THE BEST MAN by Kristan Higgins

Last week I read an article by romance novelist Kristan Higgins, who is understandably tired of people rejecting her chosen genre without having read a single example of it.

"The categorical dismissal of the most-read genre in the world reveals ignorance, not intellectual superiority," she wrote. "This is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s not built on vapidity and cliché. It exists and thrives because romance authors offer readers an emotional experience that mirrors an elemental desire in life: to find a constant and loving companion; to become our best selves; to forgive our mistakes of the past and learn from them."

I stood convicted: I had never read a romance novel, at least not of the Harlequin variety, and I had no interest in doing so. And yet romance novels, in her description, sounded a lot like the kind of books I'm always looking for. "Our books have happy endings, yes," she wrote. "Our books affirm faith in humanity and preach the goodness and courage of the ordinary heart. We make our readers laugh, we make them cry, and we affirm our belief in the enduring, uplifting power of love. I fail to see the problem here."

I decided to read a romance.

So of course I asked my hundreds of Facebook friends to help me find a good one, and they cheerfully provided an avalanche of recommendations (I've listed them here)--so many, in fact, that I had no idea where to start.

Until it occurred to me that the obvious place to start was with Kristan Higgins herself. Her books' covers looked less embarrassing than most, and she has a series about a winery. I picked The Best Man, book 1 of the Blue Heron winery series, a genuine Harlequin romance.

It wasn't bad.

Faith Holland, spectacularly jilted at the altar, flees upstate New York for San Francisco and makes a career for herself (in an improbably short time) as a landscape designer. But her sister, worried about their father's girlfriend, summons her home, and she suddenly comes face to face with the man who had a lot to do with spoiling her wedding.

OK, you already know how it's going to end, don't you. But if (like me) you are unfamiliar with contemporary romances, you may be surprised (as I was) by the narrator's kicky style, by the abundant laugh-out-loud scenes, and by the numerous chapters told from the guy's viewpoint. In addition, there are a number of mostly funny subplots involving squabbling octogenarians, a sexting middle-aged couple, feckless adolescents, neurotic inhabitants of Faith's home town, totally unsuitable romantic interests... Hey, this book is almost chick-lit, and I'm a big fan of Jennifer Weiner.

But it isn't quite chick-lit. 

Like Weiner's heroines, Faith is a bit overweight, or at least thinks she is. She's about 30 years old, and her romantic life is a mess. Her pajamas are festooned with tiny Dalmatians. Those touches of realism are a plus for Higgins's readers, who can no doubt identify with Faith more easily than with, say, Wonder Woman.

But Higgins also adheres to what I assume are romance conventions that most chick-lit authors mercifully avoid. Her hero, for example, emanates conventional masculinity--washboard abs, hard muscles, a career in both the military (Afghanistan!) and the police force--and Higgins has a hard time not mentioning this every time he walks into a room (this man has "tanned, smooth, muscular forearm[s]" with "little golden hairs" that catch the light!).

There's no graphic sex, but every encounter between hero and heroine ends in either bickering (think Katharine Hepburn movies) or in tingling body parts ("the hot golden feeling was stronger now, pulsing hard"). The hero is obsessed with Faith's gorgeous or mighty "rack," as he frequently refers to her abundant endowment (she, on the other hand, calls it her "boobage"). The attraction between these two is more sexual than romantic, and they are so busy avoiding or sleeping with each other that it's hard to tell if they have common interests.

Unfortunately, the ending isn't likely to be happy.

Oh yes, the girl gets the guy. But this marriage, I'm afraid, is not going to work out. Our hero suffers from various emotional traumas that he does not want to talk about. He opens up slightly, since that seems to be a requirement for keeping Faith; but once they're married, she can probably forget about further revelations. He's not the kind of guy who prizes vulnerability.

Her ex, however, is exactly that kind of guy, and our hero may get jealous if Faith starts spending her evenings with him.

On the other hand, will he even know? Faith has a rather magical career that seems not to require either her physical presence or a great deal of her time, though she's always getting high-level commissions. But as Gilbert & Sullivan pointed out, "When constabulary's duty's to be done, / A policeman's lot is not a happy one." Our hero will continue to work around the clock, which may have something to do with why his first marriage broke up (even if Higgins makes it appear to have been entirely the ex-wife's fault).

When it occurs to Faith that she's married to a guy who is rarely home and refuses to share his feelings, she may stop experiencing the "rush of molten gold [flowing] through her limbs, heavy and electric." And if, as it seems, they have little else in common, what happens to the marriage then?

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I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, though I'm in no hurry to read another romance: the passages intended to be erotic were often unintentionally funny, and the flowing molten gold tended to disrupt the story's flow. I'm glad Higgins spared us the details of the nightly lovefests, but I wish there had been some indication that the man who used to bonk the town slut donned a condom for subsequent couplings, and that the woman who hadn't had any sex for several years was nevertheless using an effective contraceptive.

I was just a little worried that a powerfully built man with four tours of duty in Afghanistan (that he didn't like to talk about), several years as a policeman, and a predilection for "doing" Faith against the wall just might snap someday and abuse his wife or kids.

And, being a retired editor, I really wished Higgins's human characters would stop barking.

Still, finding a life companion, becoming our best selves, learning from mistakes, believing in human goodness and courage and "the enduring, uplifting power of love"--these are indeed good things. Maybe some of Higgins's 13 other books feature characters who achieve these ends without risking their physical or emotional health. Whether or not I ever find out, I wish the fictional Faith Holland the best, and I hope her talented, award-winning, oft-translated, and very popular author will soon break out of the romance mold and write a first-rate, life-affirming novel.

Not because romances are bad, but because Higgins could do better.

FUNERAL MUSIC by Morag Joss

Thanks to my friend Anne Buchanan, who recommended Morag Joss's Sara Selkirk mysteries.

