The Inside Reader: Michael Downing
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell
Michael Downing is the author of one of the sweetest gay themed book about parenting, Breakfast with Scot. The same book who was adapted for the screen in Canada, probably in one of the few successful attempt of this genre. Plus Michael let me know a surprising thing: he is working on a book on Giotto and the Scrovegni Chapel, that is one of the Italian treasure, placed... in my hometown, Padua! I hope Michael will come back in Padua sooner or later so that we can share a spritz in Piazza della Frutta (or Piazza delle Erbe or Piazza dei Signori...). Meantime, welcome Michael and his list.
TODAY’S TOP TEN
I read as I eat-omnivorously. My favorite book, like my favorite meal, is often the one I am enjoying at the moment. Maybe I shouldn’t advertise my lack of discrimination, but I can’t choose between Jane Austen and James Baldwin. I’ll happily spend the day with Madame Bovary or Moby Dick. Lobster or a T-Bone for dinner? I’m the one ordering Surf ’n’ Turf.
But it is August. I live in New England. And my purchase on the season’s particular pleasures-late sunset times, the nearby barrier beach, local corn on the cob and sweet tomatoes and grilled mahogany clams-is slipping. So, today, I am thinking about the specific pleasure of novels that are like sweet corn and clams-that good, that distinctive, and that delicious.
The perfect novel:
1) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. The smartest, leanest, and most provocative novel I’ve ever read. It’s a master class in how to write fiction, and it’s a master class in human history-in about 200 pages. Set in South Africa, it’s the story of David Lurie, a man suffering with the grave mental disorder previously known as Romantic Idealism. I’ve read it more than a dozen times, and each time, as I try to decide whether David is Lucifer or Lear, Don Juan or just a decadent college don, the swift, startling action sweeps me into a larger story, and I can’t tell if the proponents of Truth and Reconciliation are forging a new democracy or if they are hopeless romantics.
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (August 27, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140296402,00.html
ISBN-10: 0143115286
Amazon: Disgrace
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced. Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie-whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”-obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point. Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. Nobel Prize for Literature: Winner 2003. Man Booker Prize for Fiction: Winner 1999.
A novel by Peter Cameron (a phrase synonymous with a perfect novel):
2) Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. This is one of the only true books ever written about youth-that bittersweet moment when our longings are more than we can be. It helps that every sentence is exquisitely calibrated.
Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (April 28, 2009)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/somedaythispainwillbeusefultoyou
ISBN-10: 0312428162
Amazon: Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him--including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. he would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will BE Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected. "Possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem" (Peter Gadol, LA Weekly), Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the insightful, powerfully moving story of a young man questioning his times, his family, his world, and himself.
Three (Very) Brief Miracles:
3) Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. A woman has an affair with a six-foot lizard. Consequences ensue. In about 100 thrilling pages, Ingalls manages something magnetic and mythic-right up there with Aesop’s Fables and Oedipus Rex.
Hardcover: 125 pages
Publisher: Harvard Common Press; 1st Edition. edition (September 25, 1997)
ISBN-10: 0876451121
ISBN-13: 978-0876451120
Amazon: Mrs. Caliban
"I loved Mrs. Caliban. So deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy..."-- John Updike
4) Oh What A Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. For the title alone, I am grateful. Who’d have thought Cheever-of all writers-would come up with a late-life story about how we learn to love our lives? This sublime novel is about 100 pages long, and just about as chockfull of improbable incidents, uncanny insights, and heartwarming charm as anything by Trollope or Dickens.
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 15, 1992)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679737858
ISBN-10: 0679737855
ISBN-13: 978-0679737858
Amazon: Oh What A Paradise It Seems
John Cheever's last novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful.
5) The All of It by Jeanette Haien. If you want to understand forgiveness, read this astonishing little novel. It is pure gold spun of the most familiar and pedestrian material-an Irish priest, a lonely woman, a too-small town, and a half-hidden past.
