Displaced Persons - Joan Leegant

 

I generally read about ten short story compilations a year, and even though I've been doing that for quite a long time now, I've found very few story collections as consistently good as Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons.  

The stories, half of which take place in Israel and half in the United States, share a common theme hinted at by the book's title. Each features one or more "displaced persons" struggling to fit into a world that bears little resemblance to the one left behind. Some characters manage the transition with limited difficulty, some take years even to begin feeling comfortable with the change, and others never manage the job at all. Regardless, Leegant's people have more in common than not. 

The seven stories set in Israel are presented in "Part One: The East." "The East" includes stories about those who left and the people they left behind, such as "The Baghdadi," in which an Iraqi Jew moves to Israel against the wishes of his father, or the story about a young Israeli who, against the wishes of his mother, wants to make a fresh start by moving to Germany. There are stories about "displaced" Americans naive enough to get themselves into dangerous situations, such as the one about two sixteen-year-old girls whose youthful rebelliousness places them in life-altering danger they will be lucky to escape. And there are stories about others who come to Israel expecting to go back home soon only to find that they have finally found in Israel the real home they've been yearning for.

The seven stories in "Part Two: The West" are about a different kind of displacement, one in which American Jewish families are more often than not coming apart at the seams. These stories are more about generational and religious displacement than about the physical kind. Some stories tell of children who no longer feel connected to the old ways of their immigrant parents, others of disillusioned elders who have lost the faith much to the dismay of their children. There are stories here about redemption and the kind of wisdom that comes only with age and experience. They are stories about people trying to figure out who they are and where they fit into the world. 

Displaced Persons offers, I think, an especially timely glimpse into Jewish life both in Israel and in the United States, and what it is like to be caught between those two very different worlds during the turbulent times we live in today. Joan Leegant has packed so much into these twenty-something-page stories that I will remember them for a long time to come. 

Joan Leegant jacket photo

(This New American Fiction Prize winner will be published in early June 2024. Look for it then.)

What I'm Reading This Week (May 13, 2024)

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures was one of the hottest books of 2022 and, at least in my recollection, of 2023. I got on my library wait list a little late and finally threw in the towel when I realized that it would be most of a year before I would get hold of it that way. It wasn't until this year that I thought about the novel again and decided to get back on the list - and I still started at number 65. But I had also signed up for the large print edition book and started the wait for that one in the mid-twenties. As it turns out, the wait for that edition was only three weeks, and I spent a lot of time last week finally reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. With just a few pages to go, I'm still not sure what to think of it - and that's probably not a good thing. 

I did finish up both Alice McDermott's Absolution and the Mark Twain classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well, and made good starts on James Lee Burke's Clete and Alan Murrin's The Coast Road. Too, I've started re-reading Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the novel that turned me into a lifetime fan of Tyler's work the first time that I read it back in the eighties - and I'm down to the last short story in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons. This was one of those weeks that I found it particularly hard to focus, so I found myself moving from book to book quicker than I normally do, with shorter bursts of reading that I don't find nearly as satisfying as reading at least fifty or so pages from one book before moving on to the next. I do hope that changes this week.

Clete is a little bit different in that it is being correctly marketed as book number 24 in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series despite Dave being very much a secondary character in the novel - at least through the first third of the book. This time around the narrator is Clete Purcell, a private investigator who has been Dave's closest friend since their days in Vietnam. Once again, Dave and Clete are dealing with some truly evil people in small town Louisiana, but it's been eye-opening to see Dave through the eyes of a man who knows him better than anyone else in the world could ever know him. (I've read the first 23 books in the series so it's interesting to learn that Clete sees him a bit differently than I see him.)

I'm about thirty percent of the way through The Coast Road and I still haven't settled into it comfortably. The characters, all of whom are women with marital problems of one degree or another, have not separated themselves in my mind yet, and that makes it hard to keep up with the intricacies of their day-to-day experiences together. It's still hard to know which of them can be relied on to tell the truth and which of them are lying to themselves. I do expect this one to suck me in soon - well at least I hope that's about to happen.