Anne knows the kind of mysteries I like best. I'd rather the murder(s) happened offstage. I want the characters to be more than plot devices--I like to read about their friends and families, what annoys them at work, what brings them joy, what they like to eat. I love a writer who knows how to develop a sense of place. And it helps if the writer can make me laugh every now and then.

I was delighted with Funeral Music.

Sara Selkirk is a concert cellist of international renown who has been suffering from "musician's block" for a year or so. Originally from Scotland but now a resident of Bath, England, Sara has agreed to play a short concert at the Pump Room in order to raise funds for the Bath Festival. Not long afterward she discovers a corpse.

Fortunately she is well connected. One of her cello students is a police inspector. A friend is a colleague of the murder victim. Another friend takes her to an alternative healing fair, where she happens to observe the eventual murder victim talking with a large man who, it turns out, badly wants a job they both are applying for. This friend's landlady, as it turns out, is the large man's girlfriend (Bath's population is only about 80,000). And then there is Paul, who is good with women and knives; and James, who has a rotten alibi; and George, the prejudiced museum guard, and ...

The puzzle is fun, with several healthy red herrings. Even more fun are Joss's descriptions--short ones, like "his face had the faraway, otherworldly look of a defecating Labrador," and dazzling longer ones, like her evocation of Bach's Trio Sonata in C Major, which

splashed out and down in a shower of weightless drops into the open lap of the abbey nave.... Only Bach could do this, make you feel you had been only half alive until this moment, pull you into the dance, lift you and take you as high as the roof, right up to where you could drink from the music's spring and be filled with a few bubbles of his crazy joy.... It flowed on, the little sounds dancing out across the transept like drops of light, darting through the melodic web that the organist's feet and fingers were spinning to and fro on which to catch them. Sara had the sensation that she had unknowingly been suffering from some sort of deafness and that with this glorious noise she had suddenly woken up to find that her ears were working properly.

Joss spices up the story with a number of complicated relationships: Paul and Sue (or Olivia?), Andrew and Valerie (or Sara?), Derek and Cecily (or Pauline?), James and Tom (or Graham?). One of the funniest scenes I've ever read in a mystery is between  Derek and his wife, Pauline, after she has learned about Cecily--but you'll have to read the book if you want to know more.

Publishers Weekly gave Funeral Music a starred review and P.D. James gave it a laudatory blurb. I'd call it a clever combination of Peter Lovesey and Jane Austen. I can't imagine why the Wheaton Public Library doesn't have the Sara Selkirk mysteries on its shelves, but they got it for me quickly through interlibrary loan. Or you can get a used copy for less than $4 from Amazon.

A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION by William Deresiewicz

I loved William Deresiewicz's op-ed piece "A Matter of Taste?", a look at how "foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture." If you didn't read it, now's a good time.

Be sure to read the author's bio at the end. If you're like me, the next thing you'll do is buy or borrow his 2011 book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.

The book is part memoir, part literary interpretation, part wisdom literature. The three parts aren't seamlessly integrated, and that bothered some reviewers. I enjoy all three genres and appreciated the author's - let's call him Bill - self-deprecating humor, so I wasn't bothered.

Here's the plot: Bill recounts how he moved from disdaining Jane Austen to adoring her and eventually writing his Ph.D. dissertation about her. In the process, he also moved from being a (self-described) dumb 26-year-old with daddy issues and a dismal romantic life, to being a grown-up guy with an apartment, a job, good friends, and a wife.

Jane Austen, it turns out, was his life coach.

If you already like Jane Austen, you'll probably enjoy Bill's ideas about the messages underlying her six novels.

If you read Jane Austen a long time ago - or just saw the movies and TV miniseries -  don't hesitate to pick up this book. Bill gives enough context that you'll know exactly what's going on.

If you don't like Jane Austen (but have to read her for class), or if you've never tried her at all, go ahead and see if Bill can get you interested. His book is at least as much about "the things that really matter" as about Jane.

Thanks to Bill, I'm now rereading - well, listening to an audiobook of - Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's hilarious send-up of gothic fiction. It's read by one of my favorite narrators, Wanda McCaddon, under the name of Nadia May (she is also widely known as Donada Peters).

Money, sex, and reproduction in a chick lit fantasy world

I'm not going to tell you the title of the book I just read, or the author's name. If I did, I'd be guilty of spoilers for what I'm about to say. I'll just mention that the novel has four main characters, all female:
Ya conniving 40-something woman with a murky past and an invented present
Ya 24-year-old trust-fund baby who is alarmed that the world does not revolve around her
Ya 24-year-old Ivy League grad who desperately wants to rescue her substance-abusing father
Ya 24-year-old mother of two with an underemployed husband

And I'll divulge that, to create a baby, one woman provides the egg, one the womb, one the money, and one the guardianship;

that the women tell their stories in interlaced chapters, all in the first person, all with pretty much the same voice;

that lots of brand names get mentioned, often in tones of awe;

that there's a fair amount of soft-core sex: straight, lesbian, married, unmarried, abusive, coital, oral;

and that as improbable as it may seem, by the end of the book everyone is financially solvent, loved, happy, and friends with one another.

I was disappointed: I hadn't intended to read a fairy tale.

The author could have done better. Has done better. And maybe will do better in the future, if she starts looking closely at what happens in the real world to people who are obsessed with money.

THE RED HOUSE by Mark Haddon

I read Mark Haddon's first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, while flying somewhere. Usually plane trips make me sleepy. That time I was transfixed, improbably gripped by his first-person account of an autistic boy's attempt to learn who killed the neighbor's poodle.

A couple of years later, I eagerly took Haddon's second novel, A Spot of Bother, off the library's new-books shelf. Meh. Maybe my expectations were  too high. It's not bad, for a dysfunctional-family novel, but I didn't breathlessly tell my friends about it.

A few weeks ago I read a review of his third novel, The Red House, and put it on hold. It was published June 12, I got it June 15 (I adore the Wheaton Public Library), it was due yesterday, and I finished it last night. It wouldn't have kept me awake on a long flight, but it's oddly brilliant.

