon conveys are heartbreaking: “The average life expectancy of a Black trans woman is 35 years of age”; “Half of Black trans women spend time in jail”; “Trans people are anywhere/ between eleven and forty percent/ of the homeless population.” She also draws on her own experience of gender nonconformity: “A little butch./ A little femme.” She recalls of visiting drag bars in the 1980s: “We were all/ trying on gender.” And she vows: “No one can say a life is not right./ I have room for you in me.” Her poetic memorial is a valuable exercise in empathy.
Published by BOA Editions. Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
I was interested to note that the below poets initially published under both female and male, new and dead names, as shown on the book covers. However, a look at social media makes it clear that the trans women are now going exclusively by female names.
I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Jennifer Espinoza (2024)
In Espinoza’s undaunted fourth poetry collection, transgender identity allows for reinvention but also entails fear of physical and legislative violence.
Two poems, both entitled “Airport Ritual,” articulate panic during a security pat-down on the way to visit family. In the first, a woman quells her apprehension by imagining a surreal outcome: her genitals expand infinitely, “tearing through her clothes and revealing an amorphous blob of cosmic energy.” In the second, the speaker chants the reassuring mantra, “I am not afraid.” “Makeup Ritual” vacillates between feminism and conformity; “I don’t even leave the house unless/ I’ve had time to build a world on my face/ and make myself palatable/ for public consumption.” Makeup is “your armor,” Espinoza writes in “You’re Going to Die Today,” as she describes the terror she feels toward the negative attention she receives when she walks her dog without wearing it. The murders of trans people lead the speaker to picture her own in “Game Animal.” Violence can be less literal and more insidious, but just as harmful, as in a reference to “the day the government announced another plan to strip a few/ more basic rights from trans people.”
Words build into stanzas, prose paragraphs, a zigzag line, or cross-hatching. Espinoza likens the body to a vessel for traumatic memories: “time is a body full of damage// that is constantly trying to forget.” Alliteration and repetition construct litanies of rejection but, ultimately, of hope: “When I call myself a woman I am praying.”
Published by Alice James Books. Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
Transgenesis by Ava Winter (2024)
“The body is holy / and is made holy in its changing.”
Winter’s debut full-length collection, selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, reckons with Jewishness as much as with gender identity. The second half of the title references any beginning, but specifically the scriptural account of creation and the lives of the matriarchs and patriarchs of the Abrahamic faiths. Poems are entitled “Torah Study” and “Midrash” (whence the above quote), and two extended sections, “Archived Light” and “Playing with the Jew,” reflect on Polish paternal family members’ arrival at Auschwitz and the dubious practice of selling Holocaust and Nazi memorabilia as antiques. Pharmaceuticals and fashion alike are tokens of transformation –
Let me greet now,
with warm embrace,
the small blue tablets
I place beneath my tongue each morning.
Oh estradiol,
daily reminder
of what our bodies
have always known:
the many forms of beauty that might be made
flesh by desire, by chance, by animal action.
(from “Transgenesis”)
The first time I wore a dress in public without a hint of irony—a Max Mara wrap adorned with Japanese lilies that framed my shoulders perfectly—I was still thin but also thickly bearded and men on the train whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone, as if they hoped the dress were a joke I might let them in on.
(from “WWII SS Wiking Division Badge, $55”)
– and faith grants affirmation that “there is beauty in such queer and fruitless bodies,” as the title poem insists, with reference to the saris (nonbinary person) acknowledged by the Talmudic rabbis. “Lament with Cello Accompaniment” provides an achingly gorgeous end to the collection:
I do not choose the sound of the song
In my mouth, the fading taste of what I still live through, but I choose this future, as I bury a name defined by grief, as I enter the silence where my voice will take shape.
Winter teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. I’ll look out for more of her work.
Published by Milkweed Editions. (Read via Edelweiss)
More trans poetry I have read:
A Kingdom of Love & Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann
By nonbinary/gender-nonconforming poets, I have also read:
Surge by Jay Bernard
Like a Tree, Walking by Vahni Capildeo
Some Integrity by Padraig Regan
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest
Binded by H Warren
Extra goodies for National Poetry Day:
Follow Brian Bilston to add a bit of joy to your feed.
Editor Rosie Storey Hilton announces a poetry anthology Saraband are going to be releasing later this month, Green Verse: Poems for our Planet. I’ll hope to review it soon.
