The Cue Card

Here are a couple more photos taken from my week in Vancouver, B.C. It’s a beautiful city, especially in the summertime, and I was able to get around town by bicycle. Like most of the Northwest, it’s quite progressive and has some good bike lanes for commuting throughout the area. While there, I was lugging around in my backpack, along with my tennis gear, a library hardback copy of Jonathan Dee’s novel “The Locals,” which came out in August. It’s a sprawling thing — and it sort of reminded me of last year when I brought a copy of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel “The Sympathizer” with me to the tennis nationals, which seemed sort of crazy. Surely one could argue these are both important reads, but did I really need to challenge myself so — right there on such a fun and busy August trip?

What was I thinking? Obviously lighter fare would have been much more sensible, but sometimes you have to read things when you get them.

Anyways, “The Locals” is not a hard novel to read per se (there’s some nice storytelling within it), it’s just robust. Every page is filled to the brink with text without much in the way of breaks or dialogue. What is 400 pages felt a bit like 600 pages in reality. Still after a couple weeks, I came out the other side, feeling like I came off a significant mountain.

How to explain it? “The Locals” is a novel, set during the days right after 9/11 till after the housing bubble bursts in 2008-9, that tells the story of a small town of residents in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. There’s quite a number of characters, maybe a dozen or so that Jonathan Dee seamlessly shifts in and out of the story detailing their lives and perspectives in the town. (This slice of life aspect of various characters in a small town reminded me a bit of Kent Haruf’s novels, but then his stories are much shorter, and Dee’s novel delves more into America’s dramas with rising inequality, working class decline, and a new authoritarianism that takes hold of the town.)

The main characters include various members of the Firth family: Mark Firth being a contractor who’s trying to re-coop his family’s losses after being swindled by a financial advisor. He seems to have lost his wife Karen’s trust in his financial feasibility and his daughter Haley is going through some growing pains as a teenager. Meanwhile Mark envies the wealthy weekenders whose second homes sit vacant during the winter.

Then along comes a rich NYC hedge fund manager who moves to town after 9/11 and hires Mark to fortify his mansion with security additions. The two represent different worlds that end up colliding in the novel, particularly when the ex-Wall Street manager becomes the town’s first selectman and begins to implement changes that ultimately upset the town’s applecart.

Other characters include Mark’s sister Candace, a dissatisfied teacher who’s had an affair with a parent of one of her students; and his troubled brother Gerry, recently fired, who Mark goes into business with — buying up foreclosed properties as real estate investments. These characters, along with Mark’s wife, parents, and daughter, are just the tip of the iceberg in this story of a community that’s headed for the economic skids.

I liked quite a bit about “The Locals,” namely Dee’s storytelling I thought was well done, and the atmosphere felt real; he also draws a revealing portrait of the various characters in the town (all of whom seem pretty unhappy). The only trouble I had with it was there’s not a whole lot that happens in the story or much action (the most fluid part is at the novel’s beginning during the week of Sept. 11, 2001, when a stranger befriends Mark while he’s in New York City, uses him for dinner and a place to crash and then ends up stealing from his wallet). Ouch, it’s a harsh unsettling way to experience 9/11 through the eyes of this criminal, yet in many ways it’s the most grabbing part of the story.

Thereafter the novel shifts to Mark’s hometown in the Berkshires where characters alternate in and out throughout the story, though I’m not sure if it really goes anywhere — other than eliciting the general malaise and economic struggles in the years after. I became a bit exhausted at points reading it, yet still I persevered, which in the end felt good. It’s a different kind of 9/11 story for sure (more about the post years in a small town); still I’m glad to have perused its perspectives and characters.

Also last week I finished the audiobook of Allen Eskens’s 2014 debut novel “The Life We Bury,” which turned out to be excellent. I didn’t even know much about it, but I had been on the library wait list for it after Kathy at the blog Bermuda Onion had such positive things to say about it last year. And indeed “The Life We Bury” is a crime story that drew me in hook, line, and sinker. The narration, in particular, by the character Joe Talbert, who has a troubled family life and is putting himself through school at the University of Minnesota, is terrific. Good grief, I didn’t really know if the audio was nonfiction or fiction for awhile — it just came out like it was a true story of what happened to this guy.