Paperback: 145 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 16, 1987)
Publisher Link: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-All-of-It-Jeannette-Haien?isbn=9780061978135&HCHP=TB_The+All+of+It
ISBN-10: 0060971479
ISBN-13: 978-0060971472
Amazon: The All of It
A sleeper hit when first published in 1986, Jeannette Haien's exquisite, beloved first novel is a deceptively simple story that has the power and resonance of myth. The story begins on a rainy morning as Father Declan de Loughry stands fishing in an Irish salmon stream, pondering the recent deathbed confession of one of his parishioners. Kevin Dennehy and his wife, Enda, have been sweetly living a lie for some 50 years, a lie the full extent of which Father Declan learns only when Enda finally confides "the all of it." Her tale of suffering mesmerizes the priest, who recognizes that it is also a tale of sin and scandal, a transgression he cannot ignore. The resolution of his dilemma is a triumph of strength and empathy that, as Benedict Kiely has said, makes The All of It "a book to remember".
Three Unexpected Delights:
6) The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I love Roth’s novels, but this is the first one I had to shut several times, drop on the sand (I was at the beach), and walk away from-just to prolong the shock and delight of what had just happened. Unlike his great comedies of manners and identity, this novel is all plot-history retold, revised, and recast in a hair-raising story that somehow seems truer than the truth. It’s a fever dream of a book.
Paperback: 391 pages
Publisher: Vintage (September 27, 2005)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400079490
ISBN-10: 1400079497
ISBN-13: 978-1400079490
Amazon: The Plot Against America
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America-and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
7) Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. This is a novel I almost missed because I thought I knew more than I really wanted to know about its nominal subject, Frank Lloyd Wright, and because I have often found novels about secondary characters in the lives of famous people unsatisfying-more stunt than story. Don’t make the same mistake. This is a novel about a woman who becomes the architect of her own life, and makes something so unlikely and so sound and so pure that it is almost uninhabitable.
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; X edition (April 8, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345495006
ISBN-10: 0345495004
ISBN-13: 978-0345495006
Amazon: Loving Frank
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
8) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I am not a particular fan of really long novels, adolescent narrators, girl sleuths, Southern Gothics-I mean, I’m not even among the billions of devoted fans of To Kill a Mockingbird. Every allegedly good thing I heard about this novel made me less interested. But every summer, I go to the library and pull a dozen books from the shelves simply because I have been avoiding them, and I read the first few pages-just to be sure. I got to page 75 or so before I got to the check-out desk, and once at home on a comfortable chair by an open door, I didn’t stand up until I had gulped down every page of this crazy, funny, frantic mystery.
Paperback: 640 pages
Publisher: Vintage (October 28, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400031696
ISBN-10: 1400031699
ISBN-13: 978-1400031696
Amazon: The Little Friend
Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet-unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
One Endless Pleasure:
9) Donna Leon-all of the Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries. Happily, there are many of them. In the midst of almost any book I am reading, when I wonder what I will read next, I hope it will be the latest by Donna Leon. Give me a sequence like this-Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, About Face by Donna Leon, Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears, A Question of Belief by Donna Leon-and I am a happy man. Maybe it’s the setting (Venice); maybe it’s the appeal of the central character and his enviable home life; maybe it’s the plotting of the mysteries, which is somehow forthcoming and surprising every time. Probably, it’s just that Leon is a great novelist.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
Publisher Link: http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802119421%20
ISBN-10: 0802119425
ISBN-13: 978-0802119421
Amazon: A Question of Belief
Donna Leon’s sumptuous series of novels featuring the principled, warmhearted Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti have won her countless fans, critical acclaim, and international renown as one of the world’s best crime writers. In A Question of Belief, the nineteenth novel in the best-selling series, Brunetti must contend with ingenious corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and the stifling heat of a Venetian summer. With his hometown beset by hordes of tourists and baking under a glaring sun, Brunetti’s greatest wish is to go to the mountains with his family, where he can sleep under a down comforter and catch up on his reading of history. But before he can go on vacation, he has police work to do. A folder with court records has landed on his desk, brought by an old friend. It appears that certain cases at the local court-hardly known as a model of efficiency-are being delayed to the benefit of one of the parties. A creative new trick for corrupting the system, perhaps, but what can Brunetti do about it? At the same time, Brunetti is doing a favor for his colleague, Inspector Lorenzo Vianello. The inspector’s aunt has taken a strong interest in astrology and has been regularly withdrawing large amounts of cash from the bank. But she won’t listen to her family, and Vianello doesn’t know what to do. Brunetti agrees to help. He assigns the Questura’s new recruits, who need training in following a suspect through Venice’s complicated streets, to see where the money is going. And just when it looks like Brunetti will be able to get away for his well-earned rest, a shocking, violent crime forces him to shake off the heat and get down to work. A Question of Belief is a stellar addition to Leon’s celebrated series: atmospheric, packed with excellent characters, and building to an explosive, indelible ending.
