Tag Archives: Fiction

1: Turtle Valley

So, way back in the day when she was just Anderson without the -Dargatz, I knew Gail. Not well, it was more a friend-of-a-friend situation, but there you go.

Previously I read A Rhinestone Button (in 2003) and A Cure for Death by Lightning (in 1999, which I weirdly remember because I read it on a trip). Which predates me keeping track of my reading, so no links. I can’t say I have any strong memories of either book, but then, it’s been a while! This is why it’s good to write things down.

Anyhoo. Turtle Valley. Purchased at the VPL Book Sale, October 2010:

Turtle Valley is set just outside Salmon Arm during the August 1998 wildfire. Some of the hyper-local place names are fictional (Turtle Valley, Promise), but the general geography is authentic. The fire was to the west of Salmon Arm and this is where protagonist Kat’s parents live.

She has returned home (accompanied by her husband, Ezra, and son) to help her parents move the possessions they want to keep safe from the fire to her sister Val’s garage (in Canoe, east of SA). They do this at what feels like a rather leisurely pace, intermingled with reminiscences, reconnections, and revelations.

Kat + Val’s father, Gus, is dying. Val thinks their mother, Beth, has the beginnings of dementia. Beth + Gus’s neighbor, Jude, is Kat’s ex. Kat married Ezra on the rebound. Ezra has had a stroke and Kat feels more like his caregiver than his wife.

There’s a parallel between Ezra and Beth’s long-deceased father, who suffered from PTSD as well as a brain injury (cause: WWI). There’s another parallel between Kat/Jude’s relationship and the one between Beth’s also-deceased mother, Maud, and Gus’s deceased uncle, Valentine. There’s a third parallel between war and the wildfire (smoke fills the air, ash and sparks rain down, army trucks race past the house, helicopters and water bombers fly overhead). There’s a fourth parallel between the wildfire and Jude’s kiln (he makes raku).

And… there are ghosts.

To be clear, these are magical realism style ghosts. But there is plenty going on in this story. Did it need ghosts? I think no. I think the ghosts were superfluous. The story would have been just fine without ghosts. But it’s true I’m not a vwzg* person. I know other readers love the ghosts.

This story feels very personal. I try to avoid conflating author/narrator, but… Kat is a writer. She’s the same age as the author. They both worked as reporters for the Salmon Arm Observer. They both had husbands who had strokes. etcetera. Obviously a lot of this story is culled from real life. It made me wonder how the real-life counterparts felt about this story. How do you pull from real life so transparently and survive the backlash? That’s something I still struggle with, will maybe always struggle with, though I tell myself I need to get over my hang ups and just write.

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*vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts

20: Life Class

Life Class: A Novel by Pat Barker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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From The Book Shop in Penticton, Summer 2010:

And… Pat Barker reminds me why she is the best.

Previously on The Remainder Table, I read Liza’s England and wrote about Double Vision. Have I really not read a Pat Barker book since 2006? Yikes. That’s crazypants. *Checks Wikipedia* Ok, so not entirely my fault. Looks like she didn’t publish anything between Life Class and Toby’s Room, which came out this year, and I’ve read everything else except her first two novels (Union Street & Blow Your House Down). Her husband died in 2009; I expect that has something to do with the longer-than-usual gap between books.

With Life Class, Barker returns to World War I. This time the main characters are art students studying at the Slade. The Slade is real, as is Henry Tonks, one of the professors who appears in the story. If Madeleine L’Engle’s trademark is her crossover characters, Pat Barker’s is her use of real people as characters in her fiction.

When the story starts, it’s the summer of 1914. The main characters are Paul, Elinor, and Neville. Elinor’s already an accomplished artist, winning prizes for her work, but her family doesn’t take her painting seriously because she’s a woman. To them, painting is a nice hobby for a woman to have; it’s not work. Neville’s also producing good work, but he’s a bit avant-garde for pre-war tastes. Paul is struggling. He’s starting to think he’s wasting his money taking classes because he doesn’t seem to be making any progress. He goes to Tonks to talk about quitting. Tonks tells him he should stick out the semester and that he is improving technically. Then he says:

“Most people who come here are bursting with something they want to say, and the trouble I have with some of them is that they can’t be bothered to learn the language to say it in. Whereas with you it’s almost the opposite.”

