Monthly Archives: May 2022

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The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah

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Thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright is used to her family picking up and moving on the spur of the moment. Now, her father Ernt, having lost yet another job, has decided to move them to Alaska where they will live off the grid on land he has suddenly inherited from his Vietnam War buddy. Leni hopes this will be the new start that will make everything okay and—a great reader—she’s excited to be going to the place Jack London called the Great Alone. Her frail, former hippie mother Cora will follow her husband anywhere.

Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Leni knows that her parents have a deep and abiding love for each other, a bond that held up during Ernt’s long absence in Vietnam and through his often violent behavior since his return. The small family has no homesteading skills, other than Ernt’s mechanical aptitude, and as assets only the rundown VW bus Ernt has bought with almost the last of the money.

When they finally arrive at their land, they find a tiny cabin with no electricity or running water, set in a yard full of old animal bones, rusty machinery, and other junk. Ernt’s friend never had a chance to start fixing the place up before leaving for Vietnam where he died.

It’s 1974. Kaneq is barely even a town. Its people, mostly living in far-flung homesteads, are fiercely independent even as they pull together to help each other when needed. And help is often needed in this unforgiving environment. Luckily for the Allbrights, their neighbors, especially the family of Ernt’s buddy, show up to sort out the cabin and get the family started on a garden, chicken coop, woodpile, and other necessities. Winter will be coming all too soon.

And with it, Ernt begins to fall apart, undone by the darkness—eighteen-hour nights—and cold. He becomes increasingly paranoid and jealous of a wealthy neighbor who is attracted to Cora. He drinks too much and prepares for the coming collapse of society by accumulating guns. His abuse accelerates, but Cora and Leni always forgive him and keep his violence a secret. At the small schoolhouse, Leni meets the son of the neighbor—the only other child her age—and they become best friends.

While much of the prose is rich with detail, especially of the landscape, I found the story lacked subtlety. The characters are all stereotypes: the violent and alcoholic Vietnam vet with PTSD, the brainless hippie who thinks love will cure all, the emotionally and physically strong (despite her obesity) Black woman who runs the general store and cares for Leni in ways her parents don’t, a Romeo and Juliet couple. Every character is either all good or all evil.

And the stereotypes are dangerously naïve: you should give up everything for true love; Black mammies exist to save/serve White people; abused women love their partners too much to leave them; all vets are dangerous maniacs. The author even perpetuates the urban myth that people called vets baby-killers when they got back from Vietnam. It’s possible that happened once or twice, but the people I knew protesting the war would never have done that. We cared about the soldiers; we wanted to bring them home, out of danger. The right-wing media played the baby-killer tape for their own purposes the same way they did Benghazi and the Welfare Queen.

This could have been a fascinating story about the tension between being independent—the U.S.’s cowboy myth—and being part of a community. It could have been a thoroughly interesting story about the process of learning about the land, making mistakes, finding ways to survive. Instead we get a story about abuse and crazy preppers. The story entirely skips over the part about adapting to Alaska, jumping from the initial cluelessness to a comfortable existence with all systems humming.

Thus the family’s success seemed unrealistic to me, not just their ability to survive the winters, but also their finances. They have no money, yet Ernt always has cash for whiskey.

Aside from the characters and stereotypes, I found the plot lacking nuance. The first half is fairly slow, which didn’t bother me, but the second half turned into a whirlwind. Writers are told to constantly make it harder for the protagonist, but this story goes too far: disaster piled upon preventable disaster, bad luck and bad choices, misery and pain.

I found there wasn’t much to hold me. The story became more and more sentimental, which actually made it harder to engage emotionally. I didn’t sense the love for Alaska; characters talked about loving Alaska, but that’s not the same thing. The cartoonish characters left me cold; I didn’t ever sense the love between the young couple, much less between Ernt and Cora—their famous love that was supposed to excuse everything, including the damage to their daughter.

The one emotion I did feel was the pain: Cora’s and even more Leni’s. I know there are complicated reasons for staying in abusive relationships, but True Love as an excuse makes me roll my eyes. Self-centered parents who ignore how they are damaging their child make me want to spit. Leni, like Jane Eyre and countless other unloved children finds her refuge in books.

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.