Two poems that have been taking the top of my head off recently (in Emily Dickinson’s phrasing), from Poetry Unbound (left) and Seamus Heaney’s Field Work:
September Releases, Part II: Antrobus, Attenberg, Strout and More
As promised yesterday, I give excerpts of the six (U.S.) September releases I reviewed for Shelf Awareness. But first, my thoughts on a compassionate sequel about a beloved ensemble cast.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
“People always tell you who they are if you just listen”
Alternative title ideas: “Oh Bob!” or “Talk Therapy in Small-Town Maine.” I’ve had a mixed experience with the Amgash novels, of which I’ve now read four. Last year’s Lucy by the Sea was my favourite, a surprisingly successful Covid novel with much to say about isolation, political divisions and how life translates into art. Oh William!, though shortlisted for the Booker, seemed a low point. It’s presented as Lucy’s published memoir about her first husband, but irked me with its precious, scatter-brained writing. For me, Tell Me Everything was closer to the latter. It continues Strout’s newer habit of bringing her various characters together in the same narrative. That was a joy of the previous book, but here it’s overdone and, along with the knowing first-person plural narration (“As we mentioned earlier, housing prices in Crosby, Maine, had been going through the roof since the pandemic”; “Oh Jim Burgess! What are we to do with you?”), feels affected and hokey.
Strout makes it clear from the first line that this novel will mostly be devoted to Bob Burgess, who is not particularly interesting but perhaps a good choice of protagonist for that reason. A 65-year-old semi-retired lawyer, he’s a man of integrity who wins confidences because of his unassuming mien and willingness to listen and help where he can. One doesn’t read Strout for intrigue, but there is actually a mild murder mystery here. Bob ends up defending Matt Beach, a middle-aged man suspected of disposing of his mother’s body in a quarry. The Beaches are odd and damaged, with trauma threading through their history.
Sad stories are indeed the substance of the novel; Lucy trades in them. Literally: on her visits to Olive Kitteridge’s nursing home room, they swap bleak stories of the “unrecorded lives” they have observed or heard about. Lucy and Bob, who are clearly in love with each other, keep up a similar exchange of gloomy tales on their regular walks. Lucy asks Bob and Olive the point of these anecdotes, pondering the very meaning of life. Bob dismisses the question as immature; “as we have said, Bob was not a reflective fellow.” And because the book is filtered through Bob, we, too, feel this is just a piling up of depressing stories. Why should I care about Bob’s ex-wife’s alcoholism, his sister-in-law’s death from cancer, his nephew’s accident? Or any of the other unfortunate occurrences that make up a life. Bob and Lucy are appealingly ordinary characters, yet Strout suggests that they function as secular “sin-eaters,” accepting confessions. Forasmuch as they focus on others, they do each come to terms with childhood trauma and the reality of their marriages. Strout majors on emotional intelligence, but can be clichéd and soundbite-y. Such was my experience of this likable but diffuse novel.
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
Poetry:
Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus – The British-Jamaican poet’s intimate third collection contrasts the before and after of becoming a father—a transition that prompts him to reflect on his Deaf and biracial identity as well as the loss of his own father.
With thanks to Picador for the free copy for review.
Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor – Factor’s long, intricate second poetry collection envisions womanhood as a tug of war between desire and constraint. “Elegy for a Younger Self” poems string together vivid reminiscences.
Terminal Maladies by Okwudili Nebeolisa – The Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate’s debut collection is a tender chronicle of the years leading to his mother’s death from cancer. Food and nature imagery chart the decline in Nkoli’s health and its effect on her family.
Fiction:
A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg – Her tenth book evinces her mastery of dysfunctional family stories. From the Chicago-area Cohens, the circle widens and retracts as partners and friends enter and exit. Through estrangement and reunion, as characters grapple with sexuality and addictions, the decision is between hiding and figuring out who they are.
Nonfiction:
We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood by Jennifer Case – Case’s second book explores the evolution, politics, and culture of contemporary parenthood in 15 intrepid essays. Science and statistics weave through in illuminating ways. This forthright, lyrical study of maternity is an excellent companion read to Lucy Jones’s Matrescence.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – Ten years after his Booker Prize win for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan revisits his father’s time as a POW—the starting point but ultimately just one thread in this astonishing and uncategorizable work that combines family memoir, biography, and history to examine how love and memory endure. (Published in the USA on 17 September.)
With thanks to Emma Finnigan PR and Vintage (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Any other September releases you’d recommend?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 