I once read a definition of a literary novel as one where the characters, after thinking a great deal, are just as miserable at the end as they were at the beginning. The Red House is definitely a literary novel. The situation: a brother and a sister in their late 40s, having ignored each other for years, meet for a two-family vacation near Hay-on-Wye not long after their mother's funeral. Here is the cast of characters, with their problems:

Richard, the brother. A physician who is facing a lawsuit. Shocked by revelations about his second wife. Doesn't much like her daughter.

Louisa, his wife. Unhappy first marriage. A past she'd rather forget. A daughter she doesn't know what to do with.

Melissa, their daughter, age 16. The meanest of mean girls, facing serious trouble back home for something she shouldn't have done. Realizes she has no real friends.

Angela, the sister. Not fond of either her brother or her husband. Resentful about being left to care for her aging mother. Afraid she will turn out just like her. Grieving the loss of an infant 18 years ago.

Dominic, her husband. Loser who, unbeknownst to Angela, is cheating on her with a woman he isn't sure he likes.

Alex, their son, age 17. Who knows what his problems will be after he relaxes his grip on his, um, total obsession with sex?

Daisy, their daughter, age 16. In-your-face religious, which annoys her family. I won't tell you about her other problem, one of the more interesting parts of the book.

Benjy, their son, age 8. Lives mostly in his imagination. Biggest problem: he has to hang out with the rest of this crew.

Put these eight in one vacation home in a remote part of Herefordshire and see what happens. Adopt the stance of omniscient narrator and tell their stories through stream-of-consciousness narration with lots of sentence fragments. Make it a big tricky, sometimes, for the reader to know who's talking, and see if we care what happens.

Well, eventually I did care, even though my usual lazy taste runs toward more straightforward novels. Haddon is a good writer. He may be a genius. But so far his legacy still depends on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

PS - For a thorough, knowledgeable, funny, and curmudgeonly review of this novel, read Tom Shone, "Under One Roof," in the July 8 New York Times.

THE BEGINNER'S GOODBYE by Anne Tyler

Dorothy keeps popping up unexpectedly. Aaron, her husband, first sees her at the house the oak tree fell on. She then starts joining him at random times and places: in the grocery store check-out line, in the street near his office, in Belvedere Square. One day she appears just outside his office window, by the trash cans.

The odd thing is, Dorothy has been dead for nearly a year.

Aaron is neither romantic nor religious. He's the dutiful, unimaginative editor at the family-owned vanity press, publishers of a Beginner's series--"something on the order of the Dummies books, but without the cheerleader tone of voice," thin books to get you started:

Anything is manageable if it's divided into small enough increments, was the theory; even life's most complicated lessons. Not The Beginner's Cookbook but The Beginner's Soups.... Not The Beginner's Child Care but The Beginner's Colicky Baby.

But how can Aaron apply this wisdom to grieving? How can he begin to say goodbye to Dorothy, his wife of ten years?

The Beginner's Goodbye includes everything you'd expect in an Anne Tyler novel (it's her 19th): Lovable, socially awkward characters. Family ties that sometimes bind. Writing that is at once accessible and literary, comic and profound. Baltimore.

It's not as rich as Tyler's magnificent Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, but then a Beginner's guide is just meant to get you started. This one could start a lot of conversations, not only about grief but also about communication in marriage, and how we sabotage our own happiness, and whether marriage partners can ever really know one another.

QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN'T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain

I almost wish they hadn't added that "New York Times bestseller" strip across the top of the book jacket - it disturbs the cool, mineral quiet of the original cover. I fully understand why Susan Cain's Quiet is selling so well, though. Of all the books I've read so far this year - and last year too, for that matter - this is the one about which I've most often told my friends, "You've got to read it."

Here's the book's premise, from the Introduction:

We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal - the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual - the kind who's comfortable "putting himself out there." Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.

Introversion - along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness - is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Introverts, take heart - Cain is riding to your rescue (or perhaps just quietly sidling up beside you), providing more cures for your feelings of guilt, inadequacy, shame, or discomfort than you'd get from a year of therapy. Extroversion hasn't always been as highly valued as it is in contemporary America, she points out, giving a brief history of Dale Carnegie and others who helped make us a nation of self-marketers. And while extroversion is important, too much Groupthink can dampen creativity and impede progress. Introverts have gifts we ignore at our peril (Cain links the Wall Street crash, for example, to a shortage of introverted thinking).

Cain's observations range widely, from office space (down with the open plan!) to brain chemistry to education. She offers practical advice for the hypersensitive, for those panicked by public speaking, for parents of introverted children, for spouses of opposite personality types. Along the way she reports on research and tells fascinating stories. Though a lawyer by profession, Cain is an excellent journalist.

But much as I enjoyed Cain's writing style, the reason I've been telling everybody to read this book is because so many of my friends are introverts. If they're anything like me, they'll find Cain wonderfully affirming next time they find themselves at coffee hour in a strange church, or next time they have to navigate a giant get-acquainted reception at a convention, or next time the in-service education director brightly says, "OK, folks, let's break into small groups and share ..."

Oh, and it's OK if you blush when everyone turns to look at you. Embarrassment, says a researcher whose work Cain describes, "is a moral emotion. It shows humility, modesty, and a desire to avoid aggression and make peace. It's not about isolating the person who feels ashamed ..., but about bringing people together." A blush signifies concern for others.

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND by Helen Simonson

"This is the book I've been looking for," I said to my friend Carol at a book group last night. "I'm so tired of books where the characters are miserable at the beginning, think a great deal, and are equally miserable at the end. Not that I want sappy sweet books..."

"You want books that are redemptive," Carol said.

That's exactly right. Happy books featuring genuinely good people, like D.L. Smith's The Miracles of Santo Fico; gritty books whose protagonists take on evil and win, like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch detective stories; or even deeply ambiguous books whose seriously flawed characters turn out to have a good side after all, like Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge. What I don't want to do is waste my time with any book that goes nowhere or, worse, leaves me depressed and anxious. If I want to feel suicidal, I can watch the news.

