MANHATTAN BEACH

By Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan’s previous novel, the Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, was a dazzling, post-modern high-wire act. What would she do next? Too smart to try to outdo herself, she did research — lots and lots of research — mostly revolving around the mysteries of the deep. At every turn, there is water and the people who make their living and support a war on and in it: longshoremen, divers, merchant marine, sailors, the women who do the jobs left by the men who’ve gone to war, the men who stoke the boiler, and the men who know where the bodies are buried.

At heart, Manhattan Beach is a book about a girl and her father, 11-year-old Anna and Eddie Kerrigan, trying to keep his head above water and his family afloat on the fringes of the New York underworld in the 1930s. Ten years later, the country is at war, Eddie has disappeared, and Anna works in the Brooklyn Naval Yard and yearns to be the first woman to be a diver, doing underwater repairs to the great ships that she sees in the newsreels.

This is a coming-of-age novel, a crime novel, a war novel, a New York novel, and that all-too-rare phenomenon, a literary page-turner. Jennifer Egan doesn’t let her research overwhelm her literary skills and doesn’t let her story overwhelm her characters. Highly recommended.

A lifelong book nut, Abby retired from a forty-year computer software career and ticked an item off her bucket list by going to work in a bookstore.  A native New Yorker, she moved to Boston to be among her people:  family and Red Sox fans.  She is a music lover, crossword puzzler, baseball fan, and political junkie who flunked Halloween costumes but can debug her daughter’s wifi.

There’s nothing like a good thriller once in a while. But the qualifier matters. Cardboard characters, contrived suspense, and Hollywood cliff-hangers won’t cut it. But an espionage novel that hinges on character rather than non-stop action and that provides glimpses of an unfamiliar or exotic world is a great treat. Joseph Kanon’s latest, Defectors, fits the bill nicely.

In 1970, I traveled to Scandinavia and the Soviet Union with a group sponsored by a left-wing lawyers’ association.  After stops in Stockholm, Helsinki, Leningrad, and Moscow, we flew to Central Asia, where we visited Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. A lovely, radical sixty-ish couple wasn’t on the plane to Uzbekistan with us and didn’t rejoin the group when we returned to Moscow before flying home.  We were told there was a medical issue although both had seemed hale and hearty in the early going.  Knowing their background, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had defected.  Is that how it would have been done in 1970?  I have no idea.  But I have thought about them occasionally and tried to imagine what it might have been like for them if they had indeed stayed in the Soviet Union.  It’s safe to say that their lives would not have been like those of the defectors in this gripping novel.

Frank Weeks wasn’t an ordinary American Communist when he and his wife fled to Moscow in 1949. He had been a high-ranking intelligence officer about to be exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union after an operation that went disastrously wrong. Twelve years later, still working for the KGB, Frank has written a memoir that “the Service” will allow to be published, and his brother Simon has been approved to come to Moscow to edit the book, only to learn on arrival that Frank has an ulterior motive for this visit. There will be plenty of thriller-worthy action to come – deception, murder, betrayal, CIA and KGB operations and counter-operations – but the real pleasures of the novel are in the lives of Frank and Jo Weeks and their “friends” – the community of former British and American spies who are spared the privation of ordinary Russians but not the grim reality of the workers’ paradise they believed in…the spacious but threadbare apartment, the musty dacha, the faded elegance of the Bolshoi, the privileged access to groceries, the vodka-soaked nights at the bar in the Metropol, the ever-present KGB minder…

Frank and Simon were close as boys and followed similar career paths, Frank into the CIA, Simon into the State Department. But was Frank using his brother, extracting valuable bits of information in casual conversation over their regular dinners? After Frank’s betrayal and twelve years apart, the relationship between the brothers is tense but still intimate as Simon vacillates between trusting and being wary of his charming brother, and he is still drawn to Jo, with whom he had a brief dalliance before she met and married Frank. The fine supporting cast features a woman who once smuggled atomic secrets over a border in her hat, the lonely widow of a brilliant scientist, assorted Brits with assorted motives (including a couple of real-life spies), and Boris – the factotum who is always on hand and always listening.

Defectors is Kanon’s eighth novel. The others are similarly satisfying, particularly his first, Los  Alamos. It’s a murder mystery with a compelling historical overlay as J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of scientists in New Mexico race to develop the atomic bomb in the final days of World War II. There’s no better way to lose sleep and absorb some modern history than a Joseph Kanon novel.

Abby is a lifelong book nut who retired from a forty-year computer software career in 2007 and ticked an item off her bucket list by going to work in a bookstore. She is a native New Yorker who moved to Boston recently to be among her people:  family and Red Sox fans.  She is a music lover, crossword puzzler, baseball fan, and political junkie who flunked Halloween costumes but can debug her daughter’s wifi.

Your comments are deeply appreciated–leave word for Abby below.

THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE

by Andrew Sean Greer, 2008

The Story of a Marriage was the BOLLI Book Group selection for April. We had a spirited discussion that covered a lot of ground, as does this short, absorbing novel.

The Story of a Marriage is an affecting novel that is so good on so many levels that Andrew Sean Greer — author of the wonderful The Confessions of Max Tivoli — can be forgiven some quibbles. What he gets right: 1) the evocation of the fog-bound Sunset District in San Francisco in 1953 as the young families of war veterans are putting down roots in the burgeoning middle-class neighborhood; 2) the way the fear and repression of the times — war, McCarthyism, sex, race —  are reflected in peoples’ lives and especially in their marriages, the suffocating submersion of everything that isn’t “mild and good”; 3) the way “we think we know the ones we love” but one day find ourselves sleeping next to a stranger; 4) the beautiful sentences and turns of phrase.