I wanted to like this book. Stories about people confronting a new and challenging environment interest me, and Alaska as a setting is a plus. I did find the writing engaging enough to keep reading it, though I set it down often. Ultimately, though, I was disappointed. Of course, your mileage may vary, and many reviews praise this novel.

What stories about Alaska have you read?

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This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, by Jacqueline Winspear

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I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging memoir from the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Some of the themes and settings will be familiar to readers of those novels. Here, Winspear deftly adds family stories to her own memories of growing up in a working-class family in post-war England.

It is the war, both wars, that color their lives. Her grandfather’s shellshock from the Great War makes him hard to live with, panicking at the sound of a dropped pan. Her father, who could never bear loud noises, was assigned to an explosives team during WWII, while her mother as a child was evacuated during the Blitz. Jacqueline grew up listening to her mother’s stories “of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing.”

Most fascinating for me are Jacqueline’s parents, colorful characters whose zest for life keeps them moving around, cash-poor but rich in love for family and the English countryside. Their mutual yearning for adventure prompts them to live with Romany travelers in between years-long forays out of London for life in rural Kent. The title comes from one of her endlessly optimistic father’s sayings.

As farmworkers, they are lucky to be given shacks to live in, which they make furniture for and fix up as best they can. Young Jacqueline joins them in picking hops and fruit when she is not exploring the fields and copses, often with her younger brother. The lessons of loving that she learns as a child from her hard-working parents—their patience with the shellshocked grandfather, their forgiveness of each other after the rare rows, their careful tending of the land—bear fruit in her own affectionate portrayal of them and their world in this book.

We learn about what inspired her to become a writer, a scene I recognised as similar to my own. And we learn a lot about her writing process as we perceive how she has made use of scenes from her life in her novels. She also shares the process of sorting through her memories, confirming some with research and finding others to be inaccurate.

This memoir doesn’t romanticise the sometimes harsh conditions and doesn’t shy away from the illnesses, accidents and other misfortunes that plague the family. Still, this is a charming read, even if you are not familiar with the novels. I was at times reminded of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, though that is from an earlier period, just after WWI and is more about village life than Winspear’s childhood on various farms.

I relished this vivid and evocative portrait of a writer’s life, a working-class life in a world far removed from today. I loved getting to know her parents and sharing, however briefly, in where their adventurous spirits led them.

Have you read Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels?

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The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

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In this entertaining new book from the author of A Gentleman in Moscow, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is returned to his family’s farm in June of 1954 by the warden of the work farm where the young man has just served a brief term for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett has a well-thought-out plan for how to create a stable life for himself and his younger brother. The boys’ mother has long been out of the picture, so since their father’s death, eight-year-old Billy has been staying with neighbors, Mr. Ransom and his daughter Sally who is the one who does the brunt of the work.

Emmett wants to sell the farm and, with Billy, leave Nebraska and drive to California where he’ll build a business buying and rehabbing old houses. Billy, a great reader, particularly of a book with capsule lives of real and fictional adventurers, wants them to take the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Emmett’s plans are derailed by two stowaways from prison: his friends Duchess and Wooley who have their own plans for Emmett and themselves, which involve heading in the opposite direction. Duchess is a scamp, sometimes a scoundrel, while Wooley appears to be on the spectrum, scion of a patrician New York family who never could measure up in that world.

What makes each character interesting, for me at least, is that they have each worked out their own moral code. Of course these codes vary wildly, and seeing how the young men try to stay true to their code and their vision creates suspense. The other interesting aspect is the strong ties of friendship between the three young men and how each comes up with what they think is the best way to help each other while helping themselves.

The book is narrated from multiple points of view, which lets us follow the different characters as they separate and come together. However, it makes it hard to feel invested in any of the characters. Initially I was ready to engage with Emmett and care about his quest, but began to lose interest when his story is sidelined.

If you are sensing echoes of Huckleberry Finn and The Odyssey, you’re not alone. These implicit—and sometimes explicit—references add texture to the story.

As in the Moscow book, some parts are simply unbelievable. Fantastic elements are all well and good, but when they pop up once you’re well into what purports to be a realistic book, it can feel like a betrayal.

My book club mostly found it a light read. We discussed what the book was about, perhaps the idea that we may think we’re in control, but we’re not, either because of destiny or chaos theory. Certainly it’s about human connections. We loved how the characters took care of each other, their tenderness and hopefulness. It’s essentially a “band of brothers” story.

