Anything Is Possible

Strout Sense

Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton was slim but dense with emotions, as the eponymous character lying in a hospital bed is visited by her long-estranged mother.

Lucy had escaped grinding ‘white-trash’ poverty in a small town called Amgash and become a successful writer in New York. Her mother brings her up to speed on the people she left behind,  while she waits for her daughter to recover from her mysterious illness.  

In Strout’s new collection of short stories, Anything Is Possible, a kind of sequel to, My Name Is Lucy Barton memories of Lucy hover over the town for most part, till she eventually makes an appearance. The stories are connected, characters from one story reappear in another, with Lucy being the binding thread, remembered by the various characters with pride and envy. The story that brings her to Amgash after many years, is Sister in which she visits her brother Pete and sister Vicky at their childhood home. All the unhappiness and resentment comes flowing out—Pete has been living in self-imposed isolation with only Tommy dropping by the see him; Vicky is overweight and angry because of their deprived childhood. 

These are extraordinary stories of ordinary people, who somehow beat the odds—like Tommy Guptill, the successful dairy farmer whose barn and home burns down, and he is forced to become a janitor in the local school. He takes the tragedy with admirable equanimity, and believes it was a sign from God. How the fire actually started is a mystery that is probed in bits and pieces in the other stories.

Lucy Barton’s bestselling book was a memoir and many real people and incidents were alluded to in it. For a small town where everybody knows everybody, there are still secrets, phobias, guilt and torment, which Strout’s stories gently bring out; she writes with sympathy—but not sentimentality--about flawed characters, whose actions affect their loved ones in profound ways. A woman who has an affair and wrecks her marriage, a father who suffers because of his sexuality, an older woman who takes on an Italian lover, a woman who is aware of her husband’s sexual kink, but  does not want to rock her marriage.  Strout expects the reader to be nonjudgmental too and understand that life does not always go according to plan, that that people cope with disappointment and betrayal as best as they can.

Anything Is Possible

By Elizabeth Strout

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 272

The One Man

Race Against Time

There have been so many books about the Holocaust, no aspect of the horrifying genocide of Jews by the Nazis remains uncovered. Still, more and more writes go back to that era, to tell more stories, which perhaps, is a good thing—it never lets us forget. And the times we are living, fraught with violence and hatred of the ‘other,’ we need constant reminders that communal madness has no race or colour.

The One Man by Andrew Gross is a well-researched book about the race between the Germans and the Allied Forces to create a nuclear device that would help end the war.  Meanwhile the progrom in Germany and other Nazi-occupied territories went on unchecked; the bits of information that leak of the concentration camps are too shocking to contemplate. The worst of these camps was Auschwitz,  where the worst atrocities were committed—torture, mass murder and unimaginable cruelty. It was also the most tightly guarded camp, still two men had managed to escape and brought with them stories of the camp, but also information and a rough map.

One of the men, separated from his family and pushed into these camps is Alfred Mendl, a physicist, who had done the work most crucial to develop an atomic bomb.  The Americans decide that if they have to beat Germany in the war, they have to get that formula. A Jewish American, Peter Strauss comes up with the audacious plan of smuggling in a man into Auschwitz and getting Mendl out. It seems impossible, but worth a try. But who would volunteer for a suicide mission?

Strauss finds an intense young man, an intelligence operative, Nathan Blum, who had managed to get out of Poland, leaving his parents and sister behind. When they are shot dead by the Nazis, Nathan lives with his grief and guilt, hoping to get out of his desk bound translation job and “do something more.” Being a Jew and a Pole, he is ideal for the job, and, quite aware of the risks, he agrees.

He manages to get into Auschwitz and does the impossible—locate Professor Mendl among the thousands of prisoners, in two days; but getting out is tough. The Germans are not fools, they intercept messages and figure out that somebody has infiltrated Auschwitz, what they cannot comprehend is why anyone would want to get into that hellhole?

Alternating between the preparation and training to send Nathan on that dangerous mission, and the unbearable life behind the electrified barbed wire fences of Auschwitz, Gross keeps the pace pulse-pounding, yet allows breathers to develop the characters and their relationships. In the midst of such evil, there is also goodness, love and compassion.

It is a book that moves and thrills in equal measure till it reaches its explosive climax.  It is quite literally unputdownable.

The One Man

By Andrew Gross

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 416

The Stolen Marriage

Hickory Dock

There are readers who love damsel-in-distress novels. Diane Chamberlain’s The Stolen Marriage falls firmly into that category and would satisfy her fans.  Others might find it jarringly old-fashioned, though it accurate in depicting life in the US in the 1940s.