Though I eventually did clue in: it’s a story, told by Joe, who goes to a retirement home for a class assignment to interview and write a brief biography of a person. There he meets Carl Iverson, a dying Vietnam vet and a convicted murderer, who’s recently been paroled. As he begins to write Carl’s story, Joe becomes taken with finding out whether Carl was indeed responsible for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl over 30 years ago. All the while, Joe must deal with the demands of his alcoholic mother and worry about his autistic brother who’s under her care.

Oh it’s good stuff, and the story keeps moving as Joe begins to learn things about Carl’s original trial that don’t seem to add up. He enlists the help of his skeptical college neighbor Lila Nash and the two make quite a team, following leads that eventually become dangerous. You won’t know till the end what happens to Joe and whether Carl has been wrongly convicted.

I thought the narration, pacing, and characters were great in this, and it slightly reminded me of John Grisham’s book “The Pelican Brief” because the protagonist/sleuth in that was also a college student who becomes endangered. Other than that I don’t think there’s too many similarities between the two. But I’m glad to have found the audio version of “The Life We Bury” because I think I might have liked it better (due to its narration) than if I had experienced it in print; go figure.

I’ll be curious to see if Allen Esken’s next crime novel “The Deep Dark Descending,” which comes out in October, will be as good. Also the movie version of “The Life We Bury” is slated to come out in 2018, though no actors have been officially attached to it yet, but it’s left readers of the book wondering about the possibilities. So far no one comes to my mind for the role of Joe right off the bat. I’ll have to think on it.

What about you — have you read either of these books or authors — and if so, what did you think?

Greetings. I hope everyone is enjoying August. Warm and smoky weather persists here with most of the smoke coming from the numerous wildfires going on in the province west of us — British Columbia. I only hope firefighters can get a handle on the blazes there, or at least some help from mother nature. They could use some rain.

You see my book assistant, at left, looks concerned, but it’s likely she’s just wondering what we’re having for lunch. Food — not fires or books — is usually her main preoccupation. I’ll be in Vancouver two weekends from now to play in the national age-group tennis tournament. Let’s hope the smoky air quality there improves; they say it’s a bit like Beijing’s air at the moment. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with two reviews of what I finished lately.

Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar / Harper’s / 352 pages / 2017

This was a novel I had on my summer reading list and my first by this author who was born in Bombay, India, and now lives and teaches in Cleveland. I had heard quite a bit about her novels, and this story, which examines race and privilege in the U.S., didn’t disappoint.

In a nutshell, it’s about a nine-year-old African American boy (Anton), who after an incident is taken from his drug-using birth mother and becomes a foster child to a rich, white, U.S. judge and his wife whose son was killed in an accident. The judge is so taken by Anton that eventually he has strings pulled in order to adopt him, giving him the affluent life he never imagined. But later in life when Anton comes to discover the truth about his birth mother and what happened, he’s left to reassess those who’ve meant the most to him.

This novel I thought was well done. It’s a bit like a morality play involving race and class — and a boy caught between two backgrounds as he grows up and goes to university and then law school. It made me get into the characters’ minds about the circumstances right off the bat. I was lured into their world and felt a bit for each of them in a situation that never seems fully clearcut or good guy / bad guy — although the line the foster father crosses to adopt Anton is truly squirm-worthy.

It reminded me a bit of the novel “The Light Between Oceans” as both involve stories about raising a child that is not biologically yours. Though “Everybody’s Son” asks different questions — about one’s identity and being black or white, and rich or poor. As Anton’s college girlfriend tells him: “I can’t decide if you’re the whitest black man I’ve ever known or the blackest white man I’ve ever known.”

It also drives home the point that while one’s parents might love and have the best intentions in raising their kids, they don’t always do what’s right by them — as Anton finds out with his birth and foster parents. If you like such sticky-situation stories then this one is for you. I found the characters felt pretty real even if the construct of the story played out a bit simplistically at times. All in all, it makes me want to try out other novels by Thrity Umrigar in the future, such as perhaps “The Story Hour” from 2014. Which is your favorite of hers?

