Category: Books

A Christmas Memory, by Richard Paul Evans (Gallery, 183 pages)

Thirty years ago, Richard Paul Evans was 29 years old and working for an advertising agency in Salt Lake City when he decided he’d try his hand at writing a book. He didn’t have a Haruki Murakami moment, when he suddenly knew he could be a novelist while sitting in a baseball park; rather, he had just run for a statewide political office and lost, and needed a new goal to fill the void.

In his spare time he spent four weeks writing a novella he called The Christmas Box and then made 27 copies at Kinko’s and gave them out as Christmas gifts. Family and friends loved the story, which was about a young couple who become caretakers for a widow who has a mysterious box full of letters that (spoiler alert) turn out to be life-changing for the man and his wife. A couple of publisher rejection letters later, Evans self-published the book and eventually it hit No. 2 on The New York Times self-published bestseller list. Shortly thereafter, it sold at auction to Simon & Schuster for $4.2 million. It wasn’t a bad investment.

Evans has gone on to write more than 40 novels, most of them bestsellers, many of which have something to do with Christmas. His latest is A Christmas Memory, which steals a title from Truman Capote. (Disclosure: Capote’s poignant reflection about making fruitcake with his elderly cousin was published in 1956 and is a staple in my annual holiday reading.) Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, would no doubt be amused that two writers with such different trajectories and styles converged in this way.

Like Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Evans promises, in an author’s note, that his story is a lived experience, or more accurately, a collection of lived experiences woven into one narrative memory. It is a “composite of childhood experiences,” he says, without detailing which parts of the book, if any, are fiction.

Despite the title and festive cover, A Christmas Memory is disappointingly not really a Christmas story. It’s a story about a friendship that develops between a young boy and his elderly neighbor.

It opens with a family tragedy in 1967: the loss of the narrator’s older brother, who was killed in the Vietnam War. “He had promised to be home for Christmas. He kept his promise. Just not in the way we hoped.”

The narrator — presumably Evans, or some version of Evans, as he is called Richard or Ricky throughout the book — is “an awkward boy of eight with Tourette’s syndrome” who suffers 20 different kinds of tics. The family’s troubles get worse after the brother dies. The father is unemployed, the narrator’s grandmother dies, the family moves from California to Utah and then Richard’s parents separate.

The boy takes all of this hard. One day, while he is outside sobbing, he is comforted by a dog, which turns out to belong to a neighbor he later learns is named Mr. Foster. Mr. Foster is Black, which is unusual in Utah, which is “homogeneous as whole milk.” The man keeps to himself, for reasons that gradually become clear.

One day, Mr. Foster rescues Richard from bullies, and the two develop a relationship. At first, it seems mostly business. Mr. Foster hires the boy to shovel snow and to walk his dog, Beau, a deal they consummated with (possibly the most Utah thing ever) a snack of hot croissants with strawberry preserves. The two grow closer, with Mr. Foster gradually revealing parts of his life as the boy’s visits become more regular. At Thanksgiving, Mr. Foster invites young Richard and his mother to his house for the holiday meal, and there is finally a hope that with the start of the Christmas season, something Christmassy might ensue.

Alas, no.

The story culminates in December, that is for sure. There is a subplot about a cruel public school teacher who, for reasons that are not fully explained, basically ruins Christmas for her whole class with an angry tirade about Santa Claus. But there are also tragedies of mental health and physical health that, for all Evans’ narrative gifts, make this a bit of a downer to read, especially around the holidays. That’s not to say that depressing circumstances don’t make for a good holiday story; the travails of Jim and Della in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” make one of the most beloved Christmas stories despite its soul-crushing ending. And for anyone suffering the loss of a loved one at Christmas, this little book might be a comforting read.

As Mr. Foster tells young Richard, “We hate grief because it hurts. Not everything that hurts is bad. Whatever grief may be, it’s one thing for certain. Grief is the truest evidence of love.”

Reader reviews warn that Foster, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is heavy-handed with Christian imagery and themes, but this is not the case in A Christmas Memory, aside from a few references to resurrection and an afterlife. For anyone who celebrates Christmas, this certainly wouldn’t be off-putting.

