Book Review: The Gloaming

   By Melanie Finn

• Pub Date: 2016

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: Gloaming is one of my favorite words 

 *****

    Let me tell you about how I first came across the word, gloaming. I'm an old baseball fan, and one of the great old baseball stories I read early in life is about "The Homer in the Gloamin'"

    Gloaming is the twilight of the day. In his recent book, Lark Ascending, Silas House has a character use the word. A second character expressed ignorance, asking what it meant. She told him. He asked why she didn't just say dusk. She responded, correctly, that "the word gloaming is so much lovelier." 

    Anyway, baseball. Back in the 1930s, most ballparks did not have lights. Wrigley Field was a case in point -- indeed it was the last modern park to put in lights, in 1988. So the park was dark at night. But late in the 1938 season, the Cubs and Pirates were in a pennant race, with the Pirates half a game ahead of the Cubs. So game 2 of their series would determine which team moved into first place. 

    The game was tied. As nighttime approached as the ninth inning started, the umps said that if neither team scored, they would rule it a tie. And since baseball did not allow for tie games, it would be played all over the next day as part of a doubleheader.

    Top of the ninth, the Pirates failed to scored. Bottom of the ninth, the first two Cubs went hitless. Gabby Hartnett, the Cubs player-manager, was up, and down to his last strike.

    He hit the next pitch into the bleachers, and as he ran the bases and fans swarmed the field to celebrate the victory and move into first place, a reporter for the Associated Press started writing his game story. He dubbed Hartnett's blast, "The Homer in the Gloamin' 

    So, the legend lives on from the banks of the lake they call Michigan.

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    Ok, now about the book, which is not about baseball, and has neither a pennant race nor a home run. 

    What it does have is some good stories and  decent writing. But it starts slowly with a series of flashbacks and present time settings. And I am somewhat uncomfortable with her settings in Africa, where her descriptions portray a continent of dirty, backwards, violent people.

    The protagonist and narrator, Pilgrim Jones, is a white woman who has traveled the world with her husband, a human rights lawyer. We learn this, and why, over time. We also learn that while traveling in Africa, she simply decides to abandon her companions and stay in a country village.

    The explanation comes through as she meets a series of characters, most of whom are more interesting than Pilgrim. They all have backgrounds of trauma or bad choices -- and some have both. The first half of the book tells the tales from Pilgrim's perspective, while the latter part reveals details of the rest of the cast.

    The second part is infinitely better. Some of the tales are about people people causing pain and living with it, or perhaps seeking and finding redemption. Others are those who called be called victims, but find ways to go on -- or not.

    It hard what to make of this book. Pilgrim's character almost feels like a cliche, a trope. The others are more real, if a mite exaggerated. 

Book Review: Thirteen Ways of Looking

  By Colum McCann

• Pub Date: 2015

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I love me a good collection of Irish short stories. 

 *****

 

  I am sad that I was generally disappointed in this collection of a novella and three short stories. I have liked several of the author's previous works.

    OK. The stories themselves were decent. The last one, Treaty, about a aging Catholic nun who comes face-to-face with her living nightmare, was thoughtful and compelling. But that one suffered from a flaw the others were far more guilty of, and unexpected from such an accomplished writer: A general lack of focus, using too many words, too much excess description, too much meaningless detail and too many strained metaphors  

    But let's start with the good. Treaty involves Sister Beverly, a nun living in a care home in Long Island, concerned about her health and wondering if her religious life has been a waste. She's forgetful, ill at ease, and unable to feel comfortable in her old age. Then on the television, she sees a man who looks very much like an older version of person who raped her a long time ago. 

    The story deals with perception, pain, horror, and regret. She relives her pain, but does not want to dwell on it as the defining point of her life. Would God want her to reveal the monster -- if that is what he is -- or forgive his actions? Her thoughts and behaviors are deeply compelling, and McCann's tale paints a masterful image.

    Contrast that to the main story, about Peter J. Mendelssohn,  an aging white guy, an immigrant, a Jew, a lawyer, and a former judge in Brooklyn. He's retired, and now living -- and dying -- in a fancy apartment on the Upper East Side. He's had a good life, despite an upbringing in anti-Semitic Europe. But now his days are all about his pains, his diminished capacity, his beloved but now dead wife, and his terse relationship with his egotistical son. 

    But unlike Sister Beverly, his story is not about reflection and regret. It's about him, his thoughts, and his dying. And, quite frankly, his life and story are not all that interesting for the amount of effort it takes to read about it.

    The other two stories, Sh'khol, and What Time is it Now, Where are You? fall flat.

Book Review: So Late in the Day

 By Claire Keegan

• Pub Date: 2023

• Where I bought this book: Athena Books, Greenwich, Conn. 

• Why I bought this book: Long known in her native Ireland, Keegan's books are now being published in the United States. And that is good. 

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    I am normally not a fan of verbing nouns. But when Keegan wrote "the speaker jargoned on" I began to question my existence and my crotchets.

    It was the perfect phrase for a tedious experience. And that is Keegan's strength. She can take the mundane, and with some well-chosen words, turn reading about it into one of life's pleasures.

    Whether it's riding a bus, making coffee, even going to the bathroom, Keegan nails it. I am still enamored of her ability to turn a chicken crossing the road into a work of art.

    The setting is a woman taking a drive in the country.

On the edge of the road, a small, plump hen walked purposefully along, her head extended and her feet clambering over the stones. She was a pretty hen, her plumage edged in white, as though she'd powdered herself before she'd stepped out of the house. She hopped down onto the grassy verge and, without looking left or right, raced across the road, then stopped, re-adjusted her wings, and made a clear line for the cliff. The woman watched how the hen kept her head down when she reached the edge and how, without a moment's hesitation, she jumped over it. The woman stopped the car and walked to the spot from which the hen had flung herself. A part of her did not want to look over the cliff -- but when she did she there saw the hen with several others, scratching or lying contentedly in a pit of sand on a grassy ledge not far below.

    That single paragraph does what all writers strive for: showing, not telling, using simple but compelling language, making the ordinary become extraordinary. It was an aside to the actually story, a contextual anomaly, yet it has stuck with me.

    But later thinking about the snippet, I considered how, with her skillful use of pronouns, she mingled the hen's experience with one the woman was about to have.

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See reviews of Keegan's other books

 Foster and Small Things Like These

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    These are three tiny tales of women and men, about their failures at connecting with each other. The women, but mostly the men, talk not to each other, but at each other. In her language and descriptions, Keegan gives the stories a feminist twist. 

    In the title story, she tells of a young couple's broken engagement -- on the day of their wedding -- from the groom's perspective. Instead of being sympathetic, Keegan portrays him as a mess -- bitter, thoughtless, incompetent. But it's not a harsh account. She simply does so by showing Cathal's thoughts, words, and actions before and during the courtship.

    The Long and Painful Death is told from the view of a woman who stays at a writer's house to be inspired by his work. Instead, she is interrupted by an expert on the house she is renting, who is so interested in his own knowledge that he is obtuse to her disinterest in him. It's a clever, subtle take on mansplaining.

    Antarctica deals with a woman seeking to have an affair on a holiday weekend away from her family. (No spoiler here, the opening line of the story is "Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.") Although it's another example of her exquisite writing, the story borders on being creepy. It is the reason the book failed to gain a full 10 out of 10 stars in my review.