Alice Sebold, Debra Dean, and Elizabeth Berg

Occasionally, one of my reader friends will ask me why it is that I seem to review only books that I think are good, and my response is something like, “Well, there are so many really good books and so little time to talk about them, why should I bother to review the bad or the not so good.” Add to this that so much about our own histories goes into the reading of a book; so much is determined by our moods, our preoccupations, our comportment. Quite good books can appear otherwise if we are not ready for them as readers. At any rate, today I am going to depart from my customary habit and talk briefly about three books: one quite good one, one that caught my attention but did not leave the lasting impression I usually insist on for reviews, and one that has gotten lots of attention but that I think is not really deserving.

Let me begin with the book that has received lots of attention, but that I found to be quite unconvincing and strained. The author is Alice Sebold, and the name of the book is The Almost Moon. I’m sure lots of you have read Sebold’s previous best seller, The Lovely Bones. That book, allegedly penned by a dead girl who was the victim of a horrible kidnapping and rape, strained the suspension of disbelief so important when reading fiction, but in the end I was willing to bend a long way as a reader, especially since I had reason to believe that autobiographical events in Sebold’s life had prompted her to write the book. Even in that book, however, the events became more and more fantastical, finally to the point of being downright goofy as the dead girl witnessed and in some ways even guided the investigation of her own disappearance. Sebold’s new bestseller, The Almost Moon, strains the reader’s credulity almost from the beginning. Again, the theme is an important one: How does one deal humanely, compassionately, with a parent who is suffering from dementia? How much must one cease living one’s own life in order to care for a parent who is in almost all ways no longer really there? Sebold certainly does manage to present a vivid picture of the sorts of sacrifices and heartbreak involved in such care, but I have to say that I have had many friends who have been in situations as daunting (even more daunting) and who have done a much better job of coping. However, it is not the success or failure of the daughter, Helen, to cope with her mother that makes this book so unconvincing, it is simply the sequence of events described. My conviction is that Sebold could have presented the same dilemmas, raised the same sorts of issues about just how much of one’s life must be sacrificed to others, and yet not forced the reader to believe such an unlikely sequence of events. In the end, I felt that reading the book gave me a somewhat better understanding of the nearly impossible demands some of my friends have experienced in dealing with relatives, but I became increasing frustrated with both Sebold’s lead character and with Sebold herself. One reviewer calls the book “compulsively readable,” but I felt mostly relief when I turned the final page.

The second book, Debra Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad, is also the story of a woman who is quite rapidly losing her sense of a continuous self due to Alzheimer’s. However, unlike Sebold’s book, this one is utterly believable and told with a tenderness and compassion that carries the reader along, or, more precisely, carries the reader back and forth between a girlhood in Leningrad, with the German army poised on the outskirts, and an adult woman at a family gathering with husband and children hovering around her, trying desperately to believe that she is the woman she has always been. In fact, in her own words: “It is as though she has been transported into a two-dimensional world, a book perhaps, and she exists only on this page. When the page turns, whatever was on the previous page disappears from her view.
The young woman in Leningrad is involved in a hurried and desperate attempt to save, hide, and store the artwork in a large museum before the German’s steal or destroy all of it, including the Madonnas for whom the book is named. Now, although a grown women with children and grandchildren, she sees herself as that girl wandering the halls of that museum, memorizing for some future time the positions of pieces of art that are being packed and stowed away. She, Marina, is more often there in Leningrad than in her home in America. While we all in some sense live in the past, present, and future all at once, Marina is, as it were, taken in by each new scene, really living it, and jarred back to a present that is in most ways less real than the past she has just left. This story is told with such wonderful detail and in such fluid prose that it is hard to believe this is a first novel. Although I read it some months ago, it remains vivid and fresh for me, and I mean to read whatever else this woman writes.

Finally, let me say just a few words about a not new novel by Elizabeth Berg; although I love her writing and read up her novels as soon as I find them, this 2000 novel somehow escaped my attention until now. The title of the book is Open House, and it deserves a review all its own. It is only because I have talked to you so often (and so recently) about Berg’s other novels that I choose only to give passing mention to this one.