It’s tempting to compare Evans’ Christmas titles to the mauldin “Christmas Shoes” song and movie, which grew out of a story that circulated on the internet and has, at least in my house, become a subject of mockery. But Evans is a much better storyteller than that, and his commercial success shows that there is an appetite for these sorts of books, particularly since major publishing houses have lately failed to deliver any intellectually stimulating holiday titles, instead concentrating their efforts on cheesy Christmas romances and Hallmark movie fare.

A Christmas Memory is no A Christmas Carol, and Evans is no Charles Dickens. But it is a holiday bonbon of a book in a genre with disappointingly few choices, and it’s a serviceable and poignant story, particularly for anyone tending more toward misery than merriment this Christmas season. B

Screaming on the Inside, by Jessica Grose (Mariner, 197 pages)

Every decade or so there emerges a new book by a writer who became a mother and was clearly not up to the task. The latest in the genre comes from The New York Times’ Jessica Grose, whose Screaming on the Inside is billed as an indictment of how society treats its mothers. In fact, it’s more of an indictment of the life choices that Grose has made. This is not mommy shaming, just the facts.

Grose is an opinion writer for the Times, and also writes a newsletter about parenting. She has been yowling for several years about America’s mothers being in crisis, hence the book’s subtitle: “The unsustainability of modern motherhood.” This is a popular position in a culture that likes to aggrandize individuals’ problems into societal crises. Parenting is difficult, yes. And the pandemic added new stresses. But Groses’s assessment, which is as much a hysterical rant that probably should have remained in her personal journal, is tiresome to read and full of cringy confessions that undermine her case.

She begins by admitting that, despite covering family policy, she had not looked into the provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act before getting pregnant at the time she took a new job. She was therefore shocked to learn that she could not just walk away from her new job when she developed debilitating morning sickness and severe anxiety (having gone off antidepressants while trying to get pregnant). She does herself no favors by saying that she “could barely leave the house because I was afraid of both barfing on the subway and sarin gas attacks,” nor by telling the story of how she was incredibly rude to one of her new editors on a work call. Not surprisingly, she was reprimanded and soon left that job.

Thus begins the pattern of the book: a tale of personal woe, followed by tales of woe from a few other women, followed by some statistics and comparisons to Europe:

“A study of around three thousand women from Norway, which has universal health care and paid sick leave, showed that three-quarters of women had taken at least one week of sick leave during their pregnancies. The median length of sick leave was eight weeks, and half of women needed between four and sixteen full weeks away from work. This is what should be standard for American mothers, too.”

We can definitely have a serious conversation about whether American companies are accommodating enough to pregnant women, but citing the number of women who take sick leave during pregnancy — in a country where paid sick leave is available — is probably not the evidence of need that Grose thinks it is.

But OK. Let’s continue to the birth of her first child and her admission that she’d barely even held a baby before coming home with one, her reluctance to breastfeed, her sad attempts to find friends who also had babies through mom groups. (“The only thing most of us had in common was that we had sex in March 2012.”) She later had to qualify her criticism, saying “This is not to say that all mom groups are judgmental and oppressive.”

Despite all the unhappiness and struggle, she then has another child, and takes a job at the Times when her daughters are 2 and 5. There, she comes under attack from the newspaper’s famously acidic commenters whose comments cause her, “in my darker moments,” to ponder the question: “Am I really somehow constitutionally unfit to be a mother?”

Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is no federal licensing for motherhood; otherwise America’s shrinking fertility rate would be even worse than it is. And she is right that mental health struggles shouldn’t be a barrier to having a family. But there is something disturbingly celebratory about how Gross talks about her mental health; in fact, one section of the book begins with the header “Celebrating my birthday with a Klonopin prescription.” This was, in part, brought on by the panic she experienced when schools and day cares shut down due to Covid-19, and a full chapter addresses the problems that the pandemic caused for parents and children.