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me: A Memoir by Sherman Alexie / Little, Brown / 464 pages / 2017

Wow this book has a bit of everything to it — part family memoir, part poetry, part remembrance, part grief book, part essay, part cultural reckoning. It took me a couple of weeks to listen to all of it as an audiobook read by the author, which I’m glad I chose since he seems born to orally narrate his works.

I’m a bit of newbie to knowing about Native American author Sherman Alexie, age 50, who I vaguely remember won the National Book Award in 2007 for his young adult novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” Somehow I missed this well-known book, but I recently heard him interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on her CBC program “Writers & Company” and I thought I’d try out his memoir.

It revolves mostly around the bittersweet relationship the author had with his mother and the years he spent growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. At the onset, he replays his mother’s illness and funeral at age 78 in 2015, and then he looks back on his years with her and his siblings. His mother had saved their lives when she quit drinking and supported them with the quilts she made, yet she was tough on them too. Alexie’s father was an alcoholic, and not the breadwinner, and Alexie’s years were often spent hungry and challenged on the reservation. He had to have a brain operation when he was six months old and was bullied at school. But somehow he persevered, and both parents apparently supported his leaving the reservation to attend high school 22 miles away in Reardon, Washington, and he never fully went back.

Sherman Alexie has quite a story, and it’s dramatically told. He doesn’t shy away from anything, whether it’s personal or he’s talking about genocide or prejudices against Native Americans. I thought some parts of the book were excellent and the author’s candid grief, anger, and humor shine through. I sympathized with him over the death of his mother, which has caused him so much pain, the brain operations he’s gone through, his life on the reservation, and the stuff he found out about a couple relatives being raped  (though I was a bit unsure from his narrative whether his mother was a product of a rape or his half-sister was, or both were). Regardless it’s a pretty emotional narrative in parts.

I also liked his poetry that he includes and narrates well. It’s interesting too he talks not only about the genocide done by whites and the damage it has caused, but also is quite highly critical of the violence and harm that Indians do to one another. Particularly he is unnerved when other Natives question his Indian-ness or his tribal affiliation, and he takes to task Indian violence on the reservations.

I gave the book 3.5 stars on Goodreads, which put me in the minority of many who liked it more. My only trouble with his memoir was that he rambles on and on from chapter to chapter (it’s not exactly chronologically told) and it felt unfocused quite a bit and overly long. It seemed to circle around and around repetitively to the same topics and I grew tired of the run-on-ness of it. It was a bit like a marathon and an endurance event (at 160 chapters!), and I wasn’t sure a few times if I was going to finish it, but in the end I managed to. It felt a bit uneven, but still I’m glad I read it; many parts of it I found were quite powerful and he had plenty of interesting things to say.

What about you — have you read this book or author, or Thrity Umrigar’s — and if so, what  did you think?

It’s good to be home after a great trip and summer vacation back East. We spent a week cottaging (my new verb) on an island along the St. Lawrence River near the Thousand Islands. See the view from the photo at left. It’s a beautiful area and river — where my husband grew up — that borders Canada and the U.S. and we visited both sides. Has anyone been to Gananoque, Ontario, or Clayton, N.Y., or Cape Vincent, N.Y.? Lovely little towns. We enjoyed bicycling the island, kayaking around, sunning and swimming (mostly my husband braved the waters while I read my book and enjoyed the views). It was a neat place to explore and we will think about it again maybe for next year.

We had a fair share of sun and rain there with a few big thunderstorms that crashed down rattling the small cottage. With all the water and humidity, it felt like a jungle out there covered with lush vegetation and trees — quite a change from out West where it’s very dry and scorched at the moment. We returned home to Western Canada to a heat wave where things are brown, and fires are raging in B.C. (Down south my father said it was 112 where they live in California, yikes!). Thankfully we are getting a thunderstorm today and a reprieve from the heat. Meanwhile, I will leave you with a couple of reviews of novels I finished on the trip.