I loved Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

The book is very redemptive, though if I told you exactly what I mean by that I'd give away the plot. It is also a charming romance. Characters fall in and out of love; marriage proposals are made, accepted, postponed, and turned down. The necessary complications arise because of misunderstandings (or downright nastiness) between races, nationalities, religions, generations, sexes, classes, and people with varying levels of pretentiousness. The love of money and possessions triggers plenty of havoc.

Fortunately, this is a comic novel, not grim realism. The author, a native of England who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, enjoys poking fun at stuffy old Brits (aren't they almost extinct?) and brash Americans (thriving, alas).

While Major Pettigrew, 68, and especially the quietly indomitable Mrs. Ali, 58, are well-developed characters, many members of the supporting cast are hilarious caricatures - the vicar's dreadful wife, Daisy; the Major's narcissistic son, Roger; Mrs. Ali's scowling religious nephew, Abdul Wahid; the ecologically minded but fashion challenged neighbor, Alice;  Lord Dagenham, who brings bankers to the manor to shoot at farm-raised ducks... Well, all of Helen Simonson's characters, right down to walk-on parts like the rule-obsessed lady at the tea-and-cakes kiosk, are wryly amusing.

To be sure, the course of Major Pettigrew's romance does not run smooth. Potentially derailing subplots abound: an American real estate developer wants to turn Edgecombe St. Mary into a haven for displaced minor nobility. The Major and his sister-in-law disagree about who should inherit the deceased brother's valuable gun. A single mother confronts her child's father. The yearly club dance finds yet another way to showcase its planner's ignorance and bad taste. A love affair seems to die even before it gets properly started. Hey, this is a romance - we can hardly expect things to be easy.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is funny, it's heartwarming, it's even wise. And in the end, when the main characters get what's coming to them (for good or for ill), I'm betting most readers will chuckle and cheer and say to their friends, "Here's a book you've got to read."

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When Googling for a picture of the book jacket to include with this post, I discovered that Alexander McCall Smith reviewed this book in the New York Times (March 3, 2010). His review is excellent, but even if you don't feel like reading it right now, click on this link to see the illustration. 

A TALE OF TWO CITIES and GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens

Oprah's 2-in-1 edition

I was thrilled when a friend phoned me a week ago Friday to ask if I'd read A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations - and if so, would I like to go to Oprah's book club taping with her in exactly seven days? Sort of, and YES!, I said.

I loved A Tale of Two Cities when I read it 50 years ago, but the details had become a bit hazy since then. And I must have read excerpts from Great Expectations (wasn't it in our high-school English book?) or watched a film version, though I remembered nothing but Miss Havisham, the eternal bride. But I'd gladly spend all week reading, I promised.

Reading 900 pages in 4 days, it turned out, was the most fun I've had since the internet was invented. No Facebook! No blogposts! No article writing! Very little e-mail! It was the best of times.

Getting to see Oprah just three months before she shuts down her show was a bonus. And yes, she is fabulous.

Though, for the first time ever in the history of Oprah's book club - 65 books in 15 years! - her selection did not become a bestseller. "I guess I shouldn't have chosen a book that most of you already have on your shelves," she said. Indeed, most of the 350 of us in her studio were carrying well-thumbed older editions of the books. (Opportunity for those who don't still have your high-school copies: right now the large, handsome paperback is on sale at Amazon for $4.97.)

Oprah's guest was novelist Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres, Moo), who has also written a short biography of Charles Dickens. Compared to Oprah, Smiley is somewhat reserved (who isn't?), but she more than held her own in the discussion. Since this was Oprah's book club, not her regular show, there was no hoopla. The two women simply sat at a desk and chatted about Dickens, Victorian England, and the two books for half an hour or so before taking audience questions. I had predicted that many people in the audience would be wearing glasses, and I was right. We were English teachers, librarians, and bookstore nerds all - including cast members of Les Misérables who dropped in for the show. (They carry a shelf of books with them on tour so they can read when they're not onstage, one of them told us. "Haven't you heard of Kindle?" asked Smiley.)

The book club webcast will be broadcast at 5:00 p.m. EST today. Click here to see the webcast or to click through to more information about the two Dickens books.

If you decide to read or reread these books, here are a few things I noticed that might interest you too.

• Notice what a difference the narrative point of view makes. In TOTC, Dickens steps back, sits down next to God, and watches the pageant unroll. He not only tells us a story, he also inserts social commentary and philosophy. In GE, by contrast, Pip tells his own story. If he doesn't experience it, it's not in the book. This makes GE seem more personal and relational than TOTC. I liked both approaches, but I found GE easier to read.
• Look at how Dickens portrays women. A badly mistreated woman is at the heart of both stories, but a woman is the hero of neither. In both books, women, if victims, wreak vengeance. Well-treated women, by contrast, are generally docile creatures who exist to serve the interests of their husbands, fathers, or employers (if they are servants). Hey, Dickens was what he was, and grown-up feminists can enjoy him anyway. But if you're discussing these books with kids, his view of women might be worth talking about.
• Compare the societies Dickens describes (English and French, 18th and 19th centuries) with our society today. We've come a long way from the days when orphans were left to roam the streets and miscreants were hanged for minor offenses, and for that I am deeply grateful. Now, as we consider ways to cut back governmental spending, we might want to think twice about policies that increase the gap between rich and poor, that reduce social services for the indigent, and that allow the infrastructure to crumble. In Dickensian London, it was every man for himself, and the results weren't pretty.
• Admire Dickens's brilliant psychological insights. In 1859 when A Tale of Two Cities was published, Sigmund Freud was 3 years old. C.G. Jung would not be born for another 20 years. Without their help, Dickens instinctively knew how events shape people, how relationships deteriorate and grow, how repressed rage finds an outlet, how love and hatred are created. He also knew how people thought and talked - children and adults, nobles and peasants, servants and masters, city folk and country folk, criminals and lawyers, terrorists and bankers. As Smiley pointed out, Dickens has a range of human understanding that surpasses that of perhaps any other novelist in the English language.