Samantha, Sam to most, is almost surprised when her husband, David, announces one morning that he no longer wants to live with her and their eleven year old son. Shocked, stunned, and yet also simply hearing what she already knows: “You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and you are staring at nothing: he is gone before he is gone.”

At least for this reader, Berg writes always from a position of knowledge. She describes what she has seen, what she has experienced, what she has understood, and with a prose as witty and refreshing as any writer I can think of. This is clearly a feminist piece, and yet obviously told through the eyes of a woman who loves men and who understands them. As always, she writes of real relationships, real hardships, real life, and yet the reader is carried along effortlessly, eagerly. She instructs as well as entertains, and this book is simply another reminder that I want to read her up.

And there it is, an excellent book, a good one, and a hot best-seller that is not so good.

The Art of Mending by Elizabeth Berg

Some authors are very good at describing action, or global political events; others shine when writing first person, in-depth psychological analysis, still others when writing as a kind of detached observer of the lives of others. I suppose I gravitate towards the writer of small events, ordinary lives, successful or failed relationships. Elizabeth Berg fits in this last category. Her characters are often ordinary to the point of being mundane, and one gets very little sense of the larger world or of political strife when reading her books. Instead, Berg is a writer of the heart, and especially of families and of all the joys and miseries that are to be found just below the surface of family life. Today I want to talk about one of her most recent novels, The Art of Mending, which, as the title suggests, is about the deep and long-lasting injuries that can come out of family life and the possibility of mending even the deepest of wounds.

Whether we like to believe it or not, there are some children who are not really liked by one or both of their parents, and who may be constant sources of (perhaps guilty) irritation to their siblings. Caroline, the youngest of three children in this little book, is just such a child. A beautiful child, in fact the only one of the three who rivals the striking beauty of their mother, but one who seems almost always unhappy, troubled and needy. When the three children return home because of health issues with their much loved father, Caroline, on the edge of a second divorce and launched into therapy, decides that it is finally time to reveal to her siblings the causes of her lifelong depression. Laura, the oldest of the three children, is the first to hear of some of the abuse that Caroline claims to have suffered at the hands of their mother. At first, so used to her little sister’s complaints, her unhappiness, she is suspicious of Caroline’s claims; they are, she decides, at least hyperbolic, and at worst downright fabrications. Steve, the brother and middle child who dislikes emotional excess in any form, simply scoffs at his sister. How could such events have happened with no one else noticing? And if they really happened, why did Caroline tell no one at the time?

Laura simply wants to return home to her happy family, her supportive husband, well adjusted children, and her tidy little business of making quilts. Still, she cannot quite simply write off Caroline’s stories; she begins to look carefully at old family snapshots, the grim face of young Caroline in even the happiest of family scenes. She realizes that her mother has always been somewhat cool physically towards her children, while their father has been the primary source of what might be called emotional nurturance. He has idealized their mother, nearly worshiped her, and it is always he who reaches out to touch his wife, rarely if ever the other way around. Yes, her mother is self-absorbed, certainly not a toucher, but an abuser?

I have no intention of revealing the plot of this novel other than to say that we can never really understand how deep and long-lasting the wounds of family strife can be, especially for young children so in need of love and reassurance. This is not a novel about sexual abuse, and in so many ways the events that are finally uncovered are not of the sensationalized sort we see in the movies or read about in daily papers. But whatever the actual events, even if they seem not so terrible, not so significant, the effects can be devastating.

Quite apart from Caroline’s story and the bit of mending that is done in this novel, Berg also tells us a lot about how and why some marriages succeed. While none of the characters in this book is wholly likeable, I find it interesting that it is two of the male characters who are most sympathetically portrayed. Laura’s husband, Pete, is both physically and emotionally accessible to his wife and children. Yes, he sometimes offers a bit too much advice when what is really needed is simply a listening and sympathetic ear, but the advice is usually good. And her father, while he may at times allow his adoration for his wife to occlude his vision concerning her treatment of the children, especially Caroline, is nonetheless a good partner, a warm and attentive father, and a simply good man.