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983 or so, and it turned out to be one of those books that influenced my reading for decades to come. It made me a lifetime fan of Anne Tyler's work, and I've pretty much read everything she's ever written now. But guess what? I don't remember a whole lot about the plot anymore, only how immersed I ended up being in the world Tyler created and how fascinating I found the characters to be. This is one of those risky re-reads that I hope doesn't end up lessening my fondness for a book that's been on my shelves for a long, long time.

Oh, and I also gave up on Susan Orlean's On Animals because the pieces I read from the essay collection didn't seem to work together as a whole. Maybe if I had read them as standalone magazine articles they would have struck me differently. 

The little stack of books still waiting for their turn includes this bunch:

That's my Monday morning start to the week. I do have a couple of short road trips scheduled for later this week: a baseball game against Arkansas over in College Station and a lunch date with a few of my old high school friends down toward Beaumont, but it looks like we're in for another round of hard rains that are likely to wash out both trips. Whether that ends up translating into more reading time or more time frittered away remains to be seen. 

I hope you are all doing well, and I hope to visit a bunch of blogs this week that I missed out on last week...have fun.

An American Dreamer - David Finkel

 

If cotton candy were a book, it would be called American Dreamer: Living in a Divided Country. Maybe because David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize Winner I expected too much, but my lingering impression of American Dreamer is that no one living in the United States during the last decade will be surprised by, or much enlightened by, anything that Finkel has to say here. Any American who has paid even the least attention to what has been happening all around them (and who has the ability to express themselves on paper) could have written this one. If like me, you expected to learn how and why the country became so politically divided, and what we can do together to become more united, you are going to be disappointed.

American Dreamer opens on the morning following the 2016 election as Brent Cummings and his wife wake up to the (to them) appalling realization that Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. Cummings, an Iraq War veteran with twenty-five years of service, was born in Mississippi but moved to New Jersey with his family when he was eight years old. By November 2016, he is in charge of 750 ROTC cadets at the University of North Georgia. The book is primarily from Cummings's point of view, and how he reacts to his very conservative next-door neighbor, a wheelchair bound man who is just as thrilled as Cummings is upset about Trump's election.

Finkel observes that the two men can barely speak with each other without the distinct possibility that one, or both, of them will lose their temper and say something that there will be no coming back from. So they take to being super-polite to each other and purposely talking very little about politics at all. Consequently, they don't really know each other and never will. 

Then the book is over.

The reader has been treated to a rather short and unremarkable biography of Brent and a much less detailed one of Michael, his neighbor. It is not difficult to see which of the two men Finkel sees as the more sympathetic, especially because one of the most widely debunked charges against Trump from the last several years is mentioned several times in the book without once representing Michael's understanding of the same event. Finkel seems to believe that the two men will never really understand each other. Their political beliefs and expectations are just too far apart for that to happen. By extension, I have to wonder if Finkel sees the whole country that way, and not just these two individuals. If so, I can't agree with him.

The big problem for me is that I don't think Finkel has made a serious effort here to identify solutions or causes of America's (the world's?) political divide. American Dreamer reads more like something Finkel threw together between more serious work, and as a result it had the same impact on me as all the empty calories found inside a state fair serving of pink cotton candy...still empty, and wonder why I bothered.

Mercury - Amy Jo Burns

 

"Two young women arrived in this town, twenty years apart. The first was named Elise, the second named Marley. They lived in the same house. They loved the same men. They raised their children. Elise never loved Marley like a daughter, and yet together they built a family."

Elise and Marley even shared a surname. The difference is that Elise gave birth to the three Joseph boys, and Marley married one of them before giving birth to a Joseph boy of her own.