I’m not sure why I never read Jeannette Walls’s memoir “The Glass Castle” when it came out in 2005. It was on the New York Times Best Seller List for more than five years. I think by then I might have been a bit wary or just plain scared of down-and-out memoirs about really tough childhoods. I had read Mary Karr’s 1995 memoir “The Liar’s Club” and Dorothy Allison’s 1992 semi-autobiographical novel “Bastard Out of Carolina,” both of which were pretty disturbing. There was also Tobias Wolff’s 1989 memoir “This Boy’s Life” and Kathryn Harrison’s 1997 memoir “The Kiss,” both of which I knew were pretty rough and I held off on reading. I was sort of in a recovery pause from those kinds of memoirs, but then I heard “The Glass Castle” was coming out as a movie in August, and I thought it was about time I read it and I wasn’t disappointed.

In fact it surprised me just how powerful it was. I completely fell into Jeannette Walls’s story on Page 1 and it kept me in its grips till the very end. For those unfamiliar with it, the memoir recounts the poverty-stricken upbringing Walls and her siblings faced at the hands of her dysfunctional parents. When she was young, the family moved around the West among small mining towns where her father hoped to find gold and strike it rich. They often lived in dirty shacks and didn’t have enough to eat or clothes to wear. Eventually they inherited a place to live in Phoenix when Jeannette’s grandmother died, but after some years they ran out of money and moved once again — this time to Jeannette’s paternal grandparents’ town in Welch, West Virginia.

It’s in Welch that things become even more dicey for Jeannette and her siblings. Her alcoholic father spends their money at the bars and her mother puts her energies into doing artwork, rather than her off-and-on teaching jobs. All the while the family resides in a small rotting house with no indoor plumbing and a roof that leaks on them. Her father promises that he’ll someday build his dream house, a glass castle on the property, which like all of his dreams never comes to fruition. Still Jeannette and her siblings persevere, leaving in their late teens for New York City, where they somehow make it, pursuing higher education and careers.

It’s quite a story, made all the more crazy since their parents wind up following them to New York, eventually living in an abandoned building as squatters. Jeannette recounts one evening while in a taxi seeing her mother picking through a dumpster for food. Jeannette and her siblings had helped her parents to get off the streets on various occasions, eventually to no avail. It’s this secret about Jeannette’s life that eventually propels her to confront her shame and open up about her impoverished childhood.

It’s a story that left me at times feeling quite exasperated and angered by her parents, who are truly neglectful of raising their kids and at times feeding them. I wanted to shake some sense into them along the way, yet surprisingly the kids make their way nonetheless and the family keeps together. The emotional bonds remain despite all the hardships, which I found surprising. It’s not a ranting memoir by an embittered daughter but rather a coming clean story about one’s past, in which the author remains in the end close to her parents.

As rough as it gets, the story luckily is not filled with a lot of physical abuse like some memoirs are about rough childhoods. I was thankful for that, and I thought Jeannette’s writing was superb — candid and evocative — and not overly wrought. Just telling it like it was. If you haven’t read it and get a chance, don’t pass the book up; there’s things to be learned from the memoir that I hope not to forget.

But judging by the movie’s trailer, there’s a chance the movie will not live up to the book for me. They make it seem sort of whimsical, as if the parents were just some unconventional, optimistic dreamers who wanted to challenge their gifted kids and have them learn the ropes a different way. While some of that may be true, from what I read in the book their grim poverty was real and the parents’ neglect of responsibilities seemed abusive; it’s a serious issue in many homes. I hope the movie treats it as such, though I agree the parents’ characters were more nuanced than being just plain bad or good; they were a mix, which makes it all the more emotionally complex. Still I hope the filmmakers have been careful to match it to what happened in the book.

Also last week I finished the audiobook of Katie Kitamura’s novel “A Separation,” which came out in February. For some reason — maybe because of the book’s marketing — the story was not what I expected but I liked it perhaps even more for that. It is actually much different than a “Gone Girl” type of thriller. Good grief, it’s an injustice to lump it together into that genre — for both fans of that genre and others who avoided it for trying to be another “Gone Girl.” For the record, “A Separation” is a slow-burn of a novel that’s much more ponderous about its themes.

It’s about a woman — a wife in London, whose mother-in-law sends her to Greece to find her son (the woman’s husband) because she hasn’t been able to get in contact with him and is worried. The husband, who’s on work travels in Greece, and the wife have been married for five years, yet separated six months ago without telling friends and relatives, maybe with a chance that they’d work it out. But when the wife gets to his hotel in Greece, she finds he’s not there but is known by the staff and is thought to be out doing research in the area, which has been charred earlier that summer by wildfires.