Yes, Dickens's books are long. To find time to read one, you might have to turn off your electronic devices for a while. Except for Kindle, of course: you can download both books free of charge here.

CIRCLING MY MOTHER by Mary Gordon

When my father died in 1995, he immediately strode back into my imagination as the healthy, middle-aged man of my childhood, adolescence, and young-adult years. When my mother died four months later, my imaginary clock refused to turn back. For a long time I had a hard time seeing her any way except the way she was during her painful last years - unable to speak, unable to walk, profoundly depressed.

I've spent a lot of time going through old photos since then, and I can now - at least part of the time - see both my parents as the intelligent, attractive, well-respected people I knew throughout most of my life. I also enjoy imagining their life during their 17 years together before I was born (hint to mothers: if you have kept the shoebox full of letters you wrote your husband during your engagement, you might want to consider the merriment they will someday provide your children). I came to understand that my parents were not supporting actors in my personal drama, but leading actors in their own. I now realize that, though my mother and I were close in many ways, I never really knew her.

That realization was one reason I particularly enjoyed Ruth Reichl's Not Becoming My Mother, happily renamed in the paperback edition For You, Mom, Finally. And that was also why, when a friend recommended Circling My Mother by novelist Mary Gordon, I expected an equally satisfying read.

I immediately identified with Gordon's story. Her mother was born in 1908, mine in 1910. I was born in 1948, she in 1949. Both mothers suffered from dementia; both spent their last years in nursing homes. My mother died at age 85; hers lived to be 94. Gordon, like me, was trying to get her mother back. Explaining the book's title, she writes:

I came to realize that I couldn't see my mother properly by standing in one place, by standing still. For the last eleven years of her life, the years marked by dementia, she was much more a problem to me than a joy. I wanted to move from the spot where I thought of my mother as a problem. To do this, I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points - only one of which was her career as my mother.

Gordon does this through ten essays, three of which were previously published. Many of the essays' titles begin "My Mother and ...", as in "My Mother and Her Bosses," "... Her Sisters," "... Her Friends," " ... My Father." In them, Gordon gives us a composite view of Anna Gagliano Gordon, daughter of a Sicilian immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother, first of five daughters (there were also brothers), crippled by polio at age 3, a hard worker from age 17, married at 39, a mother at 41, widowed at 49, extremely devout Catholic, eventual alcoholic, and wearer of Arpège.

In the end, though, we learn a lot more about Mary than about Anna.

This is Mary's memoir, not Anna's. It is the story of a relationship as perceived by the daughter, not a portrait of the mother. It's the kind of book that all of us who have lost our mothers should write for our personal catharsis, but that few of us should publish.

Fortunately, Anna's daughter is a fine writer who entertains us with tales about mid-century Catholic immigrant life, moves us with stories of injustice and dysfunction and missed opportunities, and lets us share her pride as she pays tribute to a flawed but decent, imaginative, and self-giving woman.

Still, Mary Gordon knows she has not yet found her mother:

I will try to keep my mother from vanishing. I will try to understand distance, but to understand that I will also have to understand closeness. I must enter a world of undulations. A world where everything is moving, nothing is forever still....

I am trying to see my mother. I must begin now to learn how to look.

Memoir aficionadas will find Circling My Mother a treat. Women looking for ways to understand their own aging or dead mothers may also enjoy it, though it offers no advice beyond Gordon's own approach: To understand our mothers, we must circle them repeatedly. We must learn how to look.

THE CHARMING QUIRKS OF OTHERS by Alexander McCall Smith

If you're not already a McCall Smith fan, The Charming Quirks of Others - book 7 in the Isabel Dalhousie series - may not be the place to start. Most readers get hooked on the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (now up to 11 titles) before moving on to the first book about Isabel, The Sunday Philosophy Club, though the Dalhousie series is also a fine introduction to the man who surely must be Scotland's most prolific writer.

But if, like me, you're a confirmed McCall Smith devotee, you know without my telling you that, with his newest book, you're in for another evening or two of reading that's as comforting as a mug of hot chocolate.

Isabel, the kindly, rich, slightly snoopy, and incessantly worrying Edinburgh ethicist, has several things to think about. Will she be able to purchase the Raeburn portrait of her ancestors? How will she, as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, deal with a presumptuous author she strongly dislikes? Can she - should she - help a woman she barely knows find out who has written an anonymous letter, and why? Has her niece, Cat, finally found a decent boyfriend? Is her fiancé, Jamie, having an affair?

The interwoven stories are fun - McCall Smith is a very funny writer. And Isabel's constant musings are delightful and, sometimes, thought provoking - McCall Smith is also a professional philosopher. Listen to Isabel thinking about why we are interested in genealogy, for instance:

Blood links, she thought; that was what it was about. However tenuous such links were, people regarded them as standing between themselves and the void of human impermanence. For ultimately we were all insignificant tenants of this earth, temporary bearers of a genetic message that could so easily disappear. We had not always been here, and there was not reason to suppose that we always would be. And yet we found such thoughts uncomfortable, and did not like to think them. So we clung to the straws of identity; these, at least, made us feel a little more permanent.

I love McCall Smith's storytelling and philosophizing, but even more I love his kindness. His characters are often odd and bumbling, but they mean well. They care for one another. They believe in forgiveness. They know how to love.

Isabel and Jamie, for example, having picnicked on Scotch egg pie and cucumber sandwiches, are now lazily talking. "You're very kind," Isabel says.

"Because I love you so much," he said. "That is why I like to be kind to you."

"And that is why I shall bring you all the flowers of the mountain," said Isabel. "For the self-same reason."

She went on to say something else, but Jamie found his attention drifting. He was feeling sleepy, for it was warm, and he could lie there for ever, he thought, listening to the sound of Isabel's voice, in the way one listens to the conversations of birds, or the sound of a waterfall descending the side of a Scottish mountain; sounds for which we cannot come up with a meaning, but which we love dearly and with all our heart, and loving anything with all your heart always brings understanding, in time.