The book is set in the American South around World War II, when pretty Tess Demello is waiting to marry her childhood sweetheart. Her fiancé, Vincent Russo, is a doctor who goes off to deal with a polio outbreak in Chicago and takes much too long coming back.

Distressed by his absence and apparent indifference, she goes to Washington on a trip with her friend Gina, and after too many drinks, wakes up next to a man she just met. Henry Kraft is a furniture tycoon from a town called Hickory, and the strong, silent type, who also lost his control due to intoxication. 

 A few weeks down the line, Tess finds herself pregnant, and her Catholic upbringing prevents her from going ahead with a back alley abortion. Instead, she goes to meet Henry for help, and he offers to marry her.  She cannot bring herself to face Vincent, so she agrees to the proposal, even it means breaking her own heart and that of Vincent, not to mention the two families.

Henry’s mother, sister and the wealthy social circle of Hickory hate Tess and make to attempt to hide it. They look down on her ambition to be a nurse and want her to become another vacuous high society, like Violet, the girl Henry is supposed to have dumped to marry her. Tess is utterly miserable, though she tries very hard to adjust.  Henry treats her well, but obviously does not love her.

Several passages make one gnash one’s teeth in irritation, but then Chamberlain deals with topics like racism, class snobbery, women’s independence and public health.  Eventually Tess does find her voice and  purpose in life.  Which makes the melodrama that went before worthwhile.

The Stolen Marriage

By Diane Chamberlain

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages:  384

Need You Dead

Crime Of Passion

Peter James has created the popular crime series with ‘Dead’ in the titles and the hard-working cop Roy Grace as the protagonist. The thirteenth book in the series, Need You Dead, goes to show why the author is so popular and was awarded the 2016 Crime Writers’ Association’s Diamond Dagger award.

Unlike so many other trigger-happy, lone wolf policemen in crime fiction, Grace is a stable family man, with a wife Cleo, infant son Noah, and a dog. In the past, his wife Sandy had disappeared, causing him a great deal of anguish. In the last book, Love You Dead,Sandy has resurfaced in a Berlin hospital, where she committed suicide and left behind a son, Bruno, who turns out to be Grace’s. With Cleo’s gentle encouragement, he decides to bring Bruno to live with them in England.

So in between his investigation into the strange case of Lorna Belling, he has to prepare for the domestic upheaval that would be caused by the arrival of Bruno, as well as the professional annoyance of getting as his superior the hated Cassian Pewe.

Lorna was trying to escape an abusive marriage by having an affair with a married man, who, she discovers quite by chance, had been lying to her all along. She is found dead in a love nest she was sharing with her lover. During a quarrel, the man ended up killing her. He not just took care to remove all traces of his presence from the apartment, but also plotted to implicate Lorna’s worthless husband Corin.

When Grace, along with devoted deputy Guy Batchelor go to arrest Corin, he makes a run for and is crushed to death by a car.  Grace is not convinced that Corin was the killer, despite all evidence pointing at him. He believes in the credo, Assume nothing. Believe no one. Check everything. Which stand him in good stead in his career as a homicide detective.

The red herrings pile up and more suspects turn up. In the midst of all this chaos, Grace brings Bruno home—the strange, quiet child with a love for football and drums. 

The book is a serious police procedural, but also keeps an eye on Grace’s personal life and the emotional turbulence that is caused by Bruno’s arrival.  There is always a new twist introduced, but James takes time with new developments in the plot, which might get the impatient reader skip pages, but Need You Dead is ultimately a rewarding read for fans of crime fiction.

Need You Dead

By Peter James

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 512

Golden Prey

Cops And Outlaws

John Sandford is a best selling crime novelist, and Golden Prey is his twenty-seventh ‘Prey’ book, that comes with endorsement from Stephen King, no less.

In this book, the man in the middle of the action is Lucas Davenport, who has just been made a US Marshal due to his high-level connections, that has caused some heartburn in the force.  Davenport is wealthy, nattily dressed and, to the envy of some of his colleagues, travels business class and stays in fancy suites. But when it comes to crime fighting, he is not averse to getting his hands dirty.

When his latest prey, the ruthless killer Garvin Poole, cold-bloodedly killed a six-year-old child during a heist, the enraged cop, husband and father does not rest till he tracks down the man. 

