Review: Skylight Confessions by Alice Hoffman

She was young enough not to see a glass as half empty or half full, but as a beautiful object into which anything might be poured. She whispered a bargain, as though her whispering could make it true.
Skylight Confessions – Alice Hoffman

Every time I pick up an unread Hoffman novel I am amazed by her skill with the written word. The way she can form a sentence, twist it into something ethereal and beautiful, it always leaves me breathless. I always feel cleansed and well-read after a Hoffman novel, as though the books I finished leading up to her works were trivial and here is something of worth to spend my time on.

Following four generations of the Moody family who live in the Glass Slipper in suburban Connecticut, Skylight Confessions begins with Arlyn Singer and John Moody as they meet under strange circumstances and form a bond that will affect their children and their grandchildren to come. Under the glass roof and clear walls of their house, secrets are kept and hidden. Mysterious occurrences are swept under the rug, and lives are forever changed by the decisions of others. Following the Moody children into their separate lives as they’re drawn back to the Glass Slipper, Hoffman tells a truly character driven story, so intent are we upon Arlyn and John, and the residents of the glass house that we easily forget there’s a world beyond them.

Skylight Confessions contains the usual hint of magic that Hoffman is known for, but the writing is a little less sad than the previous works I’ve read by her. Or maybe I’m just accustomed to her tone now. The story of the Moody children is beautiful and touching, and in such a short book it’s amazing that we come to know them as well as we do.

Another remarkable Hoffman with all my favorite trademarks, empathetic with a hint of magical realism. All in all, a fabulous book and another great addition to my library. Highly recommended to those who have not read an Alice Hoffman novel yet.

5 stars

Review: The Marriage Artist by Andrew Winer

“You live your life with the hope of becoming someone’s memory,” Herr Pick says with a snickering sullenness. “Then it turns out you will have to keep theirs.”
The Marriage Artist – Andrew Winer

The narrative of Andrew Winer’s The Marriage Artist is akin to two train tracks heading toward each other and meeting at a final destination. Imagine watching these trains from the sky, see them converge, but sit back and enjoy the view. Look at the landscape, watch the passing trees, and eavesdrop on fellow travelers’ conversations and stories which only make sense once both trains have pulled into the station.

Track one is the story of art critic Daniel Lichtmann, whose wife Aleksandra plunged to her death alongside Benjamin Wind, one of Daniel’s favorite artists. Whether his wife and the artist were lovers is unknown. What she was doing on the roof of his building, and whether the two jumped to their deaths by choice or force, also remains a mystery. Daniel searches for answers and receives unexpected information in the form of an elderly wheelchair-bound man who attends both funerals.

Track two starts in 1928 Vienna when young Josef Pick discovers his artistic talent and trains with his grandfather to paint Jewish marriage contracts called ketubah. This track follows young Josef through his teenage and early adult years, during the tumultuous start of World War II and the purging of Jewish citizens from Vienna, until it meets with Daniel Lichtmann’s story in the present day.

At times both sweeping and engaging, here is an author who knows his tools and how to use them. Winer’s prose ranges from lilting and poetic to stream-of-consciousness. Emotional and poignant, The Marriage Artist is a vast and tremendous dramatic novel of history and heartache. Of the bonds that bring people together and the devices that tear us apart.

Not knowing where the plot is taking us, the reader has no choice but to read onward, trusting in the author to reveal his secrets. And reveal he does. Winer selectively shares bits of historical ingredients to define the puzzle of present day, piecing each corner edge to its partner. Only when the whole puzzle is complete can we truly see and appreciate the splendor of the picture. Beautifully wrought and imagined, The Marriage Artist is remarkably unlike anything I’ve read in quite some time.

5 stars

(I received an advance copy from the publisher)

Review: By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.
By Nightfall – Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham’s latest book since Flesh and Blood (2007) is a literary internal monologue of sorts. A book about that strange and complicated world of Adulthood. A book that exposes our fears through its words, but charmingly underestimates itself.