There’s a jaunty tone to the book, even during episodes of danger and great violence, along with a sense that every risky move turns out okay. The combination made me feel that this was actually a middle grade book. A quick read despite its length, it’s a pleasant bit of fluff.

Do you have a favorite Amor Towles book?

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The Magician, by Colm Tóibín

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Tóibín has long been one of my favorite authors. This new story of the life and times of author Thomas Mann rises to an even higher level. Born in a provincial German town in 1875, Mann navigates his birth family’s dynamics, formed by his conservative and proper father and his lovely and unpredictable Brazilian mother. His much older brother Heinrich is the favored one, expected to become a famous writer, so Thomas keeps his own ambitions to himself. He must also hide his homosexual desires.

Thomas becomes the most famous writer of his time, author of novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice. Winner of the Nobel Prize, his private life remains secret. In captivating prose, Tóibín unravels these secrets, detailing the life of his family—his unruly children, his abiding marriage to Katia, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family—and the times in which they live—the Great War, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, the Cold War.

Although written in close third person point of view, Tóibín adopts an authorial voice that conveys Mann’s personality: deliberate, insightful, alert to nuances of character. And each character in this story is multi-faceted, complex and contradictory, a combination of flaws and gifts.

What I love most is the way Tóibín enters the mind of Mann the writer, understanding the workings of inspiration, drudgery, and fame as only someone who has experienced it themselves can truly understand. For example, in one section, Thomas’s mind wanders as he listens to a performance of Beethoven’s Opus 132 quartet.

There were two men that he did not become and he might make a book from them if he could conjure up their spirits properly. One was himself without his talent, without his ambition, but with the same sensibility . . . A man, all conscience, who would have stayed in Germany even as Germany became barbaric, living a fearful life as an internal exile.

The other man was someone who did not know caution, whose imagination was as fiery and uncompromising as his sexual appetite, a many who destroyed those who loved him . . . A man who had been brushed by demons . . .

What would happen if these two men met? What energy would then emerge? What sort of book would that be? . . .

As the players drew near the final stretch, he felt the excitement of having been taken out of time and also a resolve that on this occasion the thoughts and ideas that came to him would mean something, would fill a space that he had been quietly creating.

Tóibín subtly gives us the experience of a writer’s children feeling abandoned in favor of the work, of friends and family feeling betrayed at his using details from their lives, of himself becoming a pawn in other people’s machinations.

I think this has become my new favorite book by Tóibín. Whether you are a fan of Thomas Mann’s writing or not, there is much to enjoy in this brilliant evocation of a writer’s life, of a German and part-Jewish family during this fraught period of history, and of the mysterious process of creation.

What is your favorite book by Colm Tóibín?

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The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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I played hooky today, lured by the beautiful weather to work in the garden instead of writing the blog post I’d planned.

As I dug in the dirt, I was reminded, as I always am this time of year, of this wonderful children’s book. Ten-year-old Mary Lennox, orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India where she lived with her parents, is sent to Yorkshire to live with her cantankerous uncle in his gloomy house on the moors. There is a walled garden that has been locked and hidden ever since her aunt’s death.

Spoilt and headstrong Mary is miserable until she meets Dickon, 12-year-old brother of Mary’s maid. He teaches her about the wild things on the moors and gardening as well. The two search for the hidden garden by day, but at night Mary hear strange cries.

I first learned about the book when Miss Lewis, my fourth grade teacher, began reading it to us. Unfortunately, she passed away shortly into the term, and the substitute who took her place was not interested in reading us the rest of the book. I knew even then that librarians were the smartest people on earth, and sure enough, the woman at my neighborhood branch recognised my description and found the book for me.

Little did I know then that it would change everything for me, making me a gardener for life. Not only have I put in a garden everywhere I’ve lived, but my first overseas trip was to Yorkshire. Of course.

Burnett’s book is one of nine that I can point to as having made me the person I am today. Three I read as a child; three as a teenager, and three as an adult. While every book I read changes me to some extent, these books shaped my philosophy, my values, and my identity.

I hope that when a day is this gorgeous you, too, set aside your to-do lists and go outside. Listen to the birds. Dig in the dirt. Find or make your own secret garden.

What book changed your life?