I suppose one thing that troubles me about all of Berg’s novels is how insular her characters are. We hear nothing of the larger world; everyone is working, everyone has enough to eat, a home to live in, a car to drive. She does not pretend to be a political writer, but there are ways of writing novels about family life that reflect the larger world. Carol Shields and Alice Munro certainly manage to place their families in the context of a troubled and frightening world.

Indeed, in an afterward conversation with the author, Berg refers specifically to Alice Munro and tries to say just why she finds Munro to be such a fine writer.

I’m not even sure I can articulate this, but I’ll try. There is such unadorned confidence in her writing. She knows that what she’s talking about is interesting. It just is. It’s not an epic trip around the world. It’s not political, except in the domestic sense. But there is such a keen understanding of psychology in her stories and such sympathy and empathy. She is one of the few writers who get me right away and don’t let me go. There is a precision of language. There is a beauty, a great, great beauty in the language, but mostly I think it’s just that she understands people—their foibles, their humor, their sinfulness, their longing, their inabilities and their great abilities. She’s like a little god. She’s a literary aphrodisiac.

While I would never compare Elizabeth Berg to Alice Munro, I think what she says about Munro is true of Berg as well. Munro writes almost only short stories, Berg writes what I would call little novels. They are not great novels nor do they have grand themes, and yet there is a beauty to her writing and depth to her insights. I often save Berg novels that I pick up for one of those times when I’m having trouble getting into novels, fearing that novel-reading may finally have lost its grip on me, because, as she says of Munro, “she gets me right away and won’t let go.” And while I would not call her a little god among writers, I might put her in the highest rank of the angels.

Range of Motion by Elizabeth Berg

I want to talk to you this morning about another little city book. I mean by that expression, a book short enough and engaging enough to be read by busy city workers in a few days rather than a few weeks or months. I have talked about this author before, Elizabeth Berg. The title of the little book I am reviewing today is Range of Motion.

As I have mentioned before, I prefer talking to you about books that are current to me and about us, here, now. Were this not my guiding principle, I may not have discussed this book today, because I do not think it is a great book, and there are plenty of great books I might have chosen instead. Still, I think the underlying message of this book is an important one, and the author is so emotionally astute that one always gets considerable insights that are simply asides to the main story.

Iris Murdoch, one of the truly great novelists and philosophers of the last half of the 20th century likes to remind us over and over that the world is chancy and huge and that there is no external telos—no human independent purpose for human existence. As maddening as it can be for a reader, Murdoch often takes us through some long and painful development of a character, brings that character very close to some sort of world-shaking realization, some momentous reconciliation, and then a page or two later, allows our emerging hero to die due to a fall on the ice, a traffic accident, or some other whim of chance. And while the reader may be crushed by the chance turn of events, and mad at the author for letting it happen, Murdoch’s intentions are very deliberate; she wants her novels to mirror life, and life is full of chance turns, of what is so often called luck. As the current (and I think excellent movie) “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” reminds us, if we do not believe in luck, that is often enough simply an indication that we are experiencing a run of good luck, and we have become so used to it that we think somehow we have earned it, that we deserve it, that it is meant to be. But nothing is meant to be, and the test of our characters will occur when our luck changes, when we are faced with some sudden illness or death of a loved one.

Range of Motion is about just such a chance event. A young couple with two young children who, unlike many of us, is not only happy but aware of their happiness and of their luck in love has it all tumble down in a moment. The husband is struck by ice falling off of a roof, and from that moment, the lives of all four change drastically. In a coma that it seems unlikely he will ever awake from, his wife, Lainey, visits him daily, first in the hospital, and then in a long-care nursing home, trying to bring to him each day some part of his life that might miraculously awaken him from his long sleep. Most of the staff at the nursing home laugh at her feeble efforts; they have seen too many cases of this sort, watched confidence change to hope, hope to despair.