Paul would have like to defend himself but didn’t know how. This wasn’t the criticism he’s been expecting.

“I do have a problem with life drawing. I know that. But I thought my landscapes were … Well. A bit better.”

“There’s no feeling.”

“Perhaps I’m not managing to express it, but—”

“I don’t get any feeling that they’re yours. You seem to have nothing to say.”

“I see. No, yes, I do see.”

“Well, then.” Tonks spread both hands on his desk, preparatory to rising. “I wish I could tell you what to do about it, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to thrash this one out on your own.”

“I don’t now what to do.”

“Why don’t you start by asking yourself: Do I want to paint? Or do I want ‘to be an artist’? Because they’re two very different things. And try to be honest with yourself. It’s not any easy question.”

Life Class (36-37)

Any of this hitting home, writers?

—Do I want to write? Or do I want ‘to be a writer’?

So the question then becomes ‘will Paul find something to say?’

When war is declared, all the men in the story plan to participate, but their motivations vary. Neville sees the war as a painting opportunity, and signs up with the Red Cross (partly because he’d never pass the army physical and partly because this will get him to the front lines faster). Toby, Elinor’s brother, seems to think it’s something he has to do (for duty/honor/country), even though everyone seems to agree with their father that he’d be of more use if he completed his medical studies first. Paul also doesn’t question enlisting, but the army rejects him. Like Neville, he signs up to work with the Red Cross. He starts out in a field “hospital” in Belgium.

There’s a lot of conflict/contradiction within Paul. He clearly doesn’t buy into any of the romantic notions of war. He’s tortured by what he sees. And yet… he’s compelled to be there. He can’t not be there.

Meanwhile, Elinor is being pressured to go into nursing (a “real” job) but she keeps resisting, even though she is made to feel that she is being frivolous by continuing to paint. For Elinor, her real work is painting.

I read some reviews that called Elinor unsympathetic. Reactions like that are exactly why the Elinor character is important. Essentially—

reader reaction : Elinor-the-character :: community reaction : Elinor in the story

It takes strength not to cave to that kind of pressure. In some ways, Elinor is stronger than any of the male characters. None of them were able to resist societal pressure to go along with the war in some respect, even though none of them were enthusiastic (ok, maybe Neville, who saw his opportunity for fame and fortune). Even Lewis, a Quaker, ends up at the same field hospital as Paul. Of course, you could argue Elinor has her head in the sand. But, then again, if everyone refused to participate, it wouldn’t make for much of a war, would it?

Along with the themes of war/love/class, which Barker keeps returning to, there are interesting questions explored here about the nature of work and what subjects are acceptable as art. What is the place of artwork that makes the viewer avert their eyes, turn away?

We might ask the same questions of writing.

19: The Joys of Love

The Joys of Love by Madeleine L’Engle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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From the Spring 2011 library book sale:

Well, this was a surprise. A new Madeleine L’Engle book? Now there’s dedication. Not even death could stop her writing!

It turns out The Joys of Love was one of the first novels she wrote, back in the 1940s, but it was never published. She shared it with her granddaughters when they were young and they arranged for it to be published posthumously.

The story is based on MLE’s experiences working in the theater as a young woman. The protagonist is Elizabeth “Liz” Jerrold, who is 20 years old and has just graduated from college. Although this was published by Farrar Straus Giroux books for young readers and is probably classified as young adult, it occurred to me that it fits right into the “New Adult” category some publishers are currently trying to make happen. She always was ahead of her time 🙂

It’s August 1946. The setting is a summer theater somewhere on the east coast, near New York City.

Liz’s first love is acting, but her Aunt Harriet (her guardian after her father died) disapproved. Harriet promised that if Liz majored in chemistry (chemistry! I wish more had been done with this) and graduated with honors, she could work at a summer theater. Liz graduates cum laude.