Those problems are real and were worse for mothers who, unlike Grose, did not have jobs that could be done from home, husbands with health insurance and children’s grandparents who could help provide care. But it was a pandemic, a once-in-a-century (if that) event, so using pandemic problems as evidence of systemic failure is one more example of her flimsy evidence.

Mercifully, this is a short book, and she concludes by describing a conversation with a pregnant friend in January of this year. The friend was ambivalent about having another baby, and Grose was initially upbeat and tried to convince her friend to be happy about the pregnancy (“Once the baby is here, you’ll feel better! … Part of me wishes I had another!”) but then feels “awful that I was still conditioned to slap a happy face on her mixed feelings.”)

Instead of trying to look on the bright side, I guess we should wallow in the emotional mud with our unhappy friends. There’s a lot to be said for honest sharing, but there’s also much happiness to be found in positivity. Unfortunately, Screaming on the Inside is a collection of shared misery with a thin menu of solutions. D

Now is Not the Time to Panic, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 243 pages)

It’s another mundane day in the suburban household of Frances Eleanor Budge when she picks up the phone and hears a writer for The New Yorker say, “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers.”

Frances numbly replies, “We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” as her daughter bangs on drums in the background and her husband makes a household repair.

After hanging up, refusing to answer the writer’s questions, Frances reflects, “Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet.”

Thus begins Now is Not the Time to Panic, the new novel by Kevin Wilson, whose previous work includes The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here. From that strange phone call, it’s a wild, comic ride, as Wilson takes readers back 21 years to when Frances, or Frankie, as she was called, was a teenager with a secret.

The teenage Frankie, who lived with her mom and three triplet brothers in Tennessee, was an aspiring writer with a lot of time on her hands when she met Zeke, an aspiring artist. The two bonded over animosity toward their absent fathers, their misfit natures and their boredom.

One day, while trying to think of something to do, Frankie remembered that there was an old Xerox copier in her garage that her troublemaking brothers had stolen from a supply building at the high school. It had previously only been used to photocopy the triplets’ body parts, and now wasn’t working. But Zeke figured out that it was only a paper jam, which he fixed. “This could be fun,” he says. “We could do something weird with this.”

Zeke suggested that Frankie compose a few lines, “a mystery or riddle that no one can solve,” and that he would illustrate it. Frankie complied, and Zeke produced an illustration that was equally odd, with a hellscape of shacks with roofs caving in, wild dogs, children in beds and two “giant, disembodied hands, the fingers withered and jagged, almost glowing” reaching in the direction of the children.

That night, they distributed 63 copies of the poster around town – on telephone poles, in the windows of businesses, in random mailboxes. The next day, they made 300 more. “The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like,” Frankie reflects. “It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome. I imagined my wild brothers had felt this so many times that they were numb to it. But for Zeke and me, well-behaved dorks, it was amazing.” It took a while, but soon a local reporter wrote about the mysterious posters, which he deemed sophisticated, suggesting the quote came from a famous French poet. Zeke and Frankie continued to distribute them, unnoticed. Theories begin to pile up. Some people said the posters were the work of a drug cult and were an ominous threat. The newspaper ran a story under the headline “Evil comes to Coalfield.” Meanwhile, other people in the town started making copies of the poster and hanging them up, too. One person was putting them on top of a water tower when he fell off and died.

Eventually, the story goes national and makes it to 20/20 and Saturday Night Live, and reporting on it wins a Pulitzer for The New York Times, and someone opens a restaurant called “Skinny with Hunger” and so forth. The “Coalfield Panic” becomes so legendary that random people start taking credit for it, but they are shown to be hoaxes, and Frankie has lost touch with Zeke and gone on to live her ordinary life. Which is why she is so unnerved when the writer for The New Yorker, an art critic, starts calling repeatedly, threatening to expose her.

On one level, this sounds like a madcap adventure, something that Christopher Buckley (Thank You for Not Smoking, Florence of Arabia) would write. But there is a poignancy that underlies the story, which is billed as a coming-of-age novel but is much more. It’s also about the source and meaning of art, and about how events from the past forever influence our life. “You hold on to something for twenty years, the expectations and possibilities bend and twist alongside your actual life,” the adult Frankie says.