One honorary novel:
10) A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. The most riveting work of nonfiction I’ve ever read. This book is just too good to be true. And I don’t think I can say this about any other book I’ve read: I have never met a reader who didn’t flat-out, couldn’t-put-it-down, wish-it-would-never-end love this book.
Paperback: 502 pages
Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (August 27, 1996)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679772675
ISBN-10: 0679772677
ISBN-13: 978-0679772675
Amazon: A Civil Action
"The legal thriller of the decade." --Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now a Major Motion Picture! In this true story of an epic courtroom showdown, two of the nation's largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything, including his sanity. A searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry--one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice--A Civil Action is also the story of how one determined man can ultimately make a difference. With an unstoppable narrative power, it is an unforgettable reading experience.
About Michael Downing: Michael Downing grew up in the Berkshires, graduated from Harvard College in 1980, and spent a year on a fellowship in England. After that, he worked as a contributing editor for the Italian art monthly FMR, the science journal Oceanus, and Harvard Magazine. In addition to his books, he has written two plays, premiered by the Triangle Theater of Boston and San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals.
Michael’s novels include the national bestseller Perfect Agreement, named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by Amazon.com and Newsday, and Breakfast with Scot, a comedy about two gay men who inadvertently become parents. An American Library Association honor book, Breakfast with Scot has been adapted as a movie to be released later this year. The movie recently won the endorsement of the National Hockey League and the participation of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Michael's nonfiction includes Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a "dramatic and insightful" narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as "a highly readable book, important for the healing it invites in giving voice to the thoughts and feelings of Zen Center members who have remained silent until now." His most recent book is Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, a history of clocks, Congress, and confusion that is "perceptive" (Wall Street Journal), "zany" (The New Republic), and "fun to read" (Associated Press).
Michael teaches creative writing at Tufts University. He and his partner have lived together in Cambridge for more than 20 years.
Breakfast with Scot: A Novel by Michael Downing
Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint (January 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1593761864
ISBN-13: 978-1593761868
Amazon: Breakfast with Scot: A Novel
Sam and Ed live the high life, and see no reason to add to their happy twosome. Then 11-year-old Scot’s mother dies, and a wine-soaked promise pushes the couple into parenthood. They dutifully make all the usual arrangements, but Scot is far from usual, sporting makeup and enduring bullying at school. Soon Sam and Ed begin to question their parenting, their commitment to each other, and the compromises they’ve made to live in a straight society. Breakfast with Scot is a humorous, heartwarming novel about the true meaning of family.
Michael Downing is the author of one of the sweetest gay themed book about parenting, Breakfast with Scot. The same book who was adapted for the screen in Canada, probably in one of the few successful attempt of this genre. Plus Michael let me know a surprising thing: he is working on a book on Giotto and the Scrovegni Chapel, that is one of the Italian treasure, placed... in my hometown, Padua! I hope Michael will come back in Padua sooner or later so that we can share a spritz in Piazza della Frutta (or Piazza delle Erbe or Piazza dei Signori...). Meantime, welcome Michael and his list.
TODAY’S TOP TEN
I read as I eat-omnivorously. My favorite book, like my favorite meal, is often the one I am enjoying at the moment. Maybe I shouldn’t advertise my lack of discrimination, but I can’t choose between Jane Austen and James Baldwin. I’ll happily spend the day with Madame Bovary or Moby Dick. Lobster or a T-Bone for dinner? I’m the one ordering Surf ’n’ Turf.
But it is August. I live in New England. And my purchase on the season’s particular pleasures-late sunset times, the nearby barrier beach, local corn on the cob and sweet tomatoes and grilled mahogany clams-is slipping. So, today, I am thinking about the specific pleasure of novels that are like sweet corn and clams-that good, that distinctive, and that delicious.