She finagles a scholarship to work as an apprentice* actor, but she still must pay $20/week** room-and-board. Because she doesn’t have any money of her own, Liz is dependent on her Aunt Harriet to pay her room-and-board.

*This position is kind of like an internship, but most apprentices pay for the privilege. So in some ways it’s more like a summer class/workshop that takes place in the real world. At any rate, it’s full-time and doesn’t leave any time for Liz to get a second (paying) job.

**Sidenote: this is not cheap! I did a conversion and apparently this is equivalent to $236.12 in today’s dollars, which is pretty spendy for a bed in a room shared with 3 other people and meals that leave them perpetually hungry.

Liz is infatuated with Kurt, the director, and bffs with Ben, another scholarship apprentice. Kurt, naturally, is a player who’s more interested in one night stands in his dressing room than having a girlfriend. Ben, naturally, would prefer Liz was his girlfriend rather than his bff. Liz is oblivious to Kurt’s fickleness and Ben’s true feelings. Everyone else is not.

The scholarship apprentices are portrayed as serious about acting; the paying apprentices less so.

The inciting incident is Aunt Harriet changing her mind about letting Liz spend the summer doing theater and ordering her to come home. Of course, Liz is an adult and she doesn’t have to do what Harriet says, but she also doesn’t have the $20/week she needs to pay her room-and-board.

It’s not the most original story ever, and modern readers might find Liz a little innocent/naive for a college graduate, but the setting and atmosphere are well done.

I couldn’t help comparing The Joys of Love to Ilsa, the second novel MLE published, which was written around the same time. Ilsa took place over many years and meandered all over the place with a huge cast of characters and various soapy plot developments. In contrast, TJoL is fairly tightly written. The focus is on a small core group of characters and the entire story takes place over a weekend. (In keeping with the theater theme, the chapters are designated as acts: Act I Friday; Act II Saturday; Act III Sunday; Act IV Monday.) I think The Joys of Love is the better story.

Speaking of Ilsa, perhaps the biggest surprise reading TJoL was that Ilsa herself appears in it. It’s in flashback, when Liz recalls going to her mother’s funeral. Her mother, Anna, spent her final months living at Ilsa’s boarding house. Her propensity for crossover characters has always been one of my favorite things about MLE’s writing, so that was awesome.

18: Black Water Rising

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

(Really 3.5)

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From the October 2012 library book sale:

This was an exciting find because I’ve read so much about it in the litblogosphere. Attica Locke is a screenwriter and this was her first novel. Her second came out this year.

Black Water Rising is set in Houston in 1981. Locke does a great job capturing the mood/atmosphere of the city, the tensions (race/class/money/power) between various groups. The descriptions of the setting were very sensory. It’s August and it’s hot and I could practically feel the sweat dripping. I felt like was there.

Jay Porter is a lawyer who’s barely scraping by, hoping for a case that will bring in enough money to keep his law practice afloat. Jay is weary, old beyond his years. (He’s 30.)

He left home when he was 15 to get away from his stepfather, dropping out of school in the process, but later qualified to enter the University of Houston by writing an entrance exam. While he was an undergrad, he got involved with the civil rights movement. He ends up being arrested. His case goes to trial, but he’s found not guilty. After that he went to law school. Now he’s married to Bernie, who’s pregnant. She’s 24, but she’s a young 24, so it feels like there’s more of an age gap between them than there actually is.

At the opening of the story, Jay’s taken Bernie on a night “cruise” (on a old, rickety boat) for her birthday present. They hear screams and then they see someone in the water. Jay jumps in and pulls the person, who turns out to be a white woman, into the boat. They drop her off at the police station, but don’t ask any questions. Jay hopes that’s the end of it. But that would make for a short novel, so of course it’s not.

There are a lot of subplots (a complaint I’ve read in some reviews), but everything ties together in the end, and I think the backstory is integral to Jay’s character and hence the plot. I don’t know if she has any intention of writing a sequel, but I’d read more about these characters.

16: Evidence of Murder

Evidence of Murder by Lisa Black

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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Purchased at the library book sale in October 2012.