Poole’s girlfriend Pandora Box (really!) and associate Sturgill Darling have to cope with not just the cops snapping at their heels, but the two killers, Soto and Kort, put on their trail by the Honduran drug cartel who were robbed of millions by the duo. Soto is a happy gunman, but Charlene Kort is a demented woman, who enjoys cutting up people to force them to divulge the information she wants. Evidently Sandford is not squeamish about writing gruesome scenes of torture.

The violence is a bit too much, but the pace is relentless and the adventure most entertaining. As Davenport observes, what makes their work easier is the tracking of cell phones. No matter how many burners the criminals use and throw, they can be tracked. On the other hand, the bad guys recruit hackers, who keep them one step ahead of the cops.

Sandford writes with the kind of humour and a cast of colourful lowlifes that is reminiscent of Elmore Leonard.  During the chase, Davenport is joined by the fearless pair of Bob and Rae; the latter is resigned to the responses a black female cop gets, and when she has to pass off as a maid to get information, she does, knowing that nobody pays attention to the working class.  The banter between these three is laugh out loud funny.

Golden Prey

By John Sandford

Publisher: GP Putnam’s

Pages: 440

A Horse Walks Into A Bar

Tragedy of a Comedian

David Grossman’s A Horse Walks Into A Bar (translated by Jessica Cohen) has won this year’s Man Booker International Prize. It is disturbingly tragic novel about a comedian, set in the very contemporary world of stand-up, but wrapped up in the history and politics of Israel.

There are a few bad jokes in the book, but it is not remotely funny. The narrator is a retired judge, Avishai Lazar-- carrying his own burden of loneliness and rage--who is contacted out of the blue by Dovaleh Greenstein, who he knew in school.  Because of his own shameful cowardice in the past, Lazar has put Greenstein out of his mind. Still, he is unable to refuse when his old schoolmate invites him to a stand-up show in the small town of Netanya. He just wants his old friend to watch the performance and give him his opinion.

The book then, is set in a basement bar, and runs over the two hours of the excruciating confessional show. What Lazar sees is a painfully thin, oddly dressed (in ripped jeans, red braces and cowboy boots “adorned with silver sheriff stars”) man, who starts by insulting the audience, among them, Azulai, a tiny  midget ‘medium’ with a speech impediment. He pretends not to remember her, because she knew him when he was an eccentric kid who used to walk on his hands to get over the violence of his father, and peculiar silence of his mother (obviously traumatized by the Holocaust).

The audience does not know what to expect, Greenstein is intermittently funny and engaging, but also shocks them by hitting himself hard, or starting on his own story, which is not what people have paid to hear—they want jokes and they are getting waves and waves of a man’s angst.

The audience starts to leave, some grumbling loudly, some escaping under cover of darkness; but the ones who remain listen with morbid fascination to incidents from his troubled childhood. Lazar was part of a particularly horrible time in a military training camp, where he stood by and did nothing when Greenstein was cruelly ragged by the others.  Lazar sits squirming in his seat, fearing that Greenstein will give him away any time, but the comedian keeps up a non-verbal communication with the judge without giving any indication of the past friendship.

Greenstein is not a likeable person, his theatrics on stage are aggravating, but they are also the attention-grabbing antics of a man in physical and emotional pain. His marriages fail, his five kids are strangers to him, he finds wells of humour from his own arid life. His inspiration for becoming a comedian is right there in his rambling narration—a kindly joke-spewing truck driver taking the stricken teenager from the camp to a funeral, when nobody has even bothered to tell him which parent has died.

The reader, unable to put the book down, is like the audience in the dingy bar, that stays on even though they are not getting the promised comedy. Because Greenstein, nose bleeding, broken glasses askew, tired and aging, has taught them that humour does not necessarily grow out of happiness.

A Horse Walks Into A Bar

By David Grossman

Publisher: Johnathan Cape

Pages: 196

Dear Ijeawele

Wisdom For Our Age

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie followed her book, We Should All Be Feminists by a slim volume that every woman should read and gift to young women they know. She wrote Dear Ijeawele Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions--which is exactly what the title suggests—when a friend asked her how to raise her little daughter as a feminist.

She has distilled years of feminist wisdom into 61 pages, the essence of which that a girl should not be discouraged from doing anything ““because she’s a girl.”  Gender equality is always bandied about as a important goal for society, but not achievable if women still have to be “allowed” their freedom by men.

Through a letter to her friend, Adichie addresses all women, and her voice should be heard. She admits that in spite of her best efforts, the child might still turn out different from what her mother hopes, “because sometimes life just does its thing. What matters is that you try.”

Maybe what is needed is a similar guidebook on raising boys to be gender sensitive too.

Dear Ijeawele

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 66