While the ending wasn’t what I had hoped for (and perhaps not what Frankie and Zeke would have wanted either), Now is Not the Time to Panic was a joy ride from start to finish and moves easily through its two-decade time span like a fast-flowing river. It’s not the great American novel but it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s something even better: a novel that makes you laugh and think and is simply a pleasure to read. B+

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press, 352 pages)

Celeste Ng’s latest novel is a depressing dive into a dystopian society, but I had high hopes for it when I found a handwritten note tucked inside the copy I picked up from the library that said, “It is so, so, so good!” I have to wonder if I would have liked it more if that note hadn’t been there, messing with my expectations.

In Our Missing Hearts, the government has passed PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, which has resulted in the banning of anything that might promote anti-Americanism and forces children of parents who don’t fully support the act to live with state-approved foster families. PACT targets Asians, particularly the Chinese; the American government blames the decade-old “Crisis” — an economic downturn marked by unemployment and poverty — on Chinese manipulation.

The story follows 12-year-old Bird, whose mother, Chinese-American poet Margaret Miu, left him and his father three years prior, after the line from her poem “Our Missing Hearts” was adopted as a slogan for anti-PACT activists. Worried that the government would take Bird away because she was perceived as a traitor, Margaret left first.

While the idea is good, its execution drags the story down. Ng (author of the adapted-for-Hulu novel Little Fires Everywhere) made some interesting writing choices in Our Missing Hearts. My biggest pet peeve is that she doesn’t use quotation marks at all, anywhere, even though the characters have dialogues. The decision struck me as somewhat arrogant, serving no purpose other than showing that Ng has become well-known enough as an author to take such liberties. But I realized I wasn’t being fair and should find out if there was a good reason for it, so, naturally, I asked Google. An article on BuzzFeed gave me the answer; Ng was asked about her style choices, specifically the lack of quotation marks. Her response:

“When I started writing the novel, I found that I was instinctively writing without quotation marks … but I had to think about why. (I’ll be honest, I usually hate when there are no quotation marks.) … I wanted the novel to feel slightly folkloric, almost dreamlike; for Bird, the events feel a little bit like stepping into a fairytale, one of the stories his mother told him when he was young. When you think of a story being told out loud, the way folktales often are … there’s a blurring between the person narrating, and the words of the story, and the things the characters say. So, removing the quotation marks helped create that effect for the reader.”

Maybe someone who is less of a stickler about grammatical rules would appreciate that artistic perspective, but strong dialogue can really move a plot along and give the characters personality, and this didn’t have any of that. In fact, my main issue with the novel is that I didn’t really care about the characters; they were flat, dull and one-dimensional. Ng switches perspective about halfway through the novel, from Bird’s point of view to Margaret’s, and while it helps explain her reasons for leaving more clearly, that emotion still isn’t there. A mother who has to leave her child should be devastated; what we see is her focusing instead on her anti-PACT mission. It’s noble, of course, but she seems almost robotic.

The character I actually liked the most was Sadie, who was removed from her home because her parents were working against PACT. At first we get to know from Bird’s memories of her; later he meets up with her on his journey to find his mother — which he seems to do only because she sent him a cryptic letter that he thinks is a request for him to find her, and not because he has a strong emotional desire to see her. He might, but the story focuses more on how he works through the clues his mother gave him to find her.

Dystopian novels are often bleak, but Our Missing Hearts was both bleak and boring. At times I didn’t even want to finish it, but it’s pretty short, and I promised to write a book review about it, so here we are.

While the concept was good, it might have been better as a short story, where the lack of character development would be less noticeable. As a novel, Our Missing Hearts is missing, well, heart. Maybe that’s the point. But the story would have been more powerful if there were more feeling behind it. C+

Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami; translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (Knopf, 224 pages)

The career of Haruki Murakami is one of the more mystifying legends in the literary world. He’s told the story many times: how, sitting in the stands at a baseball game, he suddenly had the thought that he could write a novel, despite not having written anything much more substantive than college papers. It was, as he calls it, an epiphany. The next day, he bought a fountain pen and paper and started writing a novel at his kitchen table after he got home from work in the evening. It took six months.