You get an ominous picture as the woman narrates the story of her travels to the hotel, her meetings with the staff there, her talks with her husband’s parents, and her searches for her husband. There’s not a large amount of action or dialogue in the story but it’s more consumed by the woman’s narration of her internal thoughts, feelings, and suspicions regarding her marriage, her husband’s infidelities, which you learn about, and love and divorce.

Wow this woman rattles on and on about it all. It’s quite a sad and tension-filled narration, sometimes I wanted her to stop and the story to just get on with where it was going, but most times I found her thoughts revealing and I couldn’t turn away as small details about the marriage unfold as well as those about her husband and what happened to him. It’s an internal kind of story no doubt, and in that way it might not appeal to everyone. Some might lose patience midway through and feel like chucking the novel against a wall, but I was kept intrigued and wondered admiringly who the author was and why I hadn’t know of her earlier. I found “A Separation” to be a bit unusual and a potent small gem. I will watch for whatever Katie Kitamura puts out next. Apparently she’s married to British novelist Hari Kunzru, for those who know his work.

What about you — have you read “A Separation” or “The Glass Castle,” and if so, what did you think?

I was in an outdoor club tennis tournament over the weekend that was fun but took a lot of time. It was hot and windy and yesterday temps hit 90F degrees, which is big for Western Canada; people generally sort of melt here under such conditions, but they seemed to be having fun along the river, floating rafts downstream and throwing balls for dogs.

Meanwhile my husband and Labrador were out sailing and hiking. See Stella at left. She’s a big water dog and likes to show off, leaping into the river at full run. She believes she’s the best swimmer in town, which is pretty hard to argue with since she’s so fanatical about it.

We are going away next week back East for our summer vacation. Usually we don’t go in July, but it just worked out that way. And of course it’s Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation on July 1, so it’s a big deal. We will bang pots and pans and watch fireworks and celebrate along the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario. From there we can see Upstate New York, but we will be on the other side of the water, sporting our Maple Leaf flags and boating around amid some of the Thousand Islands. I will report on it when I get back, until then I will leave you with two brief reviews of what I finished lately.

Jardine Libaire’s novel “White Fur,” which came out in May, is getting quite a bit of buzz this summer and I was lucky to get a copy from the library. It’s about two 20-year-olds from opposite sides of the tracks who fall for one another amid the glitz and grit of New York City in the 1980s. They meet in New Haven, Conn., where Jamie Hyde is a junior at Yale. He’s beautiful and wealthy, an heir to a family fortune with high expectations. Elise Perez lives next door in a rundown apartment with a roommate who found her sleeping in his car. Half white, half Puerto Rican, Elise is a high school dropout who doesn’t know her father and ran away from her  mother’s life in public housing in Bridgeport.

Nevertheless the attraction between Jamey and Elise is quite instant. And what seems to start as a sexual obsession becomes something greater — as they move to Manhattan together that summer. Yet as their relationship grows, there’s forces — such as Jamie’s intervening family — that threaten to tear them apart and will have consequences for them staying together. You have to stay tuned to the very end to see whether they will survive it.

It’s a story that’s been compared to “Romeo and Juliet” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “Less Than Zero,” and it reminded me a bit of a mash-up of those. Of course, the theme of star-crossed lovers on opposite sides of the tracks has been done many times before, but there’s a freshness to this novel’s episodic-like telling that I found appealing. It’s raw, it’s gritty, it’s poetic at times, and there’s a feel for New York City that brings the story to life. Both protagonists’ views — Elise’s and Jamey’s — get fairly equal weight in the novel as do a bit of their family’s. “White Fur” is not only a love story, but it also focuses a lot on their class distinctions and the divide between rich and poor, which they try to transcend. The different New York City spots they frequent only highlight the melting-pot microcosm of economic society that surrounds them.

There’s not a lot of judgement in the book, other than two people trying to be together from opposite worlds. I thought the author put a lot into its writing and it came together fairly well — except for an episode or twist at the end that seemed to strain believability and that I didn’t care for. Despite that part, I rounded it up to 4 stars on Goodreads, though I don’t think it’s a book for everyone. Just fair warning: it’s rough around the edges, the sex is frequent and graphic and there’s a bit of rough language in it as well. It’s nice though that Elise and Jamey aren’t two misfit drug addicts who don’t know what they’re doing. For the most part, they’re pretty sober and clear about where their hearts come to lie.