On the jacket of this book there is a review that calls it the love story of the year, and I suppose one could see it that way. But I doubt that is Berg’s intention. Yes, Lainey loves her husband, Jay, and continues to love him even as he lies silent and helpless. But she also wonders if she should go on hoping, if she should keep her children hoping. Is it a favor to them to keep her doubts to herself? Shouldn’t she at least attempt to start some new life, if not for herself, then for her children? And how could this have happened, to her, to them? How could she have allowed it, how could he have deserted them? And on and on with the unanswerable questions, while in her lucid moments, she sees it for what it is, simple chance. She and her children do not deserve the loss any more than they deserved the happiness that had before.

Although I have no way of knowing whether Berg has ever read Murdoch, one could easily believe that she has taken this theme of the huge and chancy world laid out by Murdoch and decided to do a kind of phenomenology of luck, show just how chance plays itself out in the lived-life of some particular family. This particular story reminding us all as readers not to be smug, not to suppose so quickly or so easily that those who are less fortunate somehow deserve their misfortune, that they have somehow fallen from grace. Our protection, our safety-net, is an illusion; we are only a chunk of ice, a traffic accident, a virus away from pain and death and hopeless despair.

Of course, I have no intention of giving away any of the particulars of the story, and even in what I quote from the book, I will quite intentionally omit any parts that give away the outcome. But don’t expect a good outcome, either in your own life or in the lives of these characters. Chance is real, destiny is an illusion. But let me have Lainey (and I am supposing Berg) speak for herself in the Epilogue:

I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where [gifts are as accidental as losses], where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint--I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth. ... I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.

Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg

I want to talk to you this morning about a wonderful little book by Elizabeth Berg entitled, Talk Before Sleep. I think that Berg and another woman novelist, Joanna Trollope, are the current masters of the short novel. This one is perfect for an end of winter weekend read, and the impact of the novel will be far greater if you can read it in a sitting or two.

This is a novel about a woman who is dying of cancer and about the incredible group of women who gather around her to care for her and to celebrate their unity, their family. Of course, it is not a happy novel, but it is incredibly uplifting and optimistic. We are, after all, all of us situated towards death; this is, indeed, one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human. How we deal with our deaths and the deaths of our loved ones, and how our loved ones are able to deal with our deaths, these are the crucial issues. This group of women friends, this family, is just the sort that all of us would love to have, and I at least, would like to think that I could conduct myself with the attention and compassion towards my loved ones that these women display to each other. Though I have to admit straight out that I don’t think I could do it. Either because of weakness or self absorption or both, I think I could not be present in the ways that these women are for one another.

This is not a male bashing book, but it is very much a book about relationships between women and about suspicions that I think many (even most?) women have about the ability of men to remain present and open in situations that necessarily involve a lot of pain.

Ruth, the women who is dying of cancer, often represents the most extremely skeptical view of male-female relationships (though she, like the other women, also talks openly and honestly about her need of men, her love of men, even her mistakes in having separated from men). In one of her earliest conversations with Ann, the narrator and one of three or four main characters, the following exchange occurs. Ann has told her husband that she is going off with Ruth, first to the fabric store, but then elsewhere. His response, though good natured, is that she should stay gone a long time. Ann remarks to Ruth that he was both kidding and not, “... assuming a man’s usual position of benign inscrutability.” Ann goes on to say that they have been having minor tiffs almost every weekend because she wants to go places, and he wants to stay home and relax. A common enough domestic problem, insists Ann, but also troubling and seeming symptomatic of something deeper, something more indelible—that it seemed almost as if they did not like one another on some fundamental level. Ruth’s reply is slightly flippant, but serious nonetheless:

“It’s not just husbands and wives,” she said. “Men just can’t like women. Even if they wanted to like us—which they don’t—they’re too jealous. They want to be like us, and they can’t be. And they know they need us more than we need them, and it drives them crazy. Much of this, of course, is subconscious.” Then, looking at me, “It’s true!”