The perfect novel:
1) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. The smartest, leanest, and most provocative novel I’ve ever read. It’s a master class in how to write fiction, and it’s a master class in human history-in about 200 pages. Set in South Africa, it’s the story of David Lurie, a man suffering with the grave mental disorder previously known as Romantic Idealism. I’ve read it more than a dozen times, and each time, as I try to decide whether David is Lucifer or Lear, Don Juan or just a decadent college don, the swift, startling action sweeps me into a larger story, and I can’t tell if the proponents of Truth and Reconciliation are forging a new democracy or if they are hopeless romantics.
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (August 27, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140296402,00.html
ISBN-10: 0143115286
Amazon: Disgrace
Set in post-apartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s searing novel tells the story of David Lurie, a twice divorced, 52-year-old professor of communications and Romantic Poetry at Cape Technical University. Lurie believes he has created a comfortable, if somewhat passionless, life for himself. He lives within his financial and emotional means. Though his position at the university has been reduced, he teaches his classes dutifully; and while age has diminished his attractiveness, weekly visits to a prostitute satisfy his sexual needs. He considers himself happy. But when Lurie seduces one of his students, he sets in motion a chain of events that will shatter his complacency and leave him utterly disgraced. Lurie pursues his relationship with the young Melanie-whom he describes as having hips “as slim as a twelve-year-old’s”-obsessively and narcissistically, ignoring, on one occasion, her wish not to have sex. When Melanie and her father lodge a complaint against him, Lurie is brought before an academic committee where he admits he is guilty of all the charges but refuses to express any repentance for his acts. In the furor of the scandal, jeered at by students, threatened by Melanie’s boyfriend, ridiculed by his ex-wife, Lurie is forced to resign and flees Cape Town for his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the country. There he struggles to rekindle his relationship with Lucy and to understand the changing relations of blacks and whites in the new South Africa. But when three black strangers appear at their house asking to make a phone call, a harrowing afternoon of violence follows which leaves both of them badly shaken and further estranged from one another. After a brief return to Cape Town, where Lurie discovers his home has also been vandalized, he decides to stay on with his daughter, who is pregnant with the child of one of her attackers. Now thoroughly humiliated, Lurie devotes himself to volunteering at the animal clinic, where he helps put down diseased and unwanted dogs. It is here, Coetzee seems to suggest, that Lurie gains a redeeming sense of compassion absent from his life up to this point. Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression. Nobel Prize for Literature: Winner 2003. Man Booker Prize for Fiction: Winner 1999.
A novel by Peter Cameron (a phrase synonymous with a perfect novel):
2) Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. This is one of the only true books ever written about youth-that bittersweet moment when our longings are more than we can be. It helps that every sentence is exquisitely calibrated.
Reading level: Young Adult
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (April 28, 2009)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/somedaythispainwillbeusefultoyou
ISBN-10: 0312428162
Amazon: Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him--including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. he would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will BE Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected. "Possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem" (Peter Gadol, LA Weekly), Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the insightful, powerfully moving story of a young man questioning his times, his family, his world, and himself.
Three (Very) Brief Miracles:
3) Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. A woman has an affair with a six-foot lizard. Consequences ensue. In about 100 thrilling pages, Ingalls manages something magnetic and mythic-right up there with Aesop’s Fables and Oedipus Rex.
Hardcover: 125 pages
Publisher: Harvard Common Press; 1st Edition. edition (September 25, 1997)
ISBN-10: 0876451121
ISBN-13: 978-0876451120
Amazon: Mrs. Caliban
"I loved Mrs. Caliban. So deft and austere in its prose, so drolly casual in its fantasy..."-- John Updike
4) Oh What A Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. For the title alone, I am grateful. Who’d have thought Cheever-of all writers-would come up with a late-life story about how we learn to love our lives? This sublime novel is about 100 pages long, and just about as chockfull of improbable incidents, uncanny insights, and heartwarming charm as anything by Trollope or Dickens.
