Poignant reads for a poignant season.***image1***
New England White
by Stephen L Carter
Lemaster Carlyle had a cameo appearance in Stephen L Carter's debut novel,
The Emperor of Ocean Park
, but failed to capture this reader's attention in what was, otherwise, a riveting story. Theoretically, Carlyle is of central importance in Carter's second release,
New England White
but, really, he ends up being a minor character compared to his wife, Julia Carlyle, from whose point of view the story is told. Carter's milieu is that of wealthy, high-society African-Americans. His genre comes closest to psychological thriller; it's psychological thriller interweaved with academic and sociological context. ***image2***
Lemaster Carylyle is president of a university in New England (the author is a law professor at Yale University), where Julia is dean in the divinity school. The town itself, though picturesque, has a barely hidden history of racial discord. The Carylyles have devoted their lives to reading between the lines and the subtle demarcation of the rules that belong to, as Carter calls it, "the darker nation" are at the crux of both this and his first novel. But the book is also a finely wrought mystery, in which Julia searches for a secret in her husband's past-one that is of crucial importance to the town, her marriage and, most importantly, her daughter Vanessa's mental health. To find her way to the story's hidden secret, Julia must delve into her own past, and it's an intellectually complex journey.
Forgive Me
by Amanda Eyre Ward
In this novel, journalist Nadine Morgan and teacher Jason Irving both grew up in Cape Cod and both ended up in Cape Town, South Africa. But Jason died there, violently, pre-Apartheid, and Nadine left South Africa with secret memories that she would end up ignoring as she chased one story after the next.
***image3***Now it's 10 years later, and Nadine has just been beaten within an inch of her life while on assignment in Mexico. Her editor won't let her go back to work, she has no real place to live and is alienated from her father and his soon-to-be new wife. She's not sure where to go or what to do, until she learns that Jason's murderers will be testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Jason's parents will be flying from Nantucket to South Africa for that event.
Nadine also will be there, and her trip back to South Africa for yet another story begins to reveal the chinks in her armor. For 10 years, no story has been too violent or sad to penetrate her lust for getting it. Now all that is about to change. Ultimately,
Forgive Me
is a compelling story about personal reconciliation. But it also is a gripping thriller set in an historical setting that continues to be one of the most stark and dramatic ones of contemporary history.
The Year of Fog
by Michelle Richmond
Imagine you're spending the day with your fiancée's 6-year-old. You turn away for a moment, look back and…she's…gone. This is the wrenching beginning of Michelle Richmond's
The Year of Fog
, written so movingly that an experience that is far from universal becomes immediate and personal.
It is photographer Abby Mason's first time looking after Emma. After the girl is lost, Mason's relationship with Emma's father, Jake, suffers, and Mason***image4*** becomes obsessed with finding her charge. As she searches, Mason remembers her own past and childhood and interweaves her memories with both the present crisis and with her own observations about what it means to look at something. She looked away from Emma, just briefly, because her eye was drawn to a seal pup on the beach and her thoughts turned to photographing it. Her search for the missing child turns into a larger, perhaps existential, search for the meaning behind what we see and what we can remember. While the book drives toward a dramatic-and somewhat unlikely- end, the vignettes throughout create a larger poetica in which it is the reader who becomes, happily, lost.
The Lumiere Affair
by Sara Voorhees
If a person's past is dramatic enough to resemble a Hollywood movie (a lightening strike kills mom and injures her child, who is then sent away from France to live in New Mexico) what better place to face the past than at the ***image5***Cannes Film Festival? Such is the premise of film critic Sara Voorhees' first novel,
The Lumiere Affair
. Protagonist Natalie Conway is also a film critic (hey, it's a first novel) and one whose career has seen better days. The chance to revisit the country where her early-childhood trauma occurred, while scoring a big payday to cover Cannes, is too good an opportunity to pass up. As it turns out, Cannes may be the exact place for Conway to finally unearth the unanswered questions that have haunted her for her whole life.
Quelle coincidence?
Not likely; this is a book about the film industry written by a film critic, after all. Despite a little bit of silliness, The
Lumiere Affair
is a fun read, both because, and sometimes despite, its happy use of celebrity name-dropping. And it does give what feels like an experience verity of attending one of the premier film events of the industry.
Michael Tolliver Lives
by Armistead Maupin
The '70s are over. So are the '80s and the '90s for that matter. It's circa right about now and, fans of Armistead Maupin's
Tales of the City
series will be glad to know: Michael Tolliver lives. Tolliver was always the heart of the
City
series. His struggles to find love, to make a life, to grapple with the changing mores of gay life in San Francisco, were the narrative center of a series that***image6*** chronicled the oft-crazy mishaps of a group of friends who met while living together on Barbary Lane. The series was originally serialized in The San Francisco Chronicle and later was published in book form and made into an acclaimed television mini-series.
In
Michael Tolliver Lives
, times have changed for everyone, but Michael's heart is still open, even if bathhouse camaraderie has been replaced by online sexcapades. Unlike Maupin's original series, this latest (presumably his last) installation is told in the first person, strictly from Michael's point of view. Mrs. Madrigal is in her 90s, most of the original central casting has moved on in a variety of ways, but circumstances will bring them all together one last time. The story retains the sometimes corny sweetness of the City series and will likely appeal most to those who want to find out what happened to the gang. But it may also serve to send new readers to Barbary Lane-and the past-for the first time.
I, California
by Stacey Grenrock Woods
Life in So-Cal has a certain flavor and Stacey Grenrock Woods hasn't tasted it; she's sucked it down.
I, California
is a memoir-not to be confused with an autobiography-of one person's very particular experience. The author, a contributing writer for Esquire, relives her So-Cal days with gusto, as they include just about every seminal experience one could have in that unreal place, depending on the decade. She was a child actress, she posed for a Playboy centerfold (it wasn't published), she was a waitress, she had dreams about primetime television shows (well, who hasn't?)
***image7***The memoir is all written in a breathless I-can't-tell-you-this-fast-enough style that compels the reader along, despite the (somewhat) acknowledged banality of it all (actually the complete script of two dreams starring Jennifer Aniston that occurred when the author was on Ambien are more disturbing than banal). But this personal story does have a revivifying effect: The past is not always painful, even when it's filled with mistakes and bad hairstyles. She writes: "I heard once that you can tell if someone's young or old by pinching the skin on her hand and counting how long it takes to snap back. Time, memory, age, they are all just that-a series of those small times. They happen in the moments, the small, slow moments that it takes the skin on the back of your hand to redrape itself around the bones."
Santa Fe Reporter