Told in a close-third-person narrative, we follow Peter Harris and his wife Rebecca as their every day routine is upended by the reappearance of Rebecca’s nomad younger brother, Mizzy. Peter is our main character, and the beauty and the crux of Cunningham’s novel is that for as much as we want to like Peter, he makes it impossible.

We dislike Peter, but we understand him, and eventually, we feel sorry for him; for during all the pages leading up to the end, he’s tried to justify his actions to us, only to be foiled by fate himself. He’s the victim in the end. He fell into waywardness by claiming it all happened by “accident.” Only knowing it was happening made it not an accident, and in the end he is exposed.

We struggle to like Peter and his flaws and issues because for better or worse, he is our information source. We’re in his head, his thoughts, his weaknesses, his poses and postures. We know his script and his stage directions. It becomes difficult to tell if we don’t like him because that’s the way he is, or because Cunningham’s writing is flawed, thereby making the book flawed.  By Nightfall is one long (short) existentialist angst-ridden character-driven novel. Like he writes, Cunningham seems to be “still working something out” with this novel, and that’s the either the brilliance or the downfall of it. There’s a chance that it’s all one big cliche. I can’t tell. By Nightfall is like a work of art that you have to think about and return back to many times in order to understand, but understanding isn’t meant to happen, so it never does.

Did I love it as much as I loved The Hours? In the end, yes I think I did, but for very different reasons.

5 stars

*Update 10/23/2010: After thinking over this book for the last couple days I’ve realized there’s something unsettling about By Nightfall that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s the reasons I say it’s hard to like Peter; it’s the reason I think this novel is either amazing or amazingly cliche. For those of you who loved The Hours and think that’s why you might like to read this one, start it with an open mind. It’s nothing like The Hours, but that doesn’t make it bad. Something has to be said for the fact that it’s still got me thinking about it four days later, afterall.

(I received an advance copy from Barbara on the Bookcase)

Review: Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye

When Noah and his sister were young children their lives were forever changed when their father’s ore ship burned and sunk in the tormented waters of Lake Superior. Though their father survived, much of him was left behind when the ship went down, and Noah’s relationship with his father would never be the same. Decades later, when Noah is grown man with a wife living in Boston, his father becomes ill and Noah faces a tough choice: should he go to his father’s side? The man who shut him out and all but left him so many years ago? Journeying to the northern Minnesota town of his youth, Noah faces more than just his father when he arrives. History comes back as Noah confronts the man who changed so many years ago.

Safe from the Sea is heartbreaking and sad, but also cathartic. Noah must deal with many issues by choosing to face his father again: guilt, blame, and a deeply rooted anger. The bond of family, for better or worse, makes us who we are, and Noah is the man he is today because of his relationship with his father. This is the story of a man facing his past, for both Noah and his father.

It’s hard for me to review this novel because I’m torn in two directions. First is my loyalty to my own past, which also came from Minnesota. Geye’s writing of the north and the harsh winters carries true emotional weight. Likewise, my whole family is also in Minnesota, while I am also in Boston, much like Noah and his family are parted. Though I didn’t leave under the same circumstances and return often, the bond Noah has to Minnesota touched my heart.

The other direction I am pulled in is that of a reviewer analyzing a novel. It’s not because this is Geye’s first novel that I feel why I do, because I read many first novels, but the writing of Safe from the Sea didn’t grab me the way I wish it had. The topics did, the scenes and places, but the dialogue felt forced, and parts of Noah’s relationship with his father and wife seemed contrived. Here is a situation where a man is facing the person who destroyed him and tore him apart. I see the word “anger” but I do not feel it. I see a scene of “longing” and “regret” but do not feel those sensations. There was more true emotion in the description of snow and ice than in the setup of Noah and his relationships, and that’s the one fallback of the book.

3 1/2 stars

(I received an advance copy from the publisher)

Teaser Tuesdays: Geoff Shandler’s Slate Diary

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. My teaser this week comes not from a book, but rather the five-day journal entry Geoff Shandler did for Slate.com which I recently read for homework. (The full article can be found here.)

