Liz's Book Selections

I won't be able to make the August 30 meeting, so here are my book selections:

Reservation Road
by John Burnham Schwartz


From the Publisher
A riveting novel of feeling and suspense in which grief and punishment become tragically intertwined. At the close of a beautiful summer day near the quiet Connecticut town where they live, the Learner family--Ethan and Grace, their children, Josh and Emma--stop at a gas station on their way home from a concert. Josh Learner, lost in a ten-year-old's private world, is standing at the edge of the road when a car comes racing around the bend. He is hit and instantly killed. The car speeds away. From this moment forward, Reservation Road becomes a harrowing countdown to the confrontation between two very different men. The hit-and-run driver is a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno, a man in desperate need of a second chance. Dwight is also the father of a ten-year-old boy, who was asleep in the car the night Josh Learner was killed. Now Dwight must decide whether to run from his crime or to pay the price for what he did. Ethan Learner, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, has seen his orderly world shattered in a single moment, yet persists in the belief that he can find the unknown man who killed his son. Behind their stories are those of eight-year-old Emma, who can't stop thinking her brother's death was her fault, and of Grace, who must find the strength to keep herself and her family together, and to be the mother Emma so badly needs. In a gripping narrative woven from the voices of Ethan, Dwight, and Grace, Reservation Road tellsthe story of two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis--a book that reads like a thriller but opens up a world rich with psychological nuance and emotional wisdom. Reservation Road explores the terrain of grief even as it astonishes with unexpected redemption: powerful and wrenching and impossible to put down.

From The Critics
James Hynes: Reservation Road is a page-turner, but along the way there is much to linger over...it never fails to chill us with the sober knowledge that everything we have, and everything we are, can change in an instant. -- The Washington Post

David Bowman - New York Observer: A beautiful novel. An important novel.

Kit Reed - New York Times Book Review: A triumph of form, pacing and power. . .character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete.

Tom De Haven - Entertainment Weekly: One of those rare — very rare — novels that you don't so much read as inhabit. . .But it's the novel's conclusion, as perfect as it is sudden, shocking and completely unexpected, that will stick in your memory.

Erica Noonan: An unexpected pleasure. . .it will leave the reader entranced as well as moved. — The Boston Herald

Publishers Weekly: 'I wasn't rich, but my life was secure. That had always been its fundamental premise,' observes Ethan Learner, an English professor at a small college in Connecticut. Moments later, his 10-year-old son, Josh, is killed by a hit-and-run driver, inaugurating a novel of terrible beauty that charts the progress of grief with concerto-like precision. For Ethan, his wife, Grace, and their daughter, Emma, Josh becomes both a cold absence and a constant, haunting, unfulfilled promise. For Dwight -- the driver who killed Josh-- the event stands as more evidence of a significantly flawed life. Dwight is no cartoon villain; with a son, an ex-wife and a history of sudden violence, he's like a lesser Ethan -- a poor father who, through incompetence, has killed another man's son. Schwartz structures the book with the tautness of a thriller -- Will Ethan find his son's murderer? -- but this book quickly becomes much larger than a simple revenge tale. Neither does it become maudlin or forced. Ethan, Grace and Dwight all seem ruined by the boy's death, but, like three drowning people, they keep fighting for air--aided by Schwartz's strong, measured prose and exquisitely chosen metaphors (describing his now-troubled marriage, Ethan says, 'Our house... a wordless, internalized diaspora... a landscape riven with fault lines'). 'I want to tell this right," Ethan says several times during the course of the book. The author's first novel, Bicycle Days, gathered solid reviews but modest notice. With this effort, he seems poised to reach a break-out audience. If a story about overwhelming tragedy can be told right, this novel is--telling it with wise observation and abundant humanity. (PW best book of 1998)

Library Journal: The author of Bicycle Days returns with a powerful story about two unhappy Connecticut families linked by one violent moment. The Learners are the victims of tragedy: an ordinary stop at a country gas station turns to horror when their oldest child is killed by a hit-and-run driver in full view of his father, Ethan. As his wife and small daughter suffer through grief, depression, and guilt, Ethan is consumed by his compulsion to find and punish his son's murderer after the police give up. Nearby, failed attorney and divorced father Dwight Arno tortures himself with his memories of speeding away from the accident. Has running saved his fragile relationship with his own son (a schoolmate of the Learner boy), or has it made the unbearable problems between Dwight and his family even worse? More than slightly hoping to be apprehended, Dwight begins to behave oddly and deteriorate mentally, even as Ethan closes in on him. Narrated mainly by the two fathers, this is a forceful psychological novel in which nobody wins -- except readers appreciating Schwartz's well-wrought prose. -- Starr E. Smith, Marymount University Library, Alexandria,Virginia