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To read my reviews of other McCall Smith books, click here and then click on the titles that interest you.

LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell

One of my favorite memoirs is Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. It's also one of my favorite books about dogs, because Knapp, who knew how memoir should be written, tells us as much about dogs as about herself. The book is not self-indulgent, even though Lucille, her rescued German shepherd mix, in turn helped her come to terms with a series of devastating losses.

Pack of Two was published in 1998. In 2002, Knapp was diagnosed with lung cancer. Less than two months later, she died. She was 42 years old.

Gail Caldwell was Knapp's best friend. A memoirist and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, she and Knapp met at a literary gathering, but they bonded several years later near a duck pond where they had brought their rambunctious dogs. Both women enjoyed rowing and swimming. Both were recovering alcoholics. Both were driven introverts. They could talk for hours.

Let's Take the Long Way Home is the story of their friendship, their dogs, their personal struggles, and - eventually - Knapp's death. It is a nostalgic book, as memoirs often are, but it is not a downer. I recommend it to other bookish, dog-loving introverts who care deeply about their friends.

JIGSAW: AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Sybille Bedford

In a house that is anchored and insulated with books, a book occasionally goes missing for its entire lifespan. Someone must have given me Sybille Bedford's Jigsaw some ten years ago, right after the 1989 novel was reissued with a new introduction. I found it last week in my bedside bookcase, brand new, untouched, and out of print.

"She is one of the best writers in English, and Jigsaw may be the best of her books," said the Boston Globe reviewer quoted on the cover. Well, maybe, if the reader has high tolerance for erratic punctuation and destructively haphazard lives. It is hard to put this book down, just as it would be hard to stop watching a train bearing down on a car stalled on the tracks.

The story starts in about 1913 with the narrator, still in her pram, being asked to sleep through one of her mother's infidelities. It ends less than 20 years later, by which time the mother has destroyed her own health, sanity, and relationships. She has apparently not destroyed her daughter, the narrator, though the young woman is in a precarious place.

The reason we suspect the narrator will survive and thrive is because Jigsaw is not really a novel, even though the cover says it is. It is Bedford's coming-of-age memoir, billed as fiction only to allow her certain liberties with names and events. "What I had in mind," Bedford wrote in her introduction, "was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth.... It had to be a novel in which the events had actually happened and happened largely as described; to invent, such was my instinct, would have been pointless: it mattered that these things had occurred."

Born to an eccentric German baron and his German-English-Jewish wife, Sybille spent her earliest years with her eccentric father in a crumbling castle in southern Germany. Later she joined her peripatetic mother for months at a time in Italy and in the south of France, and for several years she lived pretty much on her own in London - all before she was out of her teens.

You can learn more about Sybille's life from her obituaries in various newspapers - the Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph - but you will quickly note that dates and places are far from uniform. I'm guessing the fictionalized story in Jigsaw is closer to the truth than some of the supposedly factual obits.

Why might you want to read Jigsaw? Let me count the ways.

• You enjoy memoirs
• You're interested in the Roaring Twenties, the "lost generation," the Jazz Age
• You like to read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, the Bloomsbury Set
• You feel better when you read about people whose problems are much worse than your own
• You have a clinical interest in dysfunctional family systems

Less than a  year before her death, Bedford wrote a book she called a memoir, Quicksand. According to a review in the Observer, it tells pretty much the same story she already told in Jigsaw. Both books describe a childhood in an environment of failed marriages, serial adultery, child abandonment, haphazard education, gambling addiction, drug addiction, financial ruin, narcissism ... in short, nearly every kind of dysfunction and codependence imaginable, more than 50 years before pop psych popularized those terms. I would have expected Sybille to die young and tragically.

Instead, she began writing for publication when she was middle-aged. Her works include the 832-page Aldous Huxley: A Biography as well as several novels, books on travel, and accounts of court trials. According to her obituary in the Independent, she

was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature - elected one of the society's 10 Companions of Literature in 1994 - and was appointed OBE in 1981. She was also an active member of the English Pen Club, and its Vice-President in 1979. Her joie de vivre expressed itself in an abiding curiosity about human beings, a deep love of nature, and a lifelong interest in wine.

She died shortly before her 95th birthday.

EAT PRAY LOVE, the movie

No, the Eat Pray Love DVD isn't out yet, but if attendance this afternoon at Cinemark Seven Bridges is any indication, it won't be in theaters too much longer.

Not that it's an unpleasant movie. I believe the nine of us middle-aged ladies in theater 7 all had a fine time. Some of us even talked back to the screen. Nobody snored, even though there was not a single chase scene.

It's just that there's nothing in the movie to warrant the adulation that has kept the book of almost the same name (commas extra) on the New York Times best-seller list for 184 weeks. Not even Julia Roberts, who at 42 is about 10 years too old to play Liz - though if you need a reason to see the movie, girls, Javier Bardem could provide it. My friend and I had been making mmmm, mmmm noises during the preview of the upcoming George Clooney film, but as soon as we saw Javier, we completely forgot about George.

Still, Bardem, 41, is about 7 years too young to play Felipe, the Brazilian to whom Liz eventually succumbs. This is delightful, actually, since so many movies pair nubile young things with actors past their prime and expect female viewers to suspend disbelief. It is not at all hard to believe that Roberts could fall for Bardem.

But their romance is only part of the movie, and not the longest part. Before we ever meet sexy Felipe, we have to get through Liz's marriage, her subsequent boyfriend, her trip to Italy, her trip to India, and the first part of her trip to Bali. In an NPR review titled "The 'Eat Pray Love' Problem: How Movie Liz Ruined the Story of Book Liz," Linda Holmes writes:

Two hours and 20 minutes is simply far too long for this story. By the time Elizabeth Gilbert — or, rather, the person I will call "Movie Liz," to distinguish her from both Book Liz and actual Elizabeth Gilbert in real life — finishes up in Italy, the thought that there are two entire countries left for her to visit is like realizing at the close of a one-hour doctor's appointment that the doctor has only looked in one ear.

