Month: April 2025

Faraway Tables, by Eric D. Goodman

by

In his first collection of poems, Goodman moves around in time and space, recalling past travels, anticipating the future, both near and far. Most of all, he pays attention to the world, noting small details as he finds meaning in seemingly ordinary moments, whether it’s making a cup of coffee or winding the clock. 

In “Relics” he and a childhood friend, newly reunited, explore Baltimore’s Museum of Industry.

Decades may have passed between us,

but our bond remains durable,

like these vestiges of a bygone age.


We consider the divergent occurrences in our lives

as we glance at the vintage printing press,

a demonstration sharing with us

how easily the movable letters connect,

disconnect, reconnect.

Having reviewed two of his novels on this blog, Setting the Family Free and Wrecks and Ruins, I  can detect fingerprints of those stories here. There’s the appreciation of things that are imperfect or ephemeral. There’s also an appreciation of other points of view, such as in “Pests” where he considers the effect of the pandemic shutdown on mice and other creatures who prowl the cubicles at night searching for cookie crumbs and trail mix.

Many of these poems were written during the pandemic, such as “Embracing Hermithood” which begins:

The hair is the first to grow.

The salt-and-pepper business cut

filling out into a lion’s mane,

gushing down the head and over the shoulders

like a SWAT team’s rappelling ropes over a fortress

during the raid on an out-of-control dictator

threatening our nation.

He touches on and personalizes recent events, such as the war in Ukraine. He remembers a trip by his children to Kiev shortly before the war and his own visit to Russia “just after the Iron Curtain fell.”

When this passes,

let my adult children stand

in Independence Square again

alongside the children

of my Ukrainian and Russian friends

and let the new generation toast

to international friendship

just as we did, so sincerely, not so long ago.

Some of the poems address aspects of the climate emergency—like drought and falling water levels—and consumerism—such as the social costs of avocado toast and bottled water. Humor and the music of words come together in poems such as “Dogged Memories” which begins:

Oh, Bratwurst,

I’ve spent time with you in the rowdy beer halls of Munich,

pierced you with fork and pulled you from a pool of kraut,

dipped you in spiced mustard and washed you down with bitter beer.

As Goodman notes in his Afterword, poetry is appropriate for today’s readers because it is not only short but also concise, conveying idea or emotion with few words. He also notes that the pandemic was “a time to question life as we know it,” looking back on what we’ve experienced and imagining the new world awaiting us.

What poems have you been reading during this National Poetry Month?

Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido

by

What a delight this novel is! I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “pleasure buttons:” the aspects of fiction that provide a pleasurable experience for readers. The missing one in that discussion turns out to be wit.

In Trapido’s debut novel, 18-year-old Katherine is eager to explore the world outside her mother’s petit-bourgeois bungalow, but is at first hesitant and only too aware of her own naïveté. It’s telling that in times of stress she turns to her favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma.

Lacking Emma’s self-assurance, Katherine assumes she’s blown her interview with the philosophy professor Jacob Goldman. She’s chosen philosophy as a shortcut to worldly wisdom, and does not realise that he’s thoroughly enchanted with her original bent of mind. He sees through her youthful lack of confidence to the potential rogue adventurer lurking underneath.

She then gets picked up by the much older John Millet, charmed by his aesthetic knowledge, not recognising that however much he flirts with her, what really turns him on are young men.  John carries her off for a weekend which turns out to be with the Goldman family: Jacob, a very pregnant Jane, and their many children.

The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. the kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles.

There’s the family you’re born with and the family you choose, and Katherine finds her real home with the eccentric and outrageous Goldman clan, quite aside from falling head over heels with oldest son Roger. They all adore her right back—even Roger, for a while anyway. In Jane, she finds her true parent.

[Jane] stands hugely in strong farmer’s wellingtons into which she has tucked some very old corduroy trousers. She has these tied together under a man’s shirt with pajama cords because the zip won’t come together over the bulge. Bits of hair are falling out of her dark brown plait.”

This hilarious, madcap novel is full of quips like the title. However, running alongside is a pungent critique of class in Britain, anti-Semitism, and women’s roles. First published in 1982, it might seem dated to modern readers, particularly the debate over women’s issues, such as motherhood vs work, and who does the dishes. However, recent events, such as the current push in the U.S. by a minority of radical evangelists to remove women from the workforce and keep them in the kitchen or making babies, make it newly relevant. It’s a good reminder that women’s gains toward equality have only come about recently and still encounter panic-stricken backlash.

Even the most revolting characters, such as macho Michele “a backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends” come across as hilarious when seen through Katherine’s amused and loving eyes, and then turn around and redeem themselves unexpectedly. It shouldn’t work; I should be horrified by some of the things these characters get up to.

Somehow, though, Katherine’s eagerness for adventure and the sheer number of fantastical goings-on lead to a suspension, not only of disbelief but of censure. I was swept up in a witty fairy tale and willing to go along with Katherine. Toward the end of the novel, a bit of sanity returns as Katherine, older and wiser, begins to see through the smokescreen of antic fun.

The story was not so much laugh-out-loud funny as snort-and-snicker witty, making it the sort of comedy I most relish. I thorough enjoyed this delightful novel and can’t wait to explore some of Trapido’s later works.

What novel has most amused you lately?