Mercury is a coming-of-age novel in which it is not always clear who is coming of age and who is doing the raising, especially when it comes to Marley. When she arrives in Mercury, Pennsylvania, Marley is more concerned with fitting in to her new high school than finding a new boyfriend. It's not like Marley dosen't know what to expect because her mother, constantly on the lookout for a better paying nursing job, is always up for a fresh start in a new town. This time, though it's going to be very different. 

Marley immediately catches the eye of one of the Jospeh boys, and before she knows it she's become a regular at the family dinner table. Right up until, that is, the moment she's unceremoniously dumped by Baylor Joseph - only to secretly take up with the steady one in the family, Baylor's younger brother, Waylon. (And yes, the notorious Joseph boys are known locally as Bay, Way, and Shay.) By nature, as well as by circumstance, Marley is a loner, but what she aches for more than anything else in the world is a family of her own and, as she sees it, a "place at someone's table." 

She gets more than she bargained for with the Josephs, becoming a surrogate mother to the youngest boy, manager of the family roofing business, and protector of the woman who never really stops resenting her. That Marley becomes as loyal a member of the Joseph family as any of them is no accident, but her ability to hold the family together is seriously tested years later by a disturbing discovery that Waylon and Baylor make in the church attic. The Joseph family has secrets...and Marley wants to help them keep it that way.

"Do you think it's possible to spend your life loving the wrong people?"   (Waylon)

"I think it's more likely that we love the right people the wrong way."      (Jade, Marley's best friend)

Mercury is one of those character-driven novels that, layer by layer, make themselves really difficult to put down. Even when I wasn't turning pages, I sometimes found myself wondering about the main characters and what Burns would reveal about them next. My biggest surprise is who the real hero of the Joseph story turns out to be, and how that realization made the book so much more memorable to me than I expected it would ever be. This one is perfect for book club reads because you'll find yourself wanting to talk about it with someone else who's read it, too. Good stuff. 

Amy Jo Burns jacket photo 

 

What I'm Reading This Week (May 6, 2024)

 

When it comes to turning pages, last week was a pretty good week, even if maybe not so good when it comes actually to finishing books. The only book I completed was Faceless Killers, the first novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. I do have three others near completion, with fewer than a 100 pages to go in each of them, but that means I was only able to begin one new book during the past week - and even that one was not among those I thought I'd be selecting from. I suppose I should just go ahead and admit to myself that I've temporarily (at the least) abandoned Camus's The Plague since I haven't touched it in almost a month, so that leaves me beginning the week deeply immersed in Alice McDermott's Absolution, Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons, and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

Absolution has taken me in directions I didn't expect it to go, and is turning out to be even better and more affecting than I hoped it would be. I mentioned last week that the first part of the book, by far the longest of its three sections, is narrated by an 80-year-old looking back at her days in Vietnam in the early 1960s - and that it is directed specifically at a woman the narrator remembers from those days as a child. It turns out that the second part of the novel is the second woman's narrative response to what she has been told by the older woman. It's a little like some amazing jigsaw puzzle that can only be put together by the combined memories of Tricia and Rainey. There's so much packed into the story that the book feels much longer than it really is when measured by page-count.

I've now read all seven of the short stories in Displaced Persons that are set in Israel along with three of the seven set in the U.S. The common theme of each is reflected in the book's title as Leegant weaves her way in and out of stories about people who never really feel completely at home where they are. There is always something about the past or their dreams for the future that have them yearning for something they've either once had and lost, or never had in the first place. Even though the stories average only about twenty pages each, Leegant has a special talent for creating complete worlds and deep characters within the space she allows herself. Displaced Persons reminds me exactly why I am such a fan of short stories.

On Animals is a series of essays in which Susan Orlean explains her "animalishness" to the rest of us. Like most children, Orlean was animalish when she was a little girl; she just never outgrew the attraction and has structured her life in a manner that allows her almost always to have animals around her. In her introduction Orlean says, "I think I have the same response to animals that I would if Martians landed on Earth: I would like to get to know them and befriend them, all the while knowing we were not quite of the same ilk. They seem to have something in common with us, and yet they're alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious." I can't say that I'm overwhelmed by the first two or three essays in the book, but I'm still reading.