Too many shots of pasta, Holmes suggests. Besides, I would add, the food was poorly chosen. Italy has a marvelously varied cuisine, but from this movie you might think it was one long chain of Pizza Huts.

The whole Italy portion, in fact, is a rapid succession of clichés : primitive living conditions, lecherous young men, Neapolitan clotheslines, rude gestures. The Asian portions are equally stereotypical. In India we see squalid cities and a Bollywood wedding, while in Bali we meet expats and native healers.

Of course Liz, not the countries or the other characters, is the center of attention. Befriending people everywhere she goes - natives and other tourists - she shows that she's not really a narcissist (even though the conversations are all about her). She come uncomfortably close to looking like a colonialist, though, when she gives one grateful woman a house.

In the end, Liz thinks she has learned something, but I had a hard time telling what it was. I will grant, however, that her third man is better looking, sexier, and much, much richer than the first two.

When Eat, Pray, Love was published four years ago, readers either loved it or hated it. The ones who hated it aren't going to go to this movie anyway. Unfortunately, many of the ones who loved it are likely to walk out of the theater saying, "I'm going to have to go back and reread that book. I thought there was a lot more to it than that."

If that's what you plan to do, I'd recommend taking a look at Gilbert's next book too. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage got neither the rave reviews nor the astronomical sales of the first book, but it updates Liz's story and leaves her in a better place. My review of it is here.

INCENDIARY by Chris Cleave

Incendiary hit British bookstores on July 7, 2005 - the day four suicide bombers crippled London transport, "killing 52 people and injuring more than 770." The timing was eerie. In Chris Cleave's novel, a group of suicide bombers have struck a London stadium, killing more than 1000 football fans.

Incendiary is about one of the survivors, a young working-class widow who has lost not only her husband but also their four-year-old son. The woman, never named, tells her story in the form of a letter to Osama Bin Laden.

I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges. I am a mother Osama I just want you to love my son. What could be more natural?

Incendiary is Cleave's first novel. His second is Little Bee, which last month I called "the best novel I've read so far this year." Little Bee fans, be warned: Incendiary is also brilliantly written, but it is much harder to read.

Some reviewers complained about the abundance of East London slang. Really, I don't think that is what slows down most readers: it's easy enough to figure out from the context. What makes this novel hard to read is its raw first-person portrayal of unquenchable grief spilling over into madness.

Both Little Bee and Incendiary are built on situations that sound a lot like the latest news stories. Both include a pair of journalists as major characters, and in both cases the journalists wrestle with how much to tell about what they know. If the journalists sound realistic, it's because Cleave himself used to work for the Daily Telegraph, and he is clearly concerned about the U.K.'s foreign policy and approach to terrorism.

His novels are nothing like journalistic accounts, however. They are literary fiction with all of that genre's characterization and interiority, rescued by a reader-pleasing overlay of plot and wry humor. Here's an example of Cleave's black humor:

Terrible things have been happening, and the protagonist wonders aloud how anyone can "carry on living in a world like this." Her friend sighs.

--People keep themselves busy don't they? he said.

He turned to look out over London.

--Look at all that, he said. Under each lightbulb is somebody keeping themselves busy. Exfoliating and applying the anti-wrinkle cream. Writing long sales reports people will only ever read the last page of. Agonising whether their cock is shrinking or the condoms are getting bigger. What you see down there is the real front line in the war against terror. That's how people go on. Staying just busy enough so they can't feel nervous. And do you know what they're mostly busy doing? DIY. For a whole week after May Day the airports stayed closed and the DIY stores stayed open. It's pathetic. People are laying their fears to rest under patio slabs. They're grouting against terror.

I looked away from the city and back at Jasper Black.

--You don't think much of people do you?

He shrugged.

--I'm a journalist, he said.

A film version of Incendiary was released in 2008. It got rotten reviews. This is not surprising. What makes the book worth reading - and it is definitely worth reading, if you can handle chaos and grief - is not so much the story as the compelling way Cleave tells it

You can read more about Chris Cleave and his books on his website.

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER by Tom Perrotta, THE BODY AND SOCIETY by Peter Brown, and I DON'T by Susan Squire

This review was originally published in Books and Culture online  (October 2008) as "Abstinence Now and Then."

In Tom Perrotta's more-or-less comic novel The Abstinence Teacher, published last year and now out in paperback, an odd attraction develops between Ruth, a divorced feminist sex-ed teacher who hasn't been to bed with a man for two years, and Tim, an evangelical ex-doper whose wife is studying a book her pastor's wife gave her, Hot Christian Sex.

"Considering the somewhat puritanical character of the Tabernacle, the book turned out to be surprisingly racy," Perrotta writes. "The authors, the Rev. Mark D. Finster and his wife, Barbara G. Finster, proclaimed the good news right in the Introduction: 'For a Christian married couple, sex is nothing less than a form of worship, a celebration of your love for one another and a glorification of the Heavenly Father who brought you together. So of course God wants you to have better sex! And He wants you to have more of it than you ever had before, in positions you probably didn't even know existed, with stronger orgasms than you believed were possible!' "

There are no characters even remotely like the Rev. and Mrs. Finster in Peter Brown's magisterial The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. I had been reading some of the saints and doctors of the ancient church, and I was puzzled. Why, I wondered, did early monastics think they were honoring the Creator when they shunned the company of others and gave up most food, all sex, and even clothing and shelter? Why did a great saint, Jerome, write, "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage; but it is because they produce virgins"? Why did an even greater saint, Augustine, believe he had to be "continent," that is, to give up marriage and sex, in order to follow Christ? Why are there so few married people on the list of Catholic saints, even post-Vatican II saints? Hoping for answers, I picked up Peter Brown's recently reissued classic.