I quote this exchange not because it is typical of the book. The hyperbole is intentional, and yet it does express what amounts more to a fear the women share than a conviction. Indeed, this same women, Ruth, when she later gets the chance to reunite with a childhood sweetheart, grasps at the chance. And even when she sees how it troubles her faithful women caregivers, how her very intimacy with this man seems to distance her from her true family, she persists. “I can’t help it,” she exclaims, “I like men to like me.” Indeed, she complains with some bitterness to Ann that the admiration (even envy) she has gotten from all of the women is this circle of friends for having left her financially secure home, her dependable and faithful husband, has sometimes been a burden. That she is tired of being the model of the independent woman, of acting out the fantasy that all of the women in the group have.

Ann, like the other women, admires her beautiful and independent friend Ruth, and understands that Ruth is the catalyst for all sorts of fundamental existential questions. Reflecting on a particularly wonderful and troubling meeting with Ruth in which the two women flirt with sexual longing that lies mostly unacknowledged between them:

“I saw that every person is a multifaceted and complex being, worthy of respectful exploration and discovery; that this longing we can’t name and try to cure with relationships might only be us, wanting to know all of our own selves. I felt like I was starting to learn, and I sort of whooped a little in happiness ...”

From what I have said so far, you may take this to be a somber and serious and sad book. In fact, in spite of dealing with dying and inevitable death, it is a humorous and even playful book most of the time. The scenes of the women friends gathered together as they care for their friend are funny and insightful, even frolicking. They recall for each other first dates and early, fumbling gropings—exchange stories about men’s almost unbelievable fascination with breasts. They make food for each other, eat piles of take-out, drink and laugh and cry.

I don’t want to overburden this fine little book with commentary. Let me end with one more quote that I think gets to at least one of the major themes. Ann and Ruth are about to go out looking at cemeteries, sharing even this final bit of preparation for Ruth’s immanent death. Ann is wondering how Ruth’s mother, already dead, would handle this scene, watching her daughter with her best friend, choosing a burial sight. Ann reflects:

“I know if Ruth’s mother were alive, she would handle this, draw from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with. She would wear clothes whose very smell comforted Ruth, she would put on an apron and make her soup and butter her toast and help her to walk to the bathroom when she needed it; and when things turned the worst, she would not leave. Women do not leave situations like this: we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, ‘What do you need? Tell me what you need and by God I will do it.’ I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.”

This is a wonderful novel about the friendship and camaraderie of women. You will see women from your own lives as you read it.

Joy School by Elizabeth Berg

I want to talk to you this morning about a delightful little book by Elizabeth Berg entitled, Joy School. Last June, I reviewed another little book of hers, The Pull of the Moon. That novel is about a grown woman who runs away from home, not because she is abused or unloved by her husband, not because she is unsatisfied with her adult children, but simply because she feels she has never been afforded the chance to discover who she is. That book was such a joy to read that I felt somehow that it may not deserve a review all by itself, so I included two other lovely novels about what it means to be a woman in this culture. Looking back, I realize that Pull of the Moon did deserve its own review, and that good books can be short, and they can by happy, or, at any rate, need not be unremittingly sad. Both of these books are what I call ‘quick hitters’; Berg seems to be the master of the two hundred page novel. Just right for one, long single sitting, and the two books together perfect for a long weekend of reading.

Joy School just recently came out in a paperback edition, and let me say a word here about the bargain of remaindered hardbounds. When a new paperback edition is put on the market, it is a common practice for bookstores to remainder their hard bound editions (knowing how hard they will be to sell once the paperback edition is out). The amazing thing is that the remaindered hardbacks often sell for less than half the price of the new paperback edition; such was the case with this Berg novel. I was actually carrying the paperback around the bookdstore, unable to resist any Berg novel, when I thought to check the remainders table, and sure enough, there it was for the bargain price of $3.50—considerably less than half the price of the new paperback. I often get my entire summer reading stack either by purchasing used books or remaindered hardbacks, an important consideration given the price of new books these days.

Joy School belongs in the genre of coming of age novels. What is amazing about this book is that Berg is able to say a lot about just what it means to come of age, what it means to love, by covering a very short period in one girl’s life between the end of her twelfth year and the beginning of her thirteenth. We who are a long way from our teens tend to forget just how intense life can be for such ‘children’, and we also tend to write off their loves, especially their disappointments in love, as puppy-love. Insultingly, we inform them the loss only seems important now, this early intimation of love will pale once they grow up and find the real thing. Berg reminds us forcefully that early love is very much the real thing. It can be crushing or redeeming, but in either case it is real and needs to be taken seriously.