That was 35 years and 25 books ago.

Everyone now trying to do the same thing (or something similar) during November for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) should know, however, that even Murakami didn’t think much of that first book, Hear the Wind Sing, of which he now writes, “What I had written seemed to fulfill the formal requirements of a novel” yet “was rather boring, and as a whole, left me cold.”

But possessed of the idea that writing a novel was his destiny, Murakami did not stay discouraged even though he wasn’t satisfied with the first draft. As he tells in his new memoir Novelist as a Vocation, he swapped the pen and paper for a typewriter and started again in English instead of his native Japanese. That limited the vocabulary available to him and forced him to write more precisely — to create, as he says, “a creative rhythm distinctly my own.”

Ultimately he rewrote the entire novel in this style and found that writing “filled the spiritual void that had loomed with the approach of my thirtieth birthday.” A year later, the book was short-listed for a prize for new writers, which he won. And Murakami Inc. was off and running, despite the disdain of some of Japan’s literary elites, one of whom has called him a “con man.”

Novelist as a Vocation recounts many of the stories that Murakami has already told, including how he got started and why he became a long-distance runner who runs every day (and a marathon every year). It also explains, in some ways, the Murakami phenomenon — why he has enjoyed enduring popular success despite a writing style that is often plain-spoken. Along the way, he offers advice to aspiring novelists, although he doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of them as a species, writing, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.”

He also says, “There are exceptions, of course, but from what I have seen, most novelists aren’t what one would call amiable and fair-minded. Neither are they what would normally be considered good role models: their dispositions tend to be idiosyncratic and their lifestyles and general behavior frankly odd.” He tells the story of the 1912 meeting of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, who barely spoke to each other at a dinner party in Paris. “Writers are basically an egoistic breed, proud and highly competitive. Put two of them in the same room and the results, more likely than not, will be a disappointment.” A certain arrogance also helps novelists who succeed, he suggests.

What novelists are, besides dogged, is accommodating. They are tolerant of other novelists because, as Murakami puts it, there’s always more room in the ring. Many people write one or two novels; few do what he does: churn them out consistently. Not that even Murakami makes his sole living from writing novels — he also has done English-to-Japanese translations for 30 years.

I have always been something of a Murakami skeptic. Even his celebrated memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I’ve read twice, seems flat to me, its sentences as matter-of-fact as a grocery list. So it was interesting to read that the author himself does not pay heed to too much of his press. “… I am, when all is said and done, a very ordinary person,” he writes. “ … Not the type to stand out when I stroll around town, the type who’s always shown to the worst table at restaurants. I doubt that if I didn’t write novels anyone would ever have noticed me.”

Also, he writes of being removed from the literary elites, having failed to win a couple of other prizes that he was shortlisted for early in his career. This has made him question the value of any prize, “from the Oscars to the Nobel.” The most important thing to have is good readers, not the acclaim of one’s peers, he says. (It’s worth noting, though, that Murakami also acknowledges that his career as a novelist might have fizzled if he hadn’t won the Gunzo Prize for his first effort.)

In short essays about his life and the craft, he goes on to muse about the importance of originality (and the difficulty of having an original style be accepted, whether in writing, painting or music); the mechanics of writing (he doesn’t work on novels unless “the desire to write is overwhelming” and instead does more mundane tasks, like translation, until that occurs); and why a scene from the movie E.T. is an apt metaphor for novelists who don’t have a lot of life experience. (Short version, you have to assemble a transmitter with an odd assortment of junk stored in the garage.)

Murakami estimates that 5 percent “of all people are active readers of literature” but those 5 percent are ardent, he says. “As long as one in twenty is like us, I refuse to get overly worried about the future of the novel and the written word.”

Perhaps the most fascinating line in Novelist as a Vocation is this: “I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other.” So many writers convince themselves that they need deadlines to motivate them to work, but Murakami suggests that creativity flows best without this pressure. He also doesn’t seem to put a lot of pressure on himself as far as output goes, writing only about 1,600 words a day when he’s working on a novel, with a hard stop after 10 pages, even if he wants to write more.

