Book Review: The Water Dancer

The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates brings some powerful writing to evoke the abject horrors of slavery. 

His descriptions of the denial of the basic humanity and dignity to those enslaved are anguished and compelling. He doesn't just tell, but he shows their stories through a range of characters who represent the Tasked, those existing under the yoke of slavery; the Quality, the owners and their family, who perpetuate yet remain enfeebled under the system; and the Low, the vast majority of poor whites who are among its most voracious defenders because it allows them to appear to build themselves up while tearing others down.

The novel depicts a daily horror show of the trepidation, fear, and devastation of a people bought, sold, and beaten as part of a system that degrades and humiliates them and their families. Its shows how the hope of freedom elevates the meaning of the word to its truest sense -- allowing one to live and love without qualm.

It is a gem of a novel, important for both its revelations and its story of hope.

But yet.

It's not perfect. Weaving in and out of the tale is the thread of magic realism -- the idea that it takes something beyond reality to end this evil and to bring people home. I think it subtracts from the efforts of  those who consistently laid their lives on the line to present the notion that supernatural assistance was required.

Another flaw is more prosaic: it felt at times to be a disjointed narrative, lacking a clear trail from

event to event, causing readers to stop in their tracks to re-evaluate.

Still, it's a fine book. The characters are strong, courageous, and human. They are male and female. The tale is clearly driven by its main black characters, which is as it should be because it is their story.

Through Coates, a student and scholar of African-American literature, history, and philosophy, the characters come alive through stirring words and vivid actions. Some are figments of Coates' imagination; others are drawn from historical figures.

All are remarkable, and present an evocative tale of a shameful time when white people sold and abused their fellow humans simply because of the color of their skins.

Book Review: Night Boat to Tangier

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

This dark and brooding novel should allow Barry to take his rightful place in the pantheon of great Irish writers such as Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan.

From Beckett's legacy, you find echoes of Waiting for Godot. Two old men, past their sell date and with few willing to listen to them, bicker and pontificate on life as they await for one of their daughters to arrive from or depart to Tangier. Behan's style is seen as you ride with the ebb and flow of the story and fearing the worst, despite having little idea where it's going.

But Barry, improving the journey with every page you turn, compels you to forge ahead.

Night Boat is a tale about Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, two old Irish drug dealers, wanderers, and petty criminals, who have made it good, then lost most of it. They are in a Spanish port, waiting for Maurice's daughter, Dilly -- or Dill, neither is really sure. They haven't seen in her a while, and all they can say about her is, "She's a small girl. She's a pretty girl."

As they wait, they talk and bicker about politics and philosophy. Many of the conversations between  the two sometimes partners and other times adversaries provide an opportunities to tell their history, and the novel devolves into another time and place for the tales.

Barry's writing is ravishingly beautiful, and he is at the top of his craft. He makes every word count, never squeezing in a phrase that doesn't belong.

You must you use your five senses to take it all in.

You can hear the silent responses of the bored Spanish clerk at the information center. You can feel the gray and dense mists as the city falls into a drugged slumber. You can taste the stale cigarettes smoked and the bitter coffee drank.You can see the hard pure light of Oct. 23, as night gives way to morning again. You can smell the dank of the empty yet cramped terminal. You can even imagine Charlie Redmond drinking in a pub, alone but for his demons.

Or you can see, feel, and hear Maurice Hearne walking with his aged mother, whose sighs opened pockets of woe.

He's one of the best writers Ireland has offered up in a long time.

Book Review: The Dutch House

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

The blurb on this book's dust jacket calls it "a dark fairy tale about two smart people ... who are forced to confront the people who left them behind." Well, perhaps. I prefer to call it a fine story, well told, about a family growing and changing in the second half of the past century.

Look, this is a great book. But to make it something larger, to analyze all its symbolism, to liken it to a dark fairy tale -- a mythical story outside our world that is meant to deceive -- really takes it too far. Instead, it's a series of anecdotes that join to make up a wonderful story.

The novel's star is the Dutch House, an ostentatious mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Cyril Conroy, an up-and-coming real-estate magnate with a wife and two young children, buys the house when the original owners -- the VanHoebeeks, a wealthy Dutch family -- sell it lock, stock, and barrel. Seriously, he buys everything, including the furniture, dishes, and the portraits of the VanHoebeeks above the fireplace mantels. Even the previous family's domestic help come with the house. The new owners move in, and never change a thing, except to commission new portraits of Conroy and his wife. But his wife refuses to sit, and thus the artist paints the daughter, Maeve.

The story then follows this strange family -- a workaholic, distant father, a mother who up and leaves, a nanny who is fired, a step-mother who hates her step-children -- through the next several decades.

The son, Danny, is the passive narrator who tells the story, but lets the action happen around him. Maeve is the active protagonist, the dominant character, the driver of the tale.

It is well written, compelling, and at times surprisingly funny. The characters are multi-faceted and well drawn. Danny and Maeve, upon whom the story revolves, have a tender, loving, yet uneven  relationship that extends over the half-century of the book. Maeve, the older sister, is Danny's mentor, adviser, and substitute parent.

While the narratives sometime jump around in time, they mesh well. An opening tale leads to a backstory, which brings us up to the present. Overall, the story moves forward as the family members age and come to terms with their pasts.

Book Review: Red at the Bone

Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson packs a lot of story into fewer than 200 pages.

The opening that describes a coming-out party for Melody, a 16-year-old black girl -- wearing the same dress that her grandmother Sabe, then 16, also wore, but that her mother Iris, then 16 and pregnant, could not -- sets the stage for a tale of family in the black community.