Because I am such a fan of these coming of age stories (especially those written by women, since women seem to me to be so much more emotionally intelligent in recalling these early experiences), I have read lots of them. Of course, many of these stories, even most of them, are sad—dismally sad. Think of Barbara Goudy’s Falling Angels, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out Out of Carolina; so many children abused, stilted, so many children having to parent their own parents. I have spent the last year reading and helping my very first girlfriend (now a woman in her 50’s) with her autobiographical novel, an important and wonderful book, but heart wrenching to read. Still perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever known, she was made into the girlfriend of her stepfather when she was only seven years old! The first person ever really to notice her, to ‘love’ her, he took advantage of her incredible need by raping and abusing her for the half dozen or so years until she reached puberty, and then he dropped her, cut her off from all affection, her punishment for his fears and guilt.

I bring these dismal but important stories up to make it clear that I am quite aware of just how unhappy many childhoods are, and I know we need to read these stories in spite of their sadness. We have to hear the stories of girls and women, learn over and over the price of sexism and oppression. But when the occasional happy story comes along, we need not feel guilty or lied to, we need not put aside these wonderful, if infrequent, tales. I remember from my youth being enchanted by Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (I think his best novel ever) and later by Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (which I think is her best work as well). Berg’s Joy School belongs in this group. Though this little girl loses her mother early and is raised by a caring but stern military father, and though she is never in one place long enough to really create family for herself, still she is resilient and tough and even optimistic. Her story could be one of the awful ones, for she falls in love with a young man in his early twenties, and it could well have happened that he would be or become the monster who takes advantage of the pure and innocent love that this girl directs towards him. Instead, because he really cares for her, really sees her, he responds as any adult should. He does not discount her love, does not make fun of it, but neither does he use it for some sort of sexual dalliance.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot of this beautiful little piece; Berg does set up some dramatic tension, and any reader sophisticated in the ways of this so often nasty world will be anxious, fearing a turn for the worst at any moment. What I loved about the book is Berg’s subtle but clear message that we can see other people if we try, that men can see beyond their genitals if they are willing, that they can refuse sexual opportunities, even sexual advances from girls and or women, without discounting or demeaning them. She shows us too that just as adults remain in so many ways the children that they were/are, so, too, children are in so many ways as perceptive and smart and ‘adult’ as their grown-up selves will be. In one passage, this young girl describes what it feels like to be attended to and taken care of by a person, to see and love the softness and warmth in a serious, grown-up man. He has just told her to button up her coat before taking her for a ride in his treasured vintage car.

He takes care of you, it is in his nature. If he came to a dying flower dropped on the street he would still move it so it wouldn’t get stepped on. I button the top button of my coat, which chokes me to death but who cares.

I love the voice of the narrator in this story. I am amazed, stunned, by Berg’s ability to adopt a convincing and consistent twelve-year-old voice without (at least to this reader) seeming trite or sentimental. The suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader that we are told is so essential to really good writing, is no effort here at all; I believe this girl, I believe in her lucidity, her goodness, her intense love, even her wisdom. I would like to have known her.

Pick up any of Berg’s novels; I think you will be glad you did.

Schlink, Smith, and Berg

I want to do something a little different today. I want to tell you very briefly about three different books—all short, and all well worth reading.

The first is a very current novel by a German author, Bernhard Schlink; the name of the novel is The Reader. Easily readable in a day, this little novel begins innocently enough with the story of a young German boy who is ill with hepatitis. Out of school for awhile but, under the direction of his doctor, told to take daily walks to regain his strength, this young man meets a woman who is more than twice his age who becomes his lover. It would be hard to say who seduces whom, but I found this part of the novel quite touching. The affection between the two seems obvious enough, and although the young man begins to feel some shame about having such an ‘old woman’ as his lover, the relationship between the two is both believable and somehow (to this reader at least) heartwarming.

