More Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason

by Nancy Pearl

  Larry’s Party describes twenty years in the life of Larry Weller—years defined by his liaisons with a variety of women, and his growing interest in designing garden mazes.

  Swann is an academic satire—an exploration of the various ways different men and women interpret the work of the mysterious poet Mary Swann, each according to his or her own needs and prejudices.

  Shields’s other works include her last, Unless; Happenstance: Two Novels in One about a Marriage in Transition, also told from the points of view of both halves of a couple; The Orange Fish; The Box Garden; and Small Ceremonies.

  NEVIL SHUTE: TOO GOOD TO MISS

  If what you’re looking for is a plain old-fashioned good story, well told and with no highfalutin language, you simply can’t do better than to hunt up Nevil Shute’s novels and immerse yourself in them. James Hilton, author of Goodbye,Mr.Chips and no mean storyteller himself, referred to Shute’s No Highway as “firstrate yarning.”The same could be said for all his novels.

  Nevil Shute Norway lived from 1899 to 1960, and although he was English born and bred, he moved permanently to Australia, where he set some of the novels that I most enjoy rereading. An infantryman in the British army in World War I and a reservist in World War II, his nonliterary career was in the aerospace industry. (He was probably the first to explore in a novel the then-revolutionary notion that planes suffer from metal fatigue, a phenomenon that is the centerpiece of No Highway’s plot). Both his wartime and peacetime experiences show up time and again in his writings. He wrote more than two dozen works of fiction (the first, Marazan, was published in 1926, and the last, Trustee from the Toolroom, was published posthumously in 1960), but he thought of himself primarily as an engineer. In fact, his autobiography, Slide Rule, is subtitled The Autobiography of an Engineer. Although he’s probably best known for On the Beach, about the last survivors of a global atomic war, my particular favorites—to which I return time and again—include Requiem for a Wren and, above all, A Town Like Alice.

  But here’s something about Nevil Shute that I must tell you: His novels, like those of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and countless other writers published in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, include racist language that, while in common usage then, rings uncomfortably in our ears today. So, for instance, despite the fact that Shute’s novel The Chequer Board is sympathetic to the plight of black soldiers in World War II, and is even supportive of interracial marriages (the African American character marries a British girl from Cornwall, while the British flyer marries a Burmese woman), the racist language makes for some discomfiting reading.

  In addition to the books mentioned above, Shute’s books include the following:Beyond the Black Stump

  The Far Country

  In the Wet

  Landfall: A Channel Story

  Lonely Road

  Most Secret

  An Old Captivity

  Pastoral

  Pied Piper

  The Rainbow and the Rose

  Round the Bend

  Ruined City (the American title is Kindling)

  So Disdained

  Stephen Morris

  Vinland the Good

  What Happened to the Corbetts (the American title is Ordeal)

  SIBS

  Birth order, appearance, talent (or lack thereof), the men and women in their lives (or lack thereof), different interests—all these factors and more can affect the relationships of brothers and sisters. Ideally, of course, siblings look beyond their surface or deep-seated differences, overcome the emotional traumas of growing up, and wind up close friends. Sometimes this happens—and sometimes not, as can be seen from the books below.

  David Long has written two wonderful (and very different) novels in which sisters play a major role.When twenty-two-year-old Mark, the main character in The Falling Boy, marries Olivia, the third of the four Stavros sisters, he doesn’t expect to fall in love with her older sister Linney, but eight years later he does. In The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux, Miles Fanning believes he has recovered from the major traumatic event of his adolescence—his high school girlfriend’s disappearance in a case that was never solved—but when her younger sister comes into his life more than two decades after those events, he realizes that the past has never lost its power over him.

  In Pete Fromm’s first novel, How All This Started, Austin Scheer and his older sister Abilene share a love for baseball and Austin’s dream of becoming a major league pitcher. But Austin only slowly grows to understand his sister’s manic depression and its effects on her personality.

  Psychiatrist Jack and his actress-sister Kate lived through the shocking death of their mother when they were children, but when as adults their family home in Ireland is put up for sale, Jack decides it’s finally time to go back home and face the ghosts of the past—to reconstruct the truth—in Josephine Hart’s elegant The Reconstructionist.

  Rita Mae Brown’s Six of One is the first of a series of warm and often humorous novels about the Hunsenmeir sisters, Julia and Louise, living in small-town Maryland. Other good ones in the series are Bingo and Loose Lips.

  Worth searching out is Charles Dickinson’s hilarious and touching The Widows’ Adventures. In an attempt to heal the crevasses in their families’ relationships, Helene and Ina, two elderly widowed sisters, take a car trip from Chicago to Los Angeles.This is a journey that is perilous not least because Helene, the driver, is blind and Ina, the navigator, is a little too fond of John Barleycorn.