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

by

Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, so sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise.

I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

I am stunned by the gorgeous language. When Chie sees the islands of her native Japan, they look like “a trail of drying footprints. Her country is a ghost haunting the water.”

When Roman glances out a window in passing, “the view is at first indistinct. It takes a moment to orientate. An expanse of wintry nothingness, pearly cloud cover, and then the familiar gleam of ice sheets sloping off the Antarctic Circle. Starboard, the seven sisters audaciously bright.”

From space, borders and boundaries blur. Within their small metallic bubble, we see the astronauts and cosmonauts—from Britain, the U.S., Japan, Italy, and two from Russia—sometimes individually and sometimes as a group as they go about their days. They exercise to preserve their legs and hearts, pursue their scientific experiments, manage the effects of weightlessness.

They have moments of awe—wonder and terror—at the boundless space around them. “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters.” Sometimes they feel themselves remote from those on the planet below them, unable to intervene in looming catastrophes. At other times, they are affected by news from home and memories. Shaun recalls a high school lesson about the Velázquez painting Las Meninas and the shifting possibilities of subject and perspective. A postcard of the painting is one of the things he brought with him.

Haley Larsen recently wrote on Substack about the use of free indirect narration. When we talk about different points of view, we’re describing different degrees of narrative distance from the characters. For example, first person PoV is the most intimate, providing access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, while third person is sometimes compared to a camera over the protagonist’s shoulder with no access to thoughts or feelings. Free indirect narration is when the author’s lens moves in and out, between a narrow focus on one character and a wider zoom.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a brilliant example of this narrative technique. Not only does the author zoom from all-seeing narrator to the group aboard the space station to a single astronaut/cosmonaut, but through the six people we see the earth as a whole, individual places (e.g., the pyramids), a family, a single person on earth. That movement in and out IS the story’s movement. Amazing.

In a recent blog post, author and teacher C.S. Lakin writes, “I was reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and I was struck by a passage that didn’t filter the world through the characters’ eyes but used a shared experience to reveal their reality.” That shared experience was hunger. She goes on to say, “[T]aking the perspective of a singular force, such as hunger, can be a powerful way to reveal not just one character’s experience but the life of an entire community.”

The community in Orbital is the six people aboard the space station. To me, though, they are an example of synecdoche, where a part of something is used to signify the whole. They are all of us, riding on this increasingly fragile planet.

I loved the book and, finishing it, immediately started again. I continue to return to it. I could write a whole essay about each tiny part. However, not everyone in my book club enjoyed it. While this is a novel, you won’t find much in the way of plot. It is more a collection of poetry, of meditations about humans and our Earth, embodied in six memorable people and their remarkable experiences.

Have you read a novel that simply astounded you?

The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman

by

In 1926 Tom Sherbourne becomes the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a lonely spot off the southwestern coast of Australia. It’s a lonely job, with a supply boat only visiting once a quarter, but Tom enjoys it. After a shattering four years fighting in WWI, Tom returned to Australia and began learning the lighthouse trade, attracted by the quiet life, the precision required, and the opportunity to save lives. On a rare shore leave he meets and marries Isabel who adjusts quickly to life on the island and looks forward to raising a family.

Unfortunately she suffers two miscarriages and a stillbirth. So when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby, she calls it a miracle. Tom, a principled man, wants to report it immediately, but Isabel persuades him to wait, arguing that the mother must have been washed overboard and drowned. The stillbirth is recent enough that Isabel is able to nurse the baby.

Stedman wonderfully evokes the fierce love of parents for a child, as well as Tom’s love for Isabel. Their quiet, isolated life on the island is idyllic. However, when the child is two, they have leave to go to town on the mainland for the first time in three years and, during that visit they are forcibly reminded of the lives of others. While Isabel is fixated on the child, Tom finds himself in a moral quandary.

Stedman’s debut novel appealed to me first because of the setting; I love a lighthouse novel. Tom also appealed to me in some ways: reserved and moral, meticulous in his care of the light, steadfast in his love for Isabel and Lucy. However, I found the book’s premise hard to believe unless the characters were completely self-centered, but then I’ve always held to the philosophy that children come first; what’s best for them is my priority. Too many of these characters give that idea lip service and then do what they want.

I still enjoyed much of the story, though. I recently read a post by Leigh Stein on her Attention Economy Substack where she mentioned the work of Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a novelist and former psychology professor. I also watched the Grammar Girl interview of Barnes on YouTube that Stein mentions. Believing that novels succeed when they provide their readers with pleasure, Barnes took a scientific approach to identifying the primary pleasure buttons. She came up with six: beauty, money & wealth, status & power, sex & touch, competition, and danger.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that fits this popular novel. The landscape of the light, the sea, and the sky is beautifully drawn. Of all the senses, touch is the one that stays with me from this story: Lucy’s soft cheek, the feel of salt spray from a rough sea. There’s competition and danger, and the potential loss of status and power. The only pleasure button missing is money, which is not a motivation for anyone in the story, but there’s another kind of wealth: family and community.

And I did take pleasure in this story, despite the unlikely premise and some unlikeable characters. It captures the joy of bathing a baby and playing with a toddler. It made for good bedtime reading.

What novel have you read recently that gave you pleasure? What about it made you feel that way?