I was thrilled with this find because Lisa Black (then writing as Elizabeth Becka Lansky) placed second in TC’s first annual Dead of Winter writing contest and ever since I discovered she’s now writing mystery novels, I’ve been wanting to check them out.

My review appears in the December 2012 issue of Toasted Cheese.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the winner of that first DoW contest, Janet Mullany, has also gone on to publish several novels. A subject for future review!

15: The Long Fall

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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From the library book sale, Spring 2012:

This is the first book of a new series set in present-day New York City. It’s narrated by the main character, private investigator Leonid Trotter (LT) McGill:

“Leonid? What kind of name is that for a black man?”

“My father was a Communist. He tried to cut me from the same red cloth. He believed in living with everybody but his family. McGill is my slave name. That’s why I got to do business with fools like you.”

The Long Fall (13)

Because it’s a new series, there’s a lot of establishing of background and setting and character going on. I liked Leonid as a narrator. He’s intriguingly flawed (he has a criminal past, which he’s trying to leave behind) and has an interesting dynamic going on with the secondary characters, especially his dysfunctional family and Aura, the woman with whom he has complicated relationship. However, there were a lot of minor characters that were less developed who were hard to keep track of. So many names! As characters reappear in subsequent books and become more familiar, this should be less of an issue, but it was a problem here.

The Long Fall has a very classic, hardboiled detective feel even though it’s contemporary and Leonid doesn’t shy away from current technology. His personal assistant, Zephyra, calls herself a ‘telephonic and computer personal assistant’ — she works from home making reservations, answering calls & the like for 10-12 clients who she charges $1500/month. Erm, that’s a pretty good job if it’s real. Is it? For 180-216k a year I’ll make your reservations for you. Damn. Life. I’m doing it wrong.

Anyway, the story is that Leonid has been hired to find four men. His client, ostensibly another detective, only knows their teenage street names. He finds the first three easily—one dead, one in prison, one awaiting trial (this is on page 4; it’s not a spoiler)—but has more difficulty with the fourth. The story starts just when he thinks he’s found him and as he’s starting to have suspicions about the motivations and legitimacy of the person who hired him.

I like Mosley’s writing style. You can see the potential for the series in this book. This was a good story, but I think subsequent ones, as Leonid and the other characters develop, will be even better.

14: The Water’s Lovely

The Water’s Lovely by Ruth Rendell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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This one’s been lurking on the shelf for a while. Found at the library book sale, April 2010:

The Water’s Lovely was more like her Barbara Vine books than the other ones she’s written as Ruth Rendell. The Rendell books tend to be more police procedural; the Vine books more psychological thriller. This one’s not a thriller, exactly, but it’s more of a psychological mystery than a procedural one.

Previously on The Remainder Table… I wrote about Rendell’s An Unkindness of Ravens and Not in the Flesh and Vine’s Grasshopper. I’ve read some other Vine books, but that was before I started these posts.

Twenty-something Ismay shares a house with her younger sister, mother, and aunt. She and her sister live in the downstairs flat; her mother and aunt upstairs. Her mother, Beatrix, is mentally incapacitated and Beatrix’s sister, Pamela, has essentially given up her life to be her caregiver.

Precipitating Beatrix’s mental decline was the death of her second husband, Guy. Beatrix (prior to losing her mind) and Ismay both think Ismay’s sister, Heather, killed him, though there’s a possibility his death was accidental. But, they’ve never asked her or discussed it and so it’s festered for over a decade. It’s clear Ismay thinks her sister is not all there and has appointed herself Heather’s ‘companion.’

Ismay has a boyfriend, Andrew, who is an asshole. (But she’s in love…) Andrew looks like Guy, who Ismay had a crush on as teenager before he was possibly murdered! Things start to unravel when Heather starts dating Edmund. Ismay frets about whether he should know about The Secret. Andrew goes off the rails when Edmund starts staying overnight because he doesn’t like having to put clothes on before he goes to the bathroom in the night because he’s a psychopath.

