Review: The Red House by Mark Haddon

The loss of a parent is bad enough but that same life-altering event is the driving force behind a family reunion set in the Welsh countryside in the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye. Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his sister Angela and her family to his vacation home. Angela and Richard have just buried their last parent, their mother, and emotions remain raw. For the past few years, it has been Angela who has been taking care of the dying mother even if Richard foots the bills for a nursing home. Even without these specific animosities, Richard and Angela don’t exactly share a harmonious sibling relationship. The families they have made with spouses and kids, therefore, remain strangers to each other.

As they get together for a week, both sets of families--Richard’s and Angela’s--are hoping to get to know each other a little better. Richard has a fairly new marriage to Louisa and is still unsure as to how to parent his teen stepdaughter, Melissa. All is not roses in Richard’s professional life either. He has a potential malpractice case on his hands and worry about the case spills over into his personal life as well. Over on the other side, Angela and her husband, Dominic, have reached a stasis in their marriage and are simply being “co-parents” to their children--teens Tim and Daisy (who has recently found God) and little Ben. Also, Angela continues to struggle with the loss of a child, Karen, nearly 18 years ago.

Over the course of the week, some ordinary and not-so-ordinary things happen that bring quiet revelations along with them. At the end of the week, the families have been altered in a strangely satisfying way and have learned to make peace with each other.

There are many family insights here but in the end, the story overall remains unresolved. Some family “secrets” even come across as mere cliches, made worse by everyone’s else’s predictable reactions to them.

Haddon has talent to waste and could have brought the family dynamics into sharper focus and crafted a more finely tuned story out of The Red House. There’s a very “been there, done that” kind of empathy that The Red House generates. After all, practically every one of us can relate to at least one aspect of the story. Yet since the story doesn’t really coalesce into a whole or come to any kind of closure, you begin to wonder at the point of it all. If we really wanted to just let family idiosyncrasies all hang loose, wouldn’t we simply revisit our annual Thanksgiving dinners?

Yet, in one sense, Haddon probably does have a point: Our family dinners do not come to a resolution either, do they? Just like in The Red House, an occasional grievance is aired and we move on, trying to make the best of every new day. After all, as Haddon asks, “Later, when parents fall from grace and become ordinary messed-up human beings and turn slowly from carers into people who must be cared for in their turn, who then will share those growing frustrations and pore over the million petty details of that long-shared soap opera carry that means nothing to others?” The answer, of course, is: we will. Haddon manages to show us that there is grace in our everyday failings. Is it enough to make The Red House a compelling read? Not quite. But it does make for a quick and breezy one.

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Review: Perla by Carolina de Robertis

More than thirty years ago, as part of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” close to 30,000 dissidents and other like-minded people simply disappeared as part of a massive state-sponsored program. During this cruel obliteration, children, too, were abducted, and those born to the disappeared were adopted into new families--entire generations of people torn from each other forcibly. These “disappeared” or “desaparecidos” form the central focus of Caroline de Robertis’s new novel, Perla.

The rest of my review is here.

Review: Canada by Richard Ford

Richard Ford's novel, Canada, is a book that reveals its spoilers early: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later," says Dell Parsons, the 60-something narrator of the story.

The rest of the review is at bookbrowse.com. 

Review: The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

The Lola Quartet by the immensely talented Emily St. John Mandel, might go down as one of the best captures of the malaise that attended the Great Recession of 2008. As St. John Mandel earlier novel, The Singer’s Gun, proved, she has a special talent for setting the mood and tone in a novel and she works that same magic here in a story that essentially is, above all else, the rootlessness of young adult life.

Gavin Sasaki is a young journalist in New York City at precisely the time when the newspaper industry is in deep decline. The axe has been falling on co-workers all around him and when he eventually gets found out for lies he has been systematically working into his stories, Gavin knows he too is on his last leg. Fired ingloriously from his job, Gavin’s last resort is to return to his hometown in Florida, where his sister Eilo is running a successful business negotiating the final sales of foreclosed homes.

Back in Florida, shortly after the sale of one such foreclosed home, Eilo happens to have taken a picture of a young girl who bears a striking resemblance to Gavin. This one picture brings back a whole host of memories for him. Gavin remembers his high school girlfriend, Anna Montgomery, and a rumor that she might have been pregnant before permanently moving away to be with her aunt in Georgia. Could this little girl whom Eilo spotted, then be his child? Armed with his journalist’s nose to sniff out a good story, Gavin is determined to find out. The problem is there are many in town who don’t share Gavin’s enthusiasm to ferret out the truth.

It turns out that Anna is in deep trouble having stolen a large sum of money from a drug dealer in Utah. She is on the run with help from a few of Gavin’s old high school friends. The chain of events that will eventually lead to murder all begins with one ill-timed photograph. Each person involved in the story reads that action differently and acts with the information he or she has. If there’s one problem in The Lola Quartet, it is that it gets hard to believe that so many men go to such extraordinary lengths to protect Anna. All in all though, the book is an incredibly taut sequence of events told breathlessly in the style that Emily St. John Mandel has effectively mastered. That The Lola Quartet also shines light on life’s early disillusionments is a bonus.