Paperback: 112 pages
Publisher: Vintage (January 15, 1992)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679737858
ISBN-10: 0679737855
ISBN-13: 978-0679737858
Amazon: Oh What A Paradise It Seems
John Cheever's last novel is a fable set in a village so idyllic it has no fast-food outlet and having as its protagonist an old man, Lemuel Sears, who still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes. But Sears's paradise is threatened; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters. In Cheever's accomplished hands the battle between an elderly romantic and the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilization becomes something ribald, poignant, and ineffably joyful.
5) The All of It by Jeanette Haien. If you want to understand forgiveness, read this astonishing little novel. It is pure gold spun of the most familiar and pedestrian material-an Irish priest, a lonely woman, a too-small town, and a half-hidden past.
Paperback: 145 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 16, 1987)
Publisher Link: http://www.harpercollins.com/books/The-All-of-It-Jeannette-Haien?isbn=9780061978135&HCHP=TB_The+All+of+It
ISBN-10: 0060971479
ISBN-13: 978-0060971472
Amazon: The All of It
A sleeper hit when first published in 1986, Jeannette Haien's exquisite, beloved first novel is a deceptively simple story that has the power and resonance of myth. The story begins on a rainy morning as Father Declan de Loughry stands fishing in an Irish salmon stream, pondering the recent deathbed confession of one of his parishioners. Kevin Dennehy and his wife, Enda, have been sweetly living a lie for some 50 years, a lie the full extent of which Father Declan learns only when Enda finally confides "the all of it." Her tale of suffering mesmerizes the priest, who recognizes that it is also a tale of sin and scandal, a transgression he cannot ignore. The resolution of his dilemma is a triumph of strength and empathy that, as Benedict Kiely has said, makes The All of It "a book to remember".
Three Unexpected Delights:
6) The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I love Roth’s novels, but this is the first one I had to shut several times, drop on the sand (I was at the beach), and walk away from-just to prolong the shock and delight of what had just happened. Unlike his great comedies of manners and identity, this novel is all plot-history retold, revised, and recast in a hair-raising story that somehow seems truer than the truth. It’s a fever dream of a book.
Paperback: 391 pages
Publisher: Vintage (September 27, 2005)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400079490
ISBN-10: 1400079497
ISBN-13: 978-1400079490
Amazon: The Plot Against America
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America-and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
7) Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. This is a novel I almost missed because I thought I knew more than I really wanted to know about its nominal subject, Frank Lloyd Wright, and because I have often found novels about secondary characters in the lives of famous people unsatisfying-more stunt than story. Don’t make the same mistake. This is a novel about a woman who becomes the architect of her own life, and makes something so unlikely and so sound and so pure that it is almost uninhabitable.
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; X edition (April 8, 2008)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345495006
ISBN-10: 0345495004
ISBN-13: 978-0345495006
Amazon: Loving Frank
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current. So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives. In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright. Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion. Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
8) The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. I am not a particular fan of really long novels, adolescent narrators, girl sleuths, Southern Gothics-I mean, I’m not even among the billions of devoted fans of To Kill a Mockingbird. Every allegedly good thing I heard about this novel made me less interested. But every summer, I go to the library and pull a dozen books from the shelves simply because I have been avoiding them, and I read the first few pages-just to be sure. I got to page 75 or so before I got to the check-out desk, and once at home on a comfortable chair by an open door, I didn’t stand up until I had gulped down every page of this crazy, funny, frantic mystery.