There’s a cast of wacky supporting characters who are pretty entertaining. The ending isn’t particularly surprising, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. I think the story is more about what people will do—and what they will willfully choose to ignore—for the people they love, and how these actions can be both selfless (to protect the other person) and selfish (so they won’t lose the person they love / end up alone).

13: N is for Noose

N is for Noose by Sue Grafton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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Purchased at Beacon Books in Sidney on my way to the ferry.The kind of place you could get lost in for hours! And yes, there was a cat 🙂

Previously on The Remainder Table, I wrote about S is for Silence and T is for Trespass. So with N is for Noose (1998), we’re taking a few steps back. Though in Kinsey’s timeline, this means months, not years.

In my T is for Trespass post, I wrote:

Here’s the thing. I know Kinsey Millhone isn’t great literature, but also know if I come across another in the series, I will probably read it. It’s reading junk food! nomnomnom It’s not even so much about the series itself, but about the fact that reading it also reminds me of reading the first books in the series, back when my favorite TV show was Remington Steele and my career aspiration was to be either a police detective, a private investigator, or a cat burglar.

Haha, yes. I loves me some reading junk food. I’ll keep reading these even though they’re flawed. There are different kinds of good.

Anyway, N is for Noose got off to a good start. For most of the book, I thought this would be the Kinsey book I’d give three stars. And then I got to the ending. Augh. Not the only time this happened this year and not the first time I’ve wished for half-stars.

In this book, Kinsey is in the Sierra Nevada, so the location is different than her usual, though she does make a quick trip home mid-story. She stays in a terrible motel that conjures up Psycho and every other movie/TV episode featuring a cabin-style motel and a sinister plot. Ok, so the sinister plot goes without saying. Has there ever been a comedy featuring a cabin-style motel? When that doesn’t work out, she ends up staying at her client’s home, which has its own challenges.

The client, Selma, has hired her to investigate what her husband, Tom, was working on prior to his sudden death. Selma is supposed to be terrible–everyone in the town dislikes her–but she’s not really. She does have wildly inconsistent cooking habits, a mixture of inedible mid-century shortcut “foods” (Jell-O with fruit cocktail and Miracle Whip? um, what?) and from-scratch baked goods. But I guess that does convey a woman of a certain era. (She is fifty-ish; this is 1986.)

There was a lot of nerd detective work in this one (digging through messy files, searching newspaper archives) and the main plot thread is the search for Tom’s last work notebook, which is missing. So that was all good. But the ending… yikes. Off the rails. Let’s just say it involves drugged brownies.

P.S. Speaking of Remington Steele, KVOS is currently showing it at 8pm weeknights. So awesome. I didn’t remember it being so campy.

12: In the Woods

In the Woods by Tana French

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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I purchased this at Munro’s Books when I was in Victoria for my mini-vacation. I’d brought some reading material with me, but when I got there, meh. I wanted a Vacation Read. So I exited my fancy-pants hotel, strolled along the inner harbor in front of The Empress and along Government Street, navigating around tourists and buskers alike.

Munro’s is owned by Jim Munro, first husband of Alice. Yes, that Alice. It’s in an old bank building on Government Street in the heart of the touristy area (maple syrup? stuffed animals in Mountie outfits? T-shirts with CANADA on the front? you’re in the right place). I used to go there all the time when I lived in Victoria, so I got all verklempt (j/k) as I browsed the fiction shelves (still in the same location in the store) remembering a younger me standing there in days of yore.

Over the past year or so, Tana French’s novels kept coming up on the lit blogs I read, so when I spotted this on the shelf, I was like a-ha! That’s the one. A mystery, but not a cookie-cutter one. Perfect. And when I took it to the counter to pay, they even gave me a lime-green bookmark that matched the cover. Well played, Munro’s!

In the Woods is the first of a series about the fictional Dublin Murder Squad, though I understand the series is not typical in that each book has different narrator. In this story, there are two mysteries: a present-day one and one from the past of the narrator, police detective Rob Ryan. Ryan has hidden his past from his employers (this is a stretch, but ok) so part of his motivation is keeping his secret.