The quibbles: Neither the plot nor the protagonist’s voice are fully plausible; the “delayed reveal” of important plot points feels manipulative; and there’s some overwriting going on.

This is nothing more or less than the story of a marriage — one marriage, of a young couple who had been teen-age sweethearts in rural Kentucky and stumble upon each other on a beach in San Francisco, having each landed there after the war. It’s a well-worn dictum that there are only two plots in fiction: someone goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. This novel is a quintessential example of the latter as a handsome, blond stranger knocks on Pearlie Cook’s door, upends everything she thought she knew about her husband and their marriage, and sets the story in motion.

There is not much more that can be said without giving away too much. Whether you find them annoying or pleasurable, unexpected twists and secrets are at the heart of this short novel and you can’t help but be borne along on the beautiful language and by wanting to know what happens. An extremely satisfying read.

THE NORTH WATER

by Ian McGuire,  2016

I can breathe now. Clean, warm, fresh air wafting in the window. There’s not much breathing to be done while reading The North Water – one of The New York Times ten best books of 2016 – both because of nonstop action and because of the overwhelmingly fetid atmosphere that pervades this brutal and brilliant novel. Seafaring saga, wilderness survival adventure, suspense story, morality tale, and more blood and guts (literally) than you can imagine in under 300 pages.

As a 19th-century whaling ship heads north to Greenland for reasons not limited to whaling, mortal danger — and not just from the elements — is the constant companion of the miscreants and misfits passing for a crew. The brutality in the novel is shocking and relentless but never gratuitous. And unlike in most historical fiction, there’s no scene-setting distraction, no digressions to describe, say, the state of the whaling industry or the ways of the Esquimaux. The only descriptive detail is the minimum needed to advance the story and our understanding of the characters. Thus the lack of a respite in which to breathe as the story careens forward.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart or, trust me, the queasy of stomach. But for pure story-telling power, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Abby is a lifelong book nut who retired from a forty-year computer software career in 2007 and ticked an item off her bucket list by going to work in a bookstore. She is a native New Yorker who moved to Boston recently to be among her people:  family and Red Sox fans.  She is a music lover, crossword puzzler, baseball fan, and political junkie who flunked Halloween costumes but can debug her daughter’s wifi.

This month, Abby reaches back to the relatively recent past for two books you may have missed.  And if you did, both are worth your attention!

THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON

by Adam Johnson, 2012

There are many books I’ve loved, many writers I’ve admired, some whose talent has been awe-inspiring. But it’s not often that I read a novel wondering “how the hell did he/she do that?” This is one of those times. How did Adam Johnson imagine his way into the dystopia of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea and create a world so real to the reader that when Americans show up, they seem oddly alien?

The book is darkly comic and desperately sad, always teetering on the brink of complete absurdity but true in its heartbreaking depiction of people just trying to survive the stories of their lives that the state has determined for them.

“Where we are from . . . stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”

In the first part of the book, the protagonist, Pak Jun Do, is plucked from the orphanage run by his father and becomes a fighter in the tunnels under the demilitarized zone, then a kidnapper, a spy at sea intercepting radio transmissions, and, when a mission to Texas goes hilariously wrong, a prisoner in a mining camp. In part two, the picaresque gives way to intrigue and romance among the upper echelons and the Dear Leader himself as Jun Do evolves from a tool of the state to a man determined to fashion his own story.

This is a remarkable accomplishment, at once compellingly readable and scarily disorienting. It is every bit as good as its Pulitzer Prize (2012) would suggest.

THE GOOD LORD BIRD

by James McBride, 2013

James McBride walks a fine line in the National Book Award-winning (2013) The Good Lord Bird. Treating tragic and painful historical events with humor is risky business. His subject is John Brown and the failed raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1861. Brown was a zealot whose plan to free the slaves bordered on lunacy but McBride succeeds in humanizing him in a rollicking romp of a story that is both irreverent and historically astute.

The narrator is Henry Shackleford, a twelve-year-old slave mistaken for a girl and swept up by “the Captain” to become his good-luck charm in the war against slavery. Henry/Henrietta is a wonderful character who doesn’t understand John Brown’s religious zeal and doesn’t want any part of war but figures out how to survive both.

“I couldn’t make head nor tails of what he was saying, for I was to learn that Old John Brown could work the Lord into just about any aspect of his comings and goings in life, including using the privy. That’s one reason I weren’t a believer, having been raised by my Pa, who was a believer and a lunatic, and them things seemed to run together. But it weren’t my place to argue with a white man, especially one who was my kidnapper, so I kept my lips closed.”

Henry lives for a time in a whorehouse, falls in love twice, escapes the clutches of Frederick Douglass, meets Harriet Tubman, and plays a role in “hiving” (recruiting) Negroes to the cause. He comes to know Brown as a “good, kind lunatic,” a man as unique as the rare bird of the title – a bird “so pretty that when man sees it, he says  ‘Good Lord.’”  The portrayal of John Brown — both hero and fool – is a great accomplishment, as is this brilliantly entertaining amalgam of history and imagination.

A lifelong book nut, Abby retired from a forty-year computer software career in 2007 and ticked an item off her bucket list by going to work in a bookstore. She is a native New Yorker who moved to Boston recently to be among her people:  family and Red Sox fans. She is a music lover, crossword puzzler, baseball fan, and political junkie who flunked Halloween costumes but can debug her daughter’s wifi.