Public mention is, for a book editor, like sunlight to a vampire. We don’t want our names on the jackets. We don’t want to go on television. If we’ve been noticed, we’ve failed. An editor is the shy girl in the back of the classroom. A writer is the shy girl with dyed green hair in the back of the classroom.

I love this quote and the idea of the difference between being an editor and being a writer. Many of us book bloggers are writers outside of our websites, and all of us are editors by the mere fact that we sit down and type up our thoughts on each book we read. Which do you most identify with?

Review: The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison

I had a certain beauty, but it wasn’t delicate. You didn’t want to protect me; you wanted to see if I would break. 
The Gin Closet - Leslie Jamison

Sometimes you pick up a book and it ends up being one of those truly amazing pieces of writing, the kind you wish you could have created when you were in your early twenties with college-angst. The kind professors yearn for and literary critics swoon over. Leslie Jamison makes me green with writers-envy. Her ability to take a string of simple words and turn them into a profound sentence blew me away on (what felt like) every page.

On the material surface, The Gin Closet is a novel about two women, one trying to find herself, one trying to survive. When Stella learns she has an estranged aunt she packs up her meaningless New York City existence and moves to the desert to help this broken woman cope with alcoholism and loneliness. Tilly is a mess, she seems to only hurt the people around her and has been that way she since she was young. She hasn’t had an easy life so when Stella turns up Tilly surfaces from her gin-induced waking-coma to think of the life she could possibly have, a life that means something, a life near her son in San Francisco. Together, Stella and Tilly embark on a trip; not a journey to somewhere even though they have a destination, more a sort of movement, fumbling many times along the way.

Told from both women’s first-person points-of-view, Stella is damaged, and Tilly is lost. The dueling narratives juxtapose these women, and give the reader a unique sense of being each of them, as well as watching each of them. This is a novel about family paradigms, but more specifically, female family paradigms: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, or a sister; what we do to our family and what is done to us. Jamison draws a true, poignant portrait of the dichotomy between female relations.

The Gin Closet is about the things we live with and survive through. How we perceive the one body we are given and what we choose to do with, and to, our life. What definitions do we place upon ourself? Anorexic, Alcoholic, Loner, Dreamer? What do we make of the people around us? Stella expects to be used, expects to be abandoned, but she is hardened and does the same to others. Tilly pushes everyone away until she decides to pull them close, but too close.

A beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of the female soul, a novel with an exquisite use of language, Leslie Jamison’s debut is remarkable in its simplistic truth. She doesn’t pander to the audience, she doesn’t mince words, she’s obvious but understated. Like Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, or Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, The Gin Closet is unsettling but utterly remarkable.

5 stars

(I received this book from the author for review)

Review: The Life O’Reilly by Brian Cohen

Nick O’Reilly is a bit stuck in his current place in life. Partner at a prestigious law firm, surrounded by luxuries only a large pay check can buy, with little free time, but at least one good friend to sympathize with, Nick knows his life is incomplete without a wife and family, but he can’t seem to find the time, or the person, he wants to make a future with. But then, as a PR stunt, he’s forced to take a pro bono case and meets Dawn and her son Jordan. The victim of domestic abuse, Dawn is looking to extricate herself from her horrible marriage. She just wants to be safe with her son, away from her husband, and happy in a new life. With a near instantaneous attraction, Nick tries to keep things professional with Dawn, but their meetings slowly evolve into more romantic occasions.

This is the story of life. Nick and Dawn face trials and tribulations in their relationship, and not everything ends happily-ever-after. Life happens, sickness happens, and this novel is the story of a couple whose love bears all. The concept is good, similar to a Nicholas Sparks novel, and the characters are vivid. But the words didn’t jump from the page and grab at my heartstrings. This is a story I can believe would actually happen and I wanted to be fully invested in Dawn and Nick’s relationship, but the narrative felt a bit dry, less like a love story and more like a deposition.

In the end though, The Life O’Reilly is a love story; one we don’t often see every day. Dawn and Nick found each other when they most needed to, and through good times and very bad times, the power of their love is a message of the beauty of humanity and the things we can do for each other.

3 stars

(I received this book from the author)