I liked French’s writing style; the overall atmosphere of the book was creepy and delicious. The interplay between the two main characters, Rob and his partner Cassie Maddox, was also compelling. The book falters a bit in the ending, but it’s not as bad as some reviews I’ve read have made it out to be. I gave it 3 stars at Goodreads, but it’s really more of a 3.5 (half-stars! get on that, Goodreads).

The thing is, I think the mystery here is more of a device through which to get to know the characters. It’s not really the point—it’s a macguffin, basically. My favorite kind of story 🙂 So I’m less critical of how the story ended here than I would be if it was a straightforward detective story where you have certain expectations of the ending.

Hope that’s neither too vague or too spoilery! I’ll definitely be checking out the sequels to In the Woods (there are three so far: The Likeness, Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor).

10: The Art of Dramatic Writing

The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives by Lajos Egri

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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This was recommended by Bellman. Well, actually she recommended the companion book (The Art of Creative Writing), but I couldn’t find it in the library—it was lost or stolen or something—and this book seemed to be the more famous, easier to find, one.

I actually got this from the UBC library first—an original edition—but I had it out for so long I decided to buy a copy. So this one’s a paperback from Chapters. Which is fine, yet lacking the coolness factor that the one from the 1940s did.

[digression]

It’s kind of wonderful that UBC still has 70-year-old books out on the shelves. I don’t mean by publication date–sure there are lots of reprints floating around–I mean objects that have actually physically been there for 70 years. That same book you just pulled off the shelf was taken out by drama students in the 1940s! When you think about it, library books like that are kind of amazing. It’s not like a work of art that’s mostly looked at but rarely touched. Or a book people have decided is worth preserving and placed under glass. That 70-year-old book has been taken out, stuffed in bags and backpacks, probably treated with less than the greatest care, maybe even taken on faraway journeys! and yet somehow every time it made it back to the shelf and it’s still there, still intact, mixed in with all the young whippersnapper books. There’s an aura about books like that. You wish they could talk, tell you where they’ve been, who they’ve been with. And at the same time you can’t help wondering how much longer that experience will exist—all the books have been relegated to movable shelves in the basement.

[/digression]

Oh, wait. One more thing about the original version. It had two additional appendixes that aren’t included in the reprint: “How to Market Your Play” and “Long Runs on Broadway.” It’s obvious why these weren’t included, yet they did add a certain je ne sais quoi to the book.

Moving along! This isn’t the kind of book you just read straight through. It’s more of a chapter here and there kind of book, one that will be great to dip back into now and again, when I need help with a sticky plot problem.

Egri’s key concept is the premise. This is your story’s purpose, theme, goal, thesis, central idea, what have you. It’s a succinct statement, usually one line, that encapsulates the point you’re making. For example, the premise of Romeo and Juliet, according to Egri, is: “great love defies even death.” What Egri argues is that your story should prove your premise.

This book was amazing because it solved My Biggest Problem. I was so excited, I immediately posted about at TC:

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2011 10:52 am Post subject: Re: My Biggest Problem

I debated over which thread to put this in (daily writing thread? this month’s AB thread? Art of Creative Writing thread?), but I was pretty sure I’d mentioned My Biggest Problem with Novel Writing somewhere here before, and so I searched for that and aha!

Beaver wrote:

Thought the 2nd: I have a similar problem (I think) with novels wherein I cycle through various ideas for endings, but can never settle on one b/c each choice feels too arbitrary. (am I forcing it? is this the ‘right’ ending?)

Well, thanks to Bellman, I’ve been reading The Art of Dramatic Writing and in one sentence (one! sentence!) on page 106 Lajos Egri has solved My Biggest Problem:

“The premise is a tyrant who permits you to go only one way — the way of absolute proof.”

Problem. Slayed. cough cough thud

So, now that My Biggest Problem has been solved, I need to work on my premises! Thanks, Bellman Smile

If the book offered nothing else, that would be enough. But there’s more! If you’re the kind of writer who has difficulty with plotting, this is the book for you.