Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is a noteworthy piece of fiction. If you liked Rooney’s Normal People, you’ll enjoy being drawn into this newest book. The narrative line is: two brothers, both grieving the recent death of their father, are alienated from each other and, we learn, from themselves. Peter, age 32, is a barrister known …
Category: reading list
Fiction to distract from post-election angst
Here are two novels in which key characters are named Gabe. The similarity ends there. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides is a psychological thriller that plumbs the depth of the human psyche. The simplest narrative – a woman is convicted of murdering her husband, Gabriel Berenson. She becomes mute, is sent for years to …
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Two more novels where small towns are defining
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke is a nicely woven mystery set in rural East Texas. Two murders occur in just a matter of days in a tiny town called Lark. Are the two crimes related? That’s just one of the questions being explored by principal character Darren Matthews, an African-American who dropped out of law …
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Fiction to escape doom-scrolling election coverage
The Hunter by Tana French is a murder mystery set in the hardworking village of Ardnakelty in Ireland during an abnormally dry, searingly hot summer, oppressive to humans and animals alike. Nerves are on edge. The only relief for the farmers and shopkeepers is gathering for a pint or more at the local pub, to …
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Two special novels for Indian summer reading
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin, translated from a 2018 French publication, is a delicately developing mysterious story about people who are a little offbeat but emerge as complex and interesting characters. The principal character, Violette Toussaint, is introduced to us as “the cemetery lady.” She works as the keeper of a cemetery in …
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Getting to first for a brave female sports writer
Locker Room Talk: One Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside by Melissa Ludtke is a sports writer’s impressive account of her 1978 lawsuit against Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who had banned female reporters from interviewing baseball players in the locker room before and after major league games. An art history major in college, athletic Ludtke was …
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Still more summer fiction
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl is a confection, set in the 1980’s in Paris. Stella, a 20-something copy editor in New York, leads a highly routinized life, the regularity of which is comforting to her. She is estranged from her mother, Celia, who has never expressed love of her. Nor has Celia ever told …
Fanatics and vigilantes: two books with red flags
American Mother by Collum McCann is an as-told-to account by Diane Foley of the 2014 death of her son, freelance American journalist James W. Foley. McCann, the author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, is a master storyteller, tells the first and last chapters of this riveting book in the third person, but …
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Two Creative Approaches to Fiction Writing
James by Percival Everett tells the story of Huckleberry Finn’s escape from his drunken abusive father with slave Jim in pre-Civil War Missouri. As a child, I read Huckleberry Finn as a simple adventure tale; as a college student, I came to understand it as telling account of mid- 19th century American life and culture. …
Diana Chapman Walsh: a college president we can admire
The Claims of Life by Diana Chapman Walsh is a deep and delightful memoir by the former president of Wellesley College, whom I met and with whom I briefly worked in conjunction with the 125th anniversary of the college. A child of privilege in suburban Philadelphia and an athlete, she grew up dismissing her intellectual …
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Marjorie Arons-Barron 