Interestingly, this memoir was released in Japan in 2015 and took seven years and two translators to make it to the U.S., just in time to help NaNoWriMo participants who need a jolt of adrenaline to power through. It serves that purpose well, and is also a surprisingly pleasurable read for anyone trying to understand the magic of Murakami more broadly. B+

Mad Honey, by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ballantine, 450 pages

The new novel by Jodi Picoult, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, is too much about bees. Its protagonist, a divorced New Hampshire mother whose profession is apiarist — beekeeper — describes her work this way: “Like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves in situations that are the stuff of others’ nightmares.”

That includes schlepping out to rescue bees in the cold and dark after a bear has broken into their hive, a first-world problem for sure, but also an old-world problem; beekeeping is the second-oldest profession. And also: informing the bees when their beekeeper has died and formally requesting that they accept the replacement. “In New Hampshire, the custom is to sing, and the news has to rhyme.”

And you thought your job was tough.

This custom is so fanciful that it seems made up, especially being told by two master storytellers. But a quick search of Google confirms that “telling the bees” is actually a thing — not just of deaths, but births, marriages and other momentous events. Mad Honey indeed.

The novel could have been subtitled “more than you ever wanted to know about bees,” and the constant presentation of bee facts at times makes Mad Honey seem like it has a third co-author named Wikipedia. But there is, in fact, a good story here to justify the bee trivia.

Olivia McAfee lives in Adams, New Hampshire, with her son Asher, having moved there from Boston after her marriage to an abusive surgeon blew up. Their lives intersect explosively with a young woman named Lily, who takes turns narrating the novel with Olivia. The narrative conceit is that Olivia tells her side of the story going forward, while Lily tells her side looking back.

Lily moved to Adams seven years ago after her forest-ranger mother found a job that would enable them to escape a bad situation in Seattle. (In one funny moment, when Lily’s mother is telling her about the move, she says she has one question: Where are the White Mountains?)

Asher and Lily are dating and are finding in each other kindred souls, as both are being raised by single mothers and have fraught relationships with their fathers. (Asher meets his dad surreptitiously once a month at a Chili’s in Massachusetts.) They reach the point in their volatile but passionate relationship where they are confiding their deepest secrets and on the verge of becoming intimate.

Soon after, Lily is found dead, and when police arrive, Asher is standing by her body. Despite his insistence that he wasn’t responsible, Asher is charged with first-degree murder. As we work our way to the apex of the trial, we learn more and more about both families’ backgrounds — the difficulties of both the mothers and their children.

Aside from the occasional stilted recitation of bee facts, Mad Honey is skillfully plotted, and Picoult and Boylan have created deeply sympathetic characters who are intelligent and interesting; it’s impossible not to care about them. They authors are, however, a bit slow getting to the point; it’s as if when divvying up the writing tasks, they dispensed with the pesky business of editing and decided they would both write the equivalent of a full book, readers be damned.

But Mad Honey also has an underlying purpose, which is to pull back the curtain on a certain divisive social issue and give readers a glimpse into the humanity at the center of it. I can’t say any more without spoilers. Of course, the biggest spoiler of all is that we know Lily dies at the start, and so there’s no happy ending to be had. But it is not an unhopeful novel, nor depressing; it is saturated more with love than with cruelty. And the ending is as perfect as it can get under the circumstances.

How this book came to be is a story in itself. As Boylan tells in the authors’ notes, she dreamed the basic plot of this book, and that she had co-written it with Picoult. Then she tweeted about her dream, and Picoult reached out, asked what the book was about, then said, “Let’s do it.” (The two had read each other’s work, but never communicated before.) So it’s hard to be too critical of a book that seems to have sprung fully formed from the universe; it was clearly a book meant to be. Picoult says she expects to get hate mail about it, but it won’t be from beekeepers clearly. And for those who just can’t get enough of the sweetness, there are a handful of character-connected recipes at the end of the book. For those of you who like this sort of thing, you’ll love it. For those who don’t, wait for the movie. B+