Walter Kirn: Part hardboiled thrilled, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys,....[He]tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash....Schwartz stays close enough to his characters' thoughts to keep the debate authentic and personal, rather than calculated and abstract. --Time Magazine

Michiko Kakutani: A powerful and affecting novel. . .haunting. . .highly suspenseful. . .compelling to read -- The New York Times

Vanity Fair: A poignant thriller. . .quietly breathtaking.. . . a suspenseful literary novel. --
Deirdre Donahue

It possesses a conclusion of such power that it would be a literary crime to reveal it. -- USA Today

Kit Reed: A triumph of form, pacing and power. . .character-driven as it is, it reads like a thriller, swift and complete. -- New York Times Book Review

Sandra Scofield: A pleasure to read. Suspense is redefined here.

Kirkus Reviews: The complex stages of guilt, grief, and recovery in the wake of a boy's hit-and-run death are exquisitely portrayed in this heartrending story by Schwartz (Bicycle Days), whose characterizations are as finely nuanced as they are sympathetic. Ten-year-old Josh Learner was killed by a hit-and-run driver that summer night in Connecticut, on the way back from a symphony picnic with his family; for the three adults—his parents and the driver of the speeding car—who saw what happened, it was as if their lives stopped then, too. His father Ethan, an English professor at a small college nearby, bears guilt for not having insisted that Josh come away from the road; his mother Grace is guilt-ridden as well, for having insisted they stop at the gas station so that Josh's sister Emma could use the restroom; and Dwight, running late after seeing a Red Sox game with his son and worried about the wrath of his ex at not having Sam back on time, not only has to bear the certainty of having killed someone Sam's age, but also the fact that the sleeping boy received a black eye from the accident—to go with the broken jaw that Dwight had given him accidentally on another occasion. In the ensuing months, Ethan tries to carry on while Grace shuts down almost completely, losing her business and her bearings. The police investigation goes nowhere, and when Ethan blows up at the officer in charge, he guarantees there'll be no further help from that quarter. Dwight, meanwhile, has let his legal practice go to hell, alienated himself from Sam and everyone else, and taken to heavy drinking while waiting for someone to find him out. After more than a year, Ethan finally does—and as the first snow of that year falls, they enact a ritual of revenge both primal and fitting. Rarely have three lives in crisis been detailed with such compassion and care: a tragic, utterly absorbing tale.


No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy

From the Publisher
"Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?" A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies.

From The Critics
Walter Kirn - The New York Times: Such sinister high hokum might be ridiculous if McCarthy didn't keep it moving faster than the reader can pause to think about it. He's a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages. The choreographed conflicts, set on a stage as big as Texas but as spiritually claustrophobic as a back-room cockfight ring, resolve themselves with a mechanistic certitude that satisfies the brain's brute love of pattern and bypasses its lofty emotional centers. Like Bell, we can only sit back and watch the horror, not wishfully influence its outcome. The clock has been wound, the key's been thrown away, and the round will not end until the hands reach midnight. The book leaves the feeling that we don't have long to wait.

Jeffery Lent - The Washington Post: … this is an entertaining novel from one of our best writers. Often seen as a fabulist and an engineer of dark morality tales, McCarthy is first a storyteller.

Publishers Weekly: Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex-Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. In a series of thoughtful first-person passages interspersed throughout, Sheriff Bell laments the changing world, wrestles with an uncomfortable memory from his service in WWII and-a soft ray of light in a book so steeped in bloodshed-rejoices in the great good fortune of his marriage. While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life. Agent, Amanda Urban. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal: McCarthy has reached the pinnacle of literary success, with critical recognition, best-seller status, and cult-author cachet. It is a difficult position to maintain, and it doesn't help that his idiosyncratic prose style, which tries to wrest poetry from hardscrabble lives, has become increasingly mannered. In his latest novel, McCarthy stumbles headlong into self-parody. Llewelyn Moss is a humble welder who hunts not for sport but to put food on the table. Tracking a wounded antelope one morning, Moss finds an abandoned truck filled with bullet-ridden corpses, sealed packages of "Mexican brown," and $2 million in cash. He leaves the dope behind but takes the money, changing in that moment from hunter to prey. Moss is tailed by Anton Chigurh, an updated version of the satanic Judge Holden from Blood Meridian (1985). Straight-arrow Sheriff Bell, the old man of the title, tries his best to save young Moss, but Chigurh is unstoppable. McCarthy lays out his rancorous worldview with all the nuance and subtlety of conservative talk radio. It is hard to believe that this is the same person who wrote Suttree (1979). A made-for-television melodrama filled with guns and muscle cars, this will nonetheless be in demand; for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/05.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.



Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje

From the Publisher
From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable new novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time.In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence — of both hand and heart — that sets fire to the rest of their lives.Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time — Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.

From The Critics
Janet Maslin - The New York Times … [Ondaatje] is a writer of intense acuity. His eminence is well earned. This book is initially difficult, but the more you give Divisadero, the more it gives in return.

Jeff Turrentine - The Washington Post: What an unusual, and unusually rich, experience it is to read Divisadero, the new novel by Michael Ondaatje -- like going for a walk in a familiar neck of the woods, getting lost and then discovering an entirely new neck of woods filled with unknown wonders. The title provides only the subtlest of clues: It's the name of the San Francisco street on which one character, Anna, lives. Within the story, it's mere trivia; none of the novel's action takes place there, and Anna herself only mentions her street in passing. But Ondaatje apparently loves what that word connotes -- a line between two realms, separating them but also hinging them. And how appropriate, for Divisadero is ultimately a story about two worlds divided by decades and oceans, but connected by clarion, undiminishable echoes.
Publishers Weekly Davis (American Splendor) reads Ondaatje's puzzle of a novel delicately, as if hesitant to jostle a single piece out of place. Often playing emotionally frazzled characters on screen, Davis is far more understated here in offering up Ondaatje's hybrid narrative-one that goes from 1970s San Francisco to early 20th-century France, linking past and present with loose tendrils of memory and history. She does a fine job with the tricky French names and nomenclature, and puts her natural gifts as an actor to good use with her subtle, understated, well-oiled reading. Davis still sounds as no-nonsense as ever, but her skilled reading offers a good deal more patience and tenderness than her often-testy characters do. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 16). (June)

Library Journal: Along with a mysterious guy named Coop, Anna and Claire help their father on his Northern California ranch, circa 1970, until a terrible incident sends Anna on the run. Ondaatje's first novel in six years; with an 11-city tour.

Jhumpa Lahiri: My life always stops for a new book by Michael Ondaatje. I began Divisadero as soon as it came into my possession and over the course of a few evenings was captivated by Ondaatje's finest novel to date. The story is simple, almost mythical, stemming from a family on a California farm that is ruptured just as it is about to begin. Two daughters, Anna and Claire, are raised not just as siblings but with the intense bond of twins, interchangeable, inseparable. Coop, a boy from a neighboring farm, is folded into the girls' lives as a hired hand and quasi-brother. Anna, Claire, and Coop form a triangle that is intimate and interdependent, a triangle that brutally explodes less than thirty pages into the book. We are left with a handful of glass, both narratively and thematically. But Divisadero is a deeply ordered, full-bodied work, and the fragmented characters, severed from their shared past, persevere in relation to one another, illuminating both what it means to belong to a family and what it means to be alone in the world. The notion of twins, of one becoming two, pervades the novel, and so the farm in California is mirrored by a farm in France, the setting for another plot line in the second half of the book and giving us, in a sense, two novels in one. But the stories are not only connected but calibrated by Ondaatje to reveal a haunting pattern of parallels, echoes, and reflections across time and place. Like Nabokov, another master of twinning, Ondaatje's method is deliberate but discreet, and it was only in rereading this beautiful book--which I wanted to do as soon as I finished it--that the intricate play of doubles was revealed. Every sign of the author's genius is here: the searing imagery, the incandescent writing, the calm probing of life's most turbulent and devastating experiences. No one writes as affectingly about passion, about time and memory, about violence--subjects that have shaped Ondaatje's previous novels. But there is a greater muscularity to Divisadero, an intensity born from its restraint. Episodes are boiled down to their essential elements, distilled but dramatic, resulting in a mosaic of profound dignity, with an elegiac quietude that only the greatest of writers can achieve.