The Lola Quartet is also about the plod that attends daily life after high school, about dreams and dashed expectations. In one beautifully realized scene, a guitar hopeful from Gavin’s old high school worries he is not all that great and eventually just retreats back home to drugs and a mundane existence. “I miss everything about high school and I’m not the musician I thought I was, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, jazz has always been my life but now it’s slipping away from me and my talent isn’t going to be enough,” he worries. Any young adult who bumbles into college and life beyond, can totally relate to the cast of characters St. John Mandel sets out so beautifully in her new novel.

“The truth is we don’t all turn into the men we had hoped to become,” says a character in the book. As The Lola Quartet wonderfully shows, this much is certainly true. Of course things get even more dangerous when there is no clear plan sketched out--even for what you hope to become. As each one of the characters in The Lola Quartet realizes, when all one does is drift, the eventual stagnation that sets in can be stifling and merciless. 

Thank you to the publisher, Unbridled Books, for making a digital copy of the ARC available through Netgalley. Full Disclosure:  I follow the author on Twitter.

Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

  

Excerpt

Imagine the wonders of the kaleidoscope. While it is made up of many fractured, unruly and colorful segments, you can still hold it against the light, turn the wheel, and freeze one gorgeous pattern into place. These are precisely the kind of beautiful snapshots one is treated to while reading the fantastic new book by Francis Spufford, Red Plenty.  

The rest of the review is at Bookbrowse.

Review: By Blood by Ellen Ullman

Excerpt

One of life's many truths is that we're each the sum of our parts. It's not usually only nature or nurture that plays a role; it's both. Yet, what if you don't know one of the essential blocks of your character, you don't know who your parents are? It is this central question of identity that haunts a psychotherapy patient in Ellen Ullman's novel, By Blood.

The rest of my review is at Bookbrowse.

Review: From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarrry

Nearly five years ago, a British man of South Asian origin named Hemant Lakhani was arrested in an FBI sting operation, accused of selling arms that were to support Somali terrorist activities. At the time Lakhani argued that he was framed and his cause was taken up by prominent journalists including Amitava Kumar in his book, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm, a Tiny Bomb.” Despite an appeal, Lakhani was eventually convicted. Now, years later, a fictional character very similar to Lakhani, makes an appearance in Alex Gilvarray’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant.

Ahmed Lakhani is in the import-export business living in New York City--except nobody knows exactly what he imports and exports. What matters is that he has enough money to throw around, a fact that is especially appealing to a young immigrant from the Philippines, Boyet Ruben Hernandez.

Boy is a recent graduate from the Fashion Institute of Makati (FIM) from his native country (the institute, one assumes, is a riff off of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology) and arrives wide-eyed to America’s warm embrace. The young grad knows he has to earn his keep in his adopted country; for now he lives off a meager stipend his doctor parents send him monthly, taking odd jobs for the fashion designer Vivienne Cho while working on a line he hopes can land him a breakthrough at Fashion Week in Bryant Park. “I understood the force I was up against” Boy says, “One needed friends much more than lovers and enemies. This city was cutthroat. This city, crossed with the exclusivity of the fashion industry, was a closed network on new talent. This city wasn’t hard on its newcomers--it was goddamn relentless.”

Boy somehow manages to make a small break through this “closed network”--his name gets mentioned in a fashion magazine as an up-and-coming designer. The two-line blurb is just barely enough to get him noticed but Boy works this to his advantage eventually getting ready to launch his line of women’s fashion, (B)oy.

At precisely the time when Boy is running out of money and when he needs to take his work to the next level, he runs into Ahmed Lakhani, a resident in his apartment building in Brooklyn. Lakhani, a Canadian Muslim, is smitten by Boy’s talent and slowly wheedles his way into Boy’s good graces. It’s uncomfortable--Boy can smell lies when he sees them and Lakhani is no angel, but when Lakhani offers to pump a huge sum of money into his fashion business as an angel investor, well, the temptation proves to be too fierce. Boy accepts, falling into a business relationship with Lakhani. “If, in my desperate state, I had to choose between finding the location of a deadly time bomb and saving my fashion label from complete demise, I would choose my label--my dream, my work, my livelihood,” Boy reasons. As most others would.

Trouble strikes when Lakhani is arrested in a few months on charges of supplying Somali terrorists with bomb-making materials. This is of course the Bush era of hyper-vigilance so the wide net that gets cast after Lakhani’s arrest also traps Boy who gets deported to Guantanamo.

The novel tells Boy’s story through segments set in New York alternating with the present time when he finds himself in “no man’s land.” Brief flashbacks to his childhood in the Philippines also populate these pages. Gilvarray expertly melds truth and facts (there are many footnotes that provide a sort of fact check to parts of the story) and the novel is an interesting experiment in how to tell a gripping story.

Boyet Hernandez comes across as a likeable everyday Joe who just happened to be caught up in a wider web beyond his wildest imagination. Nevertheless the early parts of the book set in New York seem out of place. We know what happened to Boy eventually yet the wry, la-di-da tone of the “fashion terrorist” seems out of pitch for what is to follow. Even as we read the parts set in Guantanamo one is never quite sure what to make of his experience because the light-hearted tone seems a little misplaced.

The last 100 pages or so are the best parts of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. Here’s where the book turns darker, when the gravity of Boy’s situation hits in full force. In the end, this debut novel is a strong look at the darker side of the war on terror. It shows just how easy it is to get caught in it and just how hard it is to leave. Your heart goes out to Boy when he worries, “Maybe it’s like the Qur’an says: I was placed on this earth to be tried with afflictions.” 

Thanks to the publishers for a galley of the book through Netgalley.