The answers he provided were not the ones I had hoped for. Brown didn't unearth any church fathers with "healthy"—that is, 21st-century—attitudes about the human body. He found no model marriages, no godly gourmands. But instead of criticizing our forebears for supposedly unenlightened attitudes, he emphasizes the difference between the early Christians' philosophical context and our own. "I wrote this book so as to instill in its readers … 'a sense of salutary vertigo' about the Christian past," Brown explains in the introduction to the book's 20th-anniversary edition. "I wished to make them aware of a gulf between themselves and their own past that was wider than they, perhaps, expected it to be. It was a gulf that could be bridged only by showing, to that distant, Christian past, the same combination of wonder and respect that makes for fruitful travel in a foreign land."

If ancient Rome and Alexandria are foreign to most readers today, the world depicted in The Abstinence Teacher is depressingly familiar. Marriages fail. Children rebel. Coworkers fight. Most people drink too much. Almost nobody abstains from sex, which is likely to be recreational, impulsive, or adulterous (if other people are involved at all). Marital sex is either sad (Tim can't stop lusting after his first wife) or silly (see Hot Christian Sex above). If you enjoy a book whose characters are likely to live happily ever after, The Abstinence Teacher is not for you.

And yet it is a sweet book whose flawed, wistful characters look for, and occasionally find, love. Though religious people are teased, they are not ridiculed. A Jewish environmental lawyer with a "Don't Blame Me—I Voted for Kerry" sticker on his Audi says to Ruth, "You gotta give credit where credit's due. These Christians turn a lot of lives around. From what I hear, Tim was a complete wreck before he found Jesus."

Turning wrecked lives around—this is where the second century meets the 21st. Even more than Tim, who gave up drugs and alcohol and one-night stands but hung on to music and soccer and marriage, the early Christians believed that conversion to Christ meant literally passing from one mode of existence to another, moving from death to life. "Christ's victory over death had brought about a stunning reversal of the crushing flow of irreversible negative processes that made the tyranny of the demons seemingly irresistible on earth," Brown writes. "Sexuality edged itself into the center of attention, as a privileged symptom of humanity's fall into bondage. Consequently, the renunciation of sexual intercourse came to be linked on a deep symbolic level … with man's ability to undo the power of death."

While their neighbors fought death by founding families and perpetuating their names from generation to generation, some Christians believed they had already entered the immortal realms and therefore had no need to marry and produce children. For these Christians, abstinence was a sign of their new life. Others believed that it was acceptable to marry and beget children, but only in one's youth—and even then, the sexual act should be miraculously completed without any accompanying passion. "By the year 300," Brown writes, "Christian asceticism, invariably associated with some form or other of perpetual sexual renunciation, was a well-established feature of most regions of the Christian world."

No longer. Nowadays even celibate Catholic priests avoid appealing to asceticism as an explanation for their unusual lifestyle, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that "the marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, … is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children." What happened to cause such an attitude shift? When did Christians decide that "God wants you to have better sex"? Peter Brown doesn't say: his interest is more historical and philosophical than practical. For the ancient theologians he quotes, the body is strangely detached from everyday concerns such as hunger or pain or sexual desire. Instead, it is made "to bear the symbolic weight of mighty aspirations."

There are no mighty aspirations in The Abstinence Teacher, nor is there much intentional abstinence. There is, however, a great deal of isolation. By contrast, abstinence was the ideal of just about everyone quoted in The Body and Society, yet the would-be abstainers were far from isolated. Most lived in families or monasteries, and even the desert hermits formed clusters of like-minded ascetics. Tom Perrotta enjoys such dichotomies, but I'm still looking for ancient Christians who valued marriage and community, sex and passion, children and animals, good food and wine, all things bright and beautiful. I may have to give up: the attitude I seek apparently developed during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, not the Roman Empire.

That, at least is Susan Squire's view in I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage. Though the delightfully sassy Squire romps through the history of sex with nary a thought of "symbolic levels," much of her raw data matches Brown's: "All [first-century Christians], as fervent believers in Jesus as Christ, are certain that in the next five minutes, hours, days, weeks (soon, anyway), earthly life will end. Urging people to conceive more of it is not going to be part of their game plan. In an apocalyptic frame of mind, the value of marriage and children would be approximately nil."

It's a downhill slide from St. Paul, who thinks it is better to marry than to burn; to Tertullian, who suggests that it is even better to do neither; to St. Augustine, who connects lust with original sin; to Innocent III, who writes that men and beasts, being made of slime, are the vilest of God's creations, and that this "vileness is reproduced 'from the filthiest sperm … in the stench of lust.'" The flesh will out, of course—medieval kings and queens, for example, seem not to listen much to theologians, and troubadours sing of loves that the church does not sanction—but only a theological tsunami will change the tone of official ecclesial pronouncements.

The tsunami comes in the form of Martin Luther, "a 40-year-old virgin wearing a monk's cowl" who blasts celibacy's theological proponents, starts a matchmaking service for priests and nuns, and eventually marries and fathers six children. In his wake, love becomes not the sin but "the expectation. Romantic, compassionate, erotic, intellectual, emotional, physical—hopefully, and delusionally, all at once and all the time. No surprise that divorce is common, or that hope continues to triumph over experience. The cure for lust is now the cure for loneliness, that cure being love."

Tim and Ruth, the protagonists of The Abstinence Teacher, take the love cure for granted, yet they remain lonely and isolated. One believes in abstinence, at least under certain circumstances, but can't live up to his beliefs. The other thinks abstinence is an aberration, but can't find the love she craves. Offering neither self-help nor salvation, Perrotta accepts them as they are: "standing side by side, not quite touching, but close enough that she could breathe in the sleepy smell of his body and feel a gentle current moving between them. They kept staring straight ahead for a long time, almost as if they were afraid of looking at each other, the silence gathering around them, thickening, until the world outside the window disappeared—the sky, the houses, the trees, the airborne leaves, even the man on the car [Tim's pastor]—and they were alone."