But it's much more than a family tale -- it's story about ancestors and descendants, about friendships, and about class and race. It's a story about love and marriage and sexual orientation. It's a story about connections and feelings of isolation, It's a story about hopes and fears, about bigotry and hate, about the past and the future.

We learn that the family survived the 1921 Massacre in Tulsa and began a new history in Brooklyn, but never forgot the past.

"Every day since she was a baby I've told Iris the story," Sabe tells us. "How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries -- everything -- just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know my grandbaby carries the goneness too.

Woodson tells these stories through various voices weaving their way through time. Characters come alive as their stories mesh and reveal family history and secrets. Their relationships defy time and space. They come together and sometimes feel left behind.

She uses tight, yet emotional and compelling language. She ties the generations together, allowing each to share with the long ago, but to develop their uniqueness in the now.

Book Review: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, by Abbi Waxman

This is not the type of book I would normally read. If it were a movie, critics would dub it a "rom-com."

But I liked it. It was funny. Sometimes laugh out loud funny.

Yeah, it was a bit corny in parts. Some plot lines mysteriously vanished. And the deus ex machina was hard at work. Still, it was a light, easy, and enjoyable read. Did I mention it was funny?

The book's description caught my eye:

"The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: A job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by. They are all -- or mostly all -- excited to meet her. She will have to Speak. To. Strangers."

Okay, it sort of overstates Nina's being an introvert. But it sounded like someone I could identify with.

So give it a whirl. You shan't be disappointed.

Book Review: Celestial Bodies

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

This can be a difficult if enjoyable novel to read. Its style -- combining several voices and perspectives jumping around in time, along with its setting of a different culture in an unfamiliar place -- forces one to read closely.

Several times, I had to go back and re-read paragraphs or whole chapter -- which tend to be short -- to comprehend the time and voice. Helping immensely in this is the inclusion of a family tree that connects most of the characters. I bookmarked this page so I could refer to it early and often.

The story is ostensibly about three daughters in a changing Oman, an Islamic country on the Arabian peninsula. But it's really a multi-generational tale about the village of al-Awafi and its people. The clans intermingle, slaves who were bought and sold and recently freed live and work with their former owners, and women are married off, usually not to a man of their choice.

The book is the first novel originally written in Arabic -- it was translated by Marilyn Booth -- to win the Man Booker prize. The award called it "a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman's coming of age through the prism of one family's losses and loves.

We meet sisters Mayya,  Asma, and Khawla, representative of different women who are changing along with the country. We also hear from and about others in the town, from the poorest of former slaves, to other who try to maintain their dignity over time, to those who are leaving behind their traditional culture for a new way.

We have Abdullah, whose voice ties the novel together, who married Mayya and talks about his abusive father, a slave trader. We have London, the eldest daughter of the couple, who becomes a doctor and enjoys western culture. We have Zarifa, a former slave who raised Abdullah after his mother mysteriously died, and whose place in the village is inconsistent.

As the novel moves along its path, the intertwined stories become clearer, and we reach a cohesive whole that becomes more familiar, at times sad, but always compelling and illuminating.

Book Review: Going the Distance

Going the Distance: The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella, by William Steele

Kinsella's life was successful, yet uneven. The same can be said for this biography.

For starters, it was filled with too much minutia. I do not need to know about every date Kinsella went on in high school, nor every address where he lived.

Instead, I would have liked more information about the reviews and responses to Kinsella's works, especially the debate about the fiction he wrote in the voice of indigenous people. The view that Kinsella was guilty of cultural appropriation grew throughout his life -- particularly as he became more popular for his other works -- but was treated as an afterthought in the book, spread out amidst the pages, rather than as an idea that should have been evaluated as a specific criticism of a portion of his work.

Perhaps the structure of the biography dictated how it was handled. Instead of categorical breakdown, it was written in a strict chronological order.

Still, the book presented a wealth of information about Kinsella's life and writings. He set his goal on being a writer at an early age, and despite feeling hampered and discouraged throughout those early years, made good on his goal. The book also showed how incidents in Kinsella's upbringing on an isolated farm outside of Edmonton, Canada, affected his prose. He used other experiences in his life in his stories and novels, but denied his works were biographical. Again, this issue could have been explored in a chapter, instead of interspersed in the book.

Kinsella, who died of assisted suicide in 2016, also had a disjointed private life. He hated most of his early government jobs, because he hated government and bureaucracy. He became a university professor for a span, but for the most part, he hated teaching. He hated all forms of religion, but his description of religious people could mirror a description of himself.

"... (T)here is a smugness about every one of them, a condescending sense of superiority, which the more they try to hide it, the more it shows."

The book is at its best when it explores Kinsella's growth as a writer. That may be because the growth went along Kinsella's timeline -- for the most part, he got better as he grew older and more experienced.

He was a prolific writer, often having five or more stories and books in process. He often would expand his short stories into novels -- a criticism by people who thought he was unduly padding out his stories -- but one that I would argue produced some of his best work. Shoeless Joe, for instance, started out as a short short, then a novel, and later became the movie Field of Dreams.

Steele spends a lot of time describing how the book traveled its path and grew into a cultural touchstone. He also discussed the impact it had on Kinsella and his life as a writer.

Kinsella's death in 2016 came as a shock, but his health had long been poor, and he went out as he wanted. He spurned life-extending measures that would have caused much pain and suffering, and choose to end his own life.