Meanwhile, I finished the audiobook of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel “The Circle,” which I don’t know why I didn’t get to when it came out a few years back, but it is long. And the movie of it, which came out at the end of April with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, was pretty much obliterated by the critics, with only 15 favorable ratings compared to 83 rotten ones on the site Rotten Tomatoes. Apparently it’s considered one of the biggest movie disappointments so far of 2017, probably because of how topical and good the novel was. People were waiting for it after the book but then the movie didn’t deliver. Ugh. I couldn’t even talk my husband into going.

But I’m glad I went ahead with the audiobook because I found it quite entertaining and I laughed throughout it. It’s a wonderful satire of Silicon Valley culture and social media, even if it is heavy-handed at times about its message. It seems Eggers had quite a bit of fun writing this one, sticking it to the tech giants at every turn.

It’s a story about Mae Holland who can’t believe her luck when she’s hired to work at the Circle, a Bay Area tech company that’s cornered the world market on social media and e-commerce. As she rises through the ranks, she quickly loses sight of her friends, family, and sense of self to meet her work quotas and gain social acceptance, eventually becoming privy to the company’s plans to make the world safer, which include preventing child abductions through microchips, reducing crime through constant surveillance, and eliminating political corruption through transparency via personal cameras. Soon Mae’s encouraged by the company’s founder to participate in the experiment of full disclosure to “Go Clear” and wear a camera so the public can watch and comment on her every move. But when this has consequences on her family and friends, she must decide if she’s doing the right thing, and whom to trust and be loyal to.

It’s a story that’s a little scary to think about if our every computer keystroke is quantified and tracked and there’s little to no privacy, either online or off. Is this more of what we have to look forward to in the future? It’s a grim thought and Eggers isn’t shy in his novel about showing us the downfalls of this kind of dehumanized world. Though some didn’t like the novel because they found it too heavy-handed or simplistic a screed on the tech world. And they thought Mae was too passive and accepting of the Circle’s policies.

For the most part, I found it a fairly effective satire: funny and alarming at the same time. The corporate culture at the Circle’s campus — where social activities after work hours are encouraged and tracked — are particularly laughable in the book. Pretty soon Mae is just about living on-site and it’s a stifling feeling. She’s railed on to share all of her experiences with her thousands of co-workers through inter-office messaging whether it be while out kayaking on the Bay, or visiting with her parents, or about who’s she’s dating. Oh there’s way too much sharing! It’s a social media company run amuck. You’ll want to steer clear of it if you’re ever offered work at such a place.

This was my first Dave Eggers novel, so I was pretty impressed. I thought it was a bit too long (and I’m sure overdone), but I enjoyed it and would read him again in the future. Some of his novels such as “What Is the What” and his memoir I’ve heard are excellent, so I will eventually get to them.

What about you — have you read “The Circle” or any of Dave Eggers’s novels, or have read “White Fur,” and if so, what did you think? Also Happy 4th of July and Canada Day to all who celebrate it. Enjoy.

Summer days have been busy so I have been away from the blog a bit. I returned from a short trip to California to visit my folks and plunged headfirst into summer chores and activities here. See the photo at left of our bike ride in the mountains from last week. My reading has taken a bit of a hit as a result as it’s been left on the back burner, but I hope to get it back on track soon.

The two novels I finished lately both had a little about religion and faith to them, though they were not alike. You’ll notice neither are on my “summer reading list” that I put forth in my last post but I started them before “the List” was created. So I will have to jump back to that now. Meanwhile here are my reviews of the two recent books.

(The following summary was culled in part from the publisher’s description)

J. Courtney Sullivan’s 2017 novel “Saints For All Occasions” is about two close, Irish Catholic sisters that immigrate to the U.S. in the late 1950s to start a new life in Boston. The older, responsible one (21-year-old Nora) is shy and serious and engaged to a man she doesn’t know if she wants to marry; the other (17-year-old Theresa) is pretty and outgoing and loves the social scene in Boston. But when Theresa becomes pregnant, Nora comes up with a plan to right the situation that will have life-long repercussions for both of them. Fifty years later, Nora is the mother to four grown children and Theresa is a cloistered nun, living in an abbey in rural Vermont. They haven’t spoken in decades, but a sudden death in the family forces them to confront the choices they made from long ago.