Paperback: 640 pages
Publisher: Vintage (October 28, 2003)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400031696
ISBN-10: 1400031699
ISBN-13: 978-1400031696
Amazon: The Little Friend
Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil. The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet-unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
One Endless Pleasure:
9) Donna Leon-all of the Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries. Happily, there are many of them. In the midst of almost any book I am reading, when I wonder what I will read next, I hope it will be the latest by Donna Leon. Give me a sequence like this-Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, About Face by Donna Leon, Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears, A Question of Belief by Donna Leon-and I am a happy man. Maybe it’s the setting (Venice); maybe it’s the appeal of the central character and his enviable home life; maybe it’s the plotting of the mysteries, which is somehow forthcoming and surprising every time. Probably, it’s just that Leon is a great novelist.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
Publisher Link: http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802119421%20
ISBN-10: 0802119425
ISBN-13: 978-0802119421
Amazon: A Question of Belief
Donna Leon’s sumptuous series of novels featuring the principled, warmhearted Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti have won her countless fans, critical acclaim, and international renown as one of the world’s best crime writers. In A Question of Belief, the nineteenth novel in the best-selling series, Brunetti must contend with ingenious corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and the stifling heat of a Venetian summer. With his hometown beset by hordes of tourists and baking under a glaring sun, Brunetti’s greatest wish is to go to the mountains with his family, where he can sleep under a down comforter and catch up on his reading of history. But before he can go on vacation, he has police work to do. A folder with court records has landed on his desk, brought by an old friend. It appears that certain cases at the local court-hardly known as a model of efficiency-are being delayed to the benefit of one of the parties. A creative new trick for corrupting the system, perhaps, but what can Brunetti do about it? At the same time, Brunetti is doing a favor for his colleague, Inspector Lorenzo Vianello. The inspector’s aunt has taken a strong interest in astrology and has been regularly withdrawing large amounts of cash from the bank. But she won’t listen to her family, and Vianello doesn’t know what to do. Brunetti agrees to help. He assigns the Questura’s new recruits, who need training in following a suspect through Venice’s complicated streets, to see where the money is going. And just when it looks like Brunetti will be able to get away for his well-earned rest, a shocking, violent crime forces him to shake off the heat and get down to work. A Question of Belief is a stellar addition to Leon’s celebrated series: atmospheric, packed with excellent characters, and building to an explosive, indelible ending.
One honorary novel:
10) A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. The most riveting work of nonfiction I’ve ever read. This book is just too good to be true. And I don’t think I can say this about any other book I’ve read: I have never met a reader who didn’t flat-out, couldn’t-put-it-down, wish-it-would-never-end love this book.
Paperback: 502 pages
Publisher: Vintage; First Edition edition (August 27, 1996)
Publisher Link: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679772675
ISBN-10: 0679772677
ISBN-13: 978-0679772675
Amazon: A Civil Action
"The legal thriller of the decade." --Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now a Major Motion Picture! In this true story of an epic courtroom showdown, two of the nation's largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything, including his sanity. A searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry--one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice--A Civil Action is also the story of how one determined man can ultimately make a difference. With an unstoppable narrative power, it is an unforgettable reading experience.
About Michael Downing: Michael Downing grew up in the Berkshires, graduated from Harvard College in 1980, and spent a year on a fellowship in England. After that, he worked as a contributing editor for the Italian art monthly FMR, the science journal Oceanus, and Harvard Magazine. In addition to his books, he has written two plays, premiered by the Triangle Theater of Boston and San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and other periodicals.
Michael’s novels include the national bestseller Perfect Agreement, named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by Amazon.com and Newsday, and Breakfast with Scot, a comedy about two gay men who inadvertently become parents. An American Library Association honor book, Breakfast with Scot has been adapted as a movie to be released later this year. The movie recently won the endorsement of the National Hockey League and the participation of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Michael's nonfiction includes Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, hailed by the New York Review of Books as a "dramatic and insightful" narrative history of the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, and by the Los Angeles Times as "a highly readable book, important for the healing it invites in giving voice to the thoughts and feelings of Zen Center members who have remained silent until now." His most recent book is Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, a history of clocks, Congress, and confusion that is "perceptive" (Wall Street Journal), "zany" (The New Republic), and "fun to read" (Associated Press).
Michael teaches creative writing at Tufts University. He and his partner have lived together in Cambridge for more than 20 years.
Breakfast with Scot: A Novel by Michael Downing
Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint (January 1, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1593761864
ISBN-13: 978-1593761868
Amazon: Breakfast with Scot: A Novel
Sam and Ed live the high life, and see no reason to add to their happy twosome. Then 11-year-old Scot’s mother dies, and a wine-soaked promise pushes the couple into parenthood. They dutifully make all the usual arrangements, but Scot is far from usual, sporting makeup and enduring bullying at school. Soon Sam and Ed begin to question their parenting, their commitment to each other, and the compromises they’ve made to live in a straight society. Breakfast with Scot is a humorous, heartwarming novel about the true meaning of family.