However, after this more or less happy beginning, the woman disappears quite suddenly, the boy thinking that he has perhaps driven her away as he begins to feel ashamed of her when he is well enough to rejoin his school friends. Many years later, when he is involved in studies for his law degree, he encounters her again under surprising and exceptional circumstances. Along with several other women, his old lover reappears as a defendant in a war-crimes trial, accused not only of having been a guard at one of the concentration camps, but also of being complicit (either by neglect or otherwise) in the deaths of many women prisoners.

The moral dilemmas raised as this trial unwinds are gutwrenching, and not only the moral dilemmas of deciding on the culpability for the deaths of the women prisoners. I won’t say more than this here, because the unwinding of the plot is, in many ways, presented as a mystery. Schlink, himself a judge in Germany, has published mystery novels before this one. Here, he shows himself to be not merely an excellent writer, but also a person very able to handle complicated moral questions. This book was recently highlighted on Oprah’s book club, and should warn those of us who are too quick in rejecting her selections.

The second novel is one that has been out for over a decade and which my students had recommended to me on several different occasions. The author is Lee Smith, and the title is Family Linen. This novel is about the history of a family in a small southern town. A woman, Sybill, who is plagued with headaches that induce long periods of sleeplessness agrees finally to go to a hypnotist after her regular doctor despairs of curing her and suggests that she see a psychiatrist. Her friend, knowing that she does not want to see a psychiatrist, suggests a hypnotist instead.

... she didn’t want to go, both knew, to a psychiatrist. Sybill regarded her unconscious like she regarded the reproductive system, as a messy, murky darkness full of unexplained fluids and longings which she preferred not to know too much about. Except perhaps it was true, as Dr. Rowland apparently believed, that something down in there was out of whack....

And so begins what is a clever and often funny story that is also often profound. Like some of the best of women’s journal novels, this book shows how diving into the dirty linen of a family reveals a lot about the relations between men and women and between parents and children. Using the device of the hypnotist, Smith allows the reader to see the past not only of Sybill, but of her siblings and her parents as well. Though suspicious of the hypnotist at first, she decides that,

All in all he is one of the nicest little men she has ever talked to, a big relief. Usually Sybill doesn’t talk to men at all, or at least not about anything very personal. But Bob [the hypnotist], she can tell, is really interested, as interested as Betty or any one of her women friends. Plus he’s not exactly a man, either, being a hypnotist.

Like the first novel, this one, too, is a bit of a mystery as the past and the plot unfold. And while the humor and the writing make it race along, this little book is one of substance with a lot to tell us about relationships.

Finally, I want to mention another little book by Elizabeth Berg entitled The Pull of the Moon. This book is about a woman who runs away from home, knowing, as so many women seem to discover, that they will never find themselves if they stay in the relationship they are in. The novel is really a series of letters that this woman writes to her husband as she travels around the country in search of herself.

From the beginning, this run-away is astounded by the intimacy that she achieves with other women along the way. None seem very surprised that this adult woman, all of whose children are grown and gone, has run away from home, nor do they argue with her to return. At one point in an early encounter, the woman encounters another who confesses that she, too, runs away from her husband with regularity (though she rarely goes far or for long).

I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode....

And so the reader is treated with just what these women are full to the brim with. It is rich with these conversations between women—conversations about their men, about raising children, about growing old, about life seeming to pass them by. Though not sure at first why she has left, thinking even that her leaving is a kind of suicide, soon she realizes that she is on her own existential quest.

It feels like this is a time for coming into my own. Extraordinary to suddenly think of this as a time for gain. Martin used to say, imitating his funny old grandmother, ‘Oy, I can’t vait to get home and take my goidle off.’ Well, my girdle’s off. Flung into the wind. What a luxury, the feel of one’s true flesh beneath one’s own hand.

My prediction is that with each of these novels you will simply breeze along, having a good time, feeling entertained. And it will only be after you have finished, pausing for a few moments to think about what you have read, that you will realize that you have learned quite a lot along the way.