  Shirley Hazzard keeps racking up the accolades of readers and fellow writers alike. She won the 2003 National Book Award for her novel The Great Fire and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1981 for The Transit of Venus.The latter is the story of orphan sisters Grace (the pretty one) and Caro (the intelligent one), who leave their native Australia to create new lives for themselves in England. One opts for the safety and comfort of marriage, the other for a life filled with unpredictable passion and pain.Yet neither choice is irrevocable, nor does it protect them from what life tosses their way.

  Two other sisters who choose different paths are found in Richard B.Wright’s Clara Callan, which won every major Canadian literary award in 1991, the year it was published. The novel, which spans four years in the 1930s, is told entirely in the journal of Clara (a spinster schoolteacher and closet poet) and the letters she exchanges with her sister, Nora, who left the small Canadian town where they grew up to find fame and fortune as a radio soap opera actress in dangerously seductive New York.

  Other good novels about siblings include Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade,Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour, Lan Samantha Chang’s Inheritance, Jenny McPhee’s No Ordinary Matter, Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire, and The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson.

  You might also look at the “Brothers and Sisters” section in Book Lust.

  SMALL-TOWN LIFE

  What are the benefits of setting a novel in a small town? Perhaps one is that you can more fully explore the setting and bring it to life for the reader. And perhaps another is that we tend to think of small towns as bucolic and quaint little villages that are populated with eccentrics.These characters are not only fun to write about, but enjoyable to read about as well.

  Pick, Kentucky, is the setting for Lana Witt’s Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones, in which the greed of a coal-mining company comes up against the lives and loves of a variety of quirky characters, including philosophy graduate Tom Jett, auto mechanic Gilman Lee, Gilman’s old girlfriend Rosalee Wilson, and his new (and undying) love, Gemma Collett.

  “...And Ladies of the Club” by Helen Hooven Santmyer is a lengthy (more than one thousand pages), multigenerational saga of small-town Ohio life, as experienced by members of a literary society from its 1868 founding through the 1920s. Published in 1982, when the author was in her eighties and living in a nursing home, this was a sensational (and well-deserved) success.

  For many years Wen
dell Berry has been both a farmer (in Henry County, Kentucky) and a writer of poetry, essays, and novels about the joys of the natural world and the importance of community. My favorite of his novels is Jayber Crow, which has one of those misfit heroes that so often show up in novels set in small towns. Jayber was a sometime student of the ministry, but he is now Port William’s philosopher, gravedigger, most devoted bachelor, and only barber.

  Small-town New Hampshire is both the subject and the setting of May Sarton’s Kinds of Love, which focuses on an elderly couple who, after decades of spending only the summer in the state, decides to move there permanently.

  When former folksinger and writer Henry Corvine decides to leave the music business, he goes back to Edson, the foundering mill town where he grew up, and discovers that the past is never quite over,in Bill Morrisey’s Edson.

  John Welter’s hilarious and bittersweet I Want to Buy a Vowel: A Novel of Illegal Alienation is set in a small town in Texas, where eleven-year-old Eva and her younger sister Ava come to the assistance of illegal alien Alfredo Santayana (who has learned to speak English from watching television).

  The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz is part courtroom drama, part morality tale, part examination of the difficulties of being perceived as “different” in a small town, and part hymn of praise to women’s friendships. Weaving all these themes together, this novel about a single mother and a murdered infant makes for a compelling and engrossing read.

  Love, marriage, and politics in a small New Hampshire town during the early months of the Depression come together in Sea Glass by Anita Shreve, definitely a novel with a social conscience.

  After leaving the World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans where he spent most of the war years, William Fujita finds his way to widow Margaret Kelly’s farm and slowly creates a makeshift family to replace the people he’s lost in What the Scarecrow Said by Stewart David Ikeda.

  Everyone in the small Georgia town where he lives is eager to find banjo-playing peanut pathologist Roger Meadows the perfect wife, but nobody thinks it could possibly be Della, a painter of chickens, in Bailey White’s Quite a Year for Plums.

  Frederick Reiken’s The Odd Sea describes the effects on a small-town Massachusetts family when teenager Ethan Shumway disappears.

  Icy Sparks, the eponymous heroine of Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s debut novel, is set apart from the rest of the small Kentucky town where she grows up by her tics and strange behavior, finally diagnosed as Tourette’s syndrome.

  SOCIAL STUDIES

  I’m always interested in books about current or controversial social issues that help me step back from the headlines and really think about the subject. These books all fit the bill perfectly.

  Charles Bowden’s powerful and moving Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family helps us think about the ultimate failure and the moral corruption at the heart of the war on drugs.

  Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent ten years getting to know, gaining the confidence of, and sharing the lives of one extended Latino family in one of the poorest urban areas of the country before writing Random Family: Love, Drugs,Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. Her descriptions of their experiences—teenage pregnancy, friends and relatives in prison, drug-dealing boyfriends, gangsters—are presented from the inside out, giving readers the uncomfortable sensation of being right there.

  9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill is a sensitive portrait of a group of mentally ill people living together in a group home in Glen Cove, New York. Author Michael Winerip also confronts the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome, exploring the problems involved in situating these homes in established neighborhoods.

  Cynthia Gorney’s Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars is an amazingly even-handed (and readable) overview of the abortion controversy. Gorney’s book will make you think long and hard about your beliefs on this issue, regardless of which side you’re on.

  Are there any real villains in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures?I don’t think so. There’s only great sadness at a teenage girl’s fate as a result of the collision between the beliefs of her Hmong immigrant family and the American medical establishment.

  The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace by Dennis Ross describes the participants and events in the elusive search for stability and acceptance between Israel and the Arab countries in the region. As the chief American negotiator for the Middle East peace process from 1988 to 2000, under the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross is well aware of the sticky issues involved: the Palestinian belief in “right of return,” Israeli security, the settlement *of the West Bank, and the ever-present threat of terror. This is required reading for anyone with the least interest in the topic.

  SOUTHERN-FRIED FICTION

  From my reading of Southern novels, I’ve retained many images: the scent of magnolias wafting through the still, hot, moist air; a group of women sitting on a large verandah fanning themselves and drinking large glasses of sweetened iced tea; the honeyed drawl of their voices. These images are balanced, of course, by those from an entirely different sort of Southern novel: the large tobacco and cotton plantations; men and women (usually black) working long hours picking those crops; the painful legacy of slavery and, especially in novels published since the 1960s, the difficult issue of race relations.

  The classic Southern novels are by William Faulkner.You’ll never know a fictional place as well as you come to know the invented Yoknapatawpha County, where Faulkner set such enduring novels as The Sound and the Fury; Go Down, Moses; and Absalom, Absalom!

  That good black soil of the South has produced a great number of other wonderful novels as well.Try these, which I’ve grouped by the state in which they’re set:

  Alabama

  Evelyn Couch finds her life rejuvenated when her elderly friend Mrs. Threadgoode tells her the story of Idgie and Ruth, who ran a cafe near Birmingham in the 1930s. Fannie Flagg’s most beloved book, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, tells the story of all these women.

  The complicated dynamics of family relationships and long-held secrets are explored in Anne Carroll George’s novel This One and Magic Life, when after the death of painter Artemus (Artie) Sullivan, her family gathers together to mourn and remember her. (George also wrote a series of mysteries set in Alabama, including Murder Carries a Torch.)

  A novel that I reread frequently—pure comfort food in print—is Babs H. Deal’s The Walls Came Tumbling Down, the story of a long hot 1940s Alabama summer in the lives of seven sorority sisters.

  Anne Rivers Siddons went on to write many other novels, but her first one, Heartbreak Hotel,remains my favorite. It’s set in 1956, when the thorny problem of race relations invades a bucolic college town and forever alters the life of beautiful, bright, and talented Maggie Deloach.

  Train Whistle Guitar,the first novel in Albert Murray’s coming-of-age trilogy (it’s followed by The Spyglass Tree and The Seven League Boots), takes place in 1920s Mobile, where Scooter learns about life from a variety of people, including his real mother, his adopted mother, a musician, and the local barber.

  Sena Jeter Naslund intersperses her fictional characters with real ones in Four Spirits, as college student Stella Silver joins the civil rights movement in Birmingham and discovers its dangers and its rewards.

  In 1961, a family-run hotel in Birmingham becomes the gathering place for freedom riders, reporters, and townspeople, drawn together in the cause of civil rights, in Vicki Covington’s The Last Hotel for Women.

  Robert McCammon brings a bit of magical realism to Zephyr, Alabama, in Boy’s Life, a tale of a father and son who discover a dead man and realize that evil has crept into their once idyllic hometown.

  Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress, which takes place in the 1960s, is filled with wacky characters like Aunt Lucille, who decapitates
her husband with a carving knife and then flees to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune (carrying her husband’s head in a Tupperware container). Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Peejoe becomes involved in the struggle to integrate a public swimming pool. (Another novel featuring an electric carving knife, although not set in the South, is Peter Lefcourt’s Abbreviating Ernie, about a cross-dressing urologist and his wife.)

  Sacred Dust by David Hill is about racial violence in Prince George’s County, Alabama, and how one woman gathers the courage to defy local members of the Ku Klux Klan, including her own husband.

  I enjoyed Tom Franklin’s historical mystery Hell at the Breech, in which the murder of a politician leads to more mayhem than anyone quite bargained for.