The story alternates chapters of the sisters in the 1950s with those from 2009 among Nora’s grown kids and the two sisters, now in their 70s. The oldest son Patrick, who was a troublemaker growing up, is now a bar owner; then there’s John, a successful political consultant (married with an adopted child); followed by Bridget, quietly planning to have a baby with her girlfriend; and lastly Brian, living at home after a failed baseball career. It’s a well-done story and I got caught up into each of the family members’ modern lives and perspectives and how those differed from their mother Nora’s immigrant one. You get a bit from Theresa, too, about her life at the abbey and why she chose the nunnery — and most importantly why the two sisters’ lives diverged so suddenly and much.

It reminded me a bit of other Irish Catholic family tales, though I haven’t read a lot in this genre. I found it rather frustrating because of the secret kept and things left unsaid among the family members that threaten to undo them (which made me want to yell at each to spill the truth). None of the characters are exactly saints in the story and perhaps that’s the point of the book’s title. I particularly wanted to strangle the mother Nora for her stern ways, grudges, and for making matters worse, but then again she’s not altogether bad, but is caring in her own ways, which makes the novel more complex. It’s a story tinged with sadness and regret that made me think about it for quite awhile afterwards.

This was my first novel that I read by J. Courtney Sullivan and I’d be curious to read her others. I’ve heard that her 2011 novel “Maine” perhaps is the one readers have liked the most, though her two others “Commencement” and “The Engagements” are also talked about. As for “Saints For All Occasions,” I gave it a worthy 3.7 stars on Goodreads.

Next up, I finished the audiobook of Yann Martel’s 2016 novel “The High Mountains of Portugal.” You might recall from his award-winning novel “Life of Pi” that Martel’s stories often unfold like fables, delving in allegory and magical realism and containing animals in them. And this novel is no exception.

The book is broken up into three different sections — each like a novella unto themselves with different main characters and set in different decades, but the stories are slightly inter-connected and all come to pass in the same area of Portugal.

It’s a strange novel that touches on faith and religion, and animals and humans. I almost gave up on the book during Part I as nothing much seemed to be happening to keep my attention. This part is set in Portugal in 1904 where a man, whose family has died, embarks on a journey using one of the earliest motor cars to find an artifact of a mysterious crucifix in the high mountains of Portugal. The premise seems enticing, but early on the story waxes on and on about the inner workings of the car and the man’s frustrations with it — and after while I just wanted to throw the audio against the wall. I was surprised — was this really the work of the great Yann Martel, the same author of “Life of Pi”? I couldn’t believe it. But somehow I kept going and eventually odd things about the crucifix artifact were revealed, including its chimp-like qualities.

Thankfully Part II picks up a bit and tells an odd story set in 1938 about a Portuguese pathologist who receives a visit from his wife who waxes on about Christianity in the works of his favorite author Agatha Christie. Afterwards the pathologist has a strange occurrence while doing an autopsy on a man whose body is filled with unusual items, including a curled up chimpanzee. What the story all means, I couldn’t exactly tell you.

But Part III is by far the best. Set in 1981, it tells the story of a Canadian senator who, grieving his wife’s death, moves to Portugal bringing with him a chimpanzee — freed from an animal research facility — as his companion. This last part is wonderfully told and almost fully made up for the other two lesser parts. All three sections are inter-connected by a character and include a protagonist who is grieving a great loss — moreover they all include chimpanzees. As far as I can tell, each story seems to be about faith or the lack of it, though I’m not sure I understood everything in them — or if Yann Martel was smoking too much dope at the time. But he seems to raise and pursue the Darwinian notion that: “We are risen apes, not fallen Angels,” which he quotes at the end of Part I.

If you liked Martel’s novel “Life of Pi,” as I did, (or the movie) you might give this one a try too. It’s not as great as that one was — but still has a few interesting things about it.

What about you — have you read either of these authors, and if so, what did you think?