Their fast approaching publication dates mean that I'll likely be starting these in the next few days, but I'm hoping this still turns out to be the week that I get to start re-reading either Deliverance or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, also:

Publication Date: June 11, 2024

Publication Date: June 11, 2024

Publication Date: June 4, 2024

I hope you all have good weeks, and that you find some terrific new books to tell us about along the way. I'll look forward to hearing all about them. 

The Man Who Smiled - Henning Mankell

 

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander has to be the gloomiest and grumpiest series detective I've ever run into. Sure, I could name a lot of other unhappy fictional detectives like Kurt Wallander, but unlike Wallander, the others manage to experience really good and happy times on occasion. Wallander...not so much. He wakes up gloomy and depressed about his current life - and his past life - and he stays that way until he manages to close his eyes again long enough to recycle his problems into a series of depressing or scary dreams. I bet you can't wait to read about him now, can you?

So why do I enjoy reading the Wallander series so much? After all, it's not as if I didn't already know what I was getting into when I started reading The Man Who Smiled. I've watched two multi-season television series based on the Wallander books (one in English and one in Swedish), and I'm still hoping someday to get a look at the movies based on the character. Wallander is not exactly a bundle of joy in any of those either. But he's a good man despite his many faults, especially a temper he can barely control sometimes, who gets up every morning and goes to work putting some really bad people where they belong - behind bars. You have to admire his determination.

As The Man Who Smiled opens, Wallander is still reeling from having had to shoot to death a suspect in the last case he worked on. He's all alone, walking an isolated beach in Denmark every day, and doubting that he will ever return to the job. Then a lawyer friend surprises Wallander during one of his walks and asks him to come back to Sweden to investigate the supposed suicide of that man's elderly father. Wallander refuses to do so - until he learns that the young lawyer died in an automobile accident within hours of their conversation. Kurt Wallander does not believe in coincidence. Now he has two murders to investigate - and he can do that best as a cop. He's back.

Mankell's Wallander books fit squarely into the police procedural genre, novels in which the reader follows an investigation step-by-step from its earliest days to identification and capture of the culprits. The beauty of Mankell's novels is how he presents the procedural process to the reader by letting Wallander think "out loud" while explaining his reasoning and decisions from one step to the next. This leaves room for lots of self-doubt to creep in and exposes departmental politics, Wallander's past experiences, personal relationships, and even Sweden's national psyche to readers. I've only read two of the ten Wallander novels, both written in the early nineties, but I've been surprised that both address issues that dominate the news today: mass immigration, asylum requests, borders, drugs, extremism, etc. Maybe that's why Wallander is so gloomy...no one was listening to him.

The Man Who Smiled is a solid mystery with a satisfying result. It is atmospheric, includes an almost super-villain and enough red herrings to satisfy the most avid mystery fan, and ends with a rousing climax that's sure to keep you turning pages. I'm circling back now to the first novel in the series, Faceless Killers.

Forbidden Notebook - Alba De Céspedes

 

Forbidden Notebook very much reflects the state of Italian culture, especially the relationship between husbands and wives, during the period during which it was was first published. Even so, it still surprises me that the novel was written in 1952, not written in retrospect some decades later. Thankfully, Astra House republished a Forbidden Notebook translation by Ann Goldstein in 2023, or I would most certainly have never heard of it. 

As the novel opens, Valeria is married and has a husband, a son in university, and a teen daughter about to finish high school. She's pretty much resigned herself to her life, even though she's not completely happy with being a full-time caretaker to three other adults. But all it will take is one innocent decision to change the lives of her entire family forever. 

It all begins when Valeria goes to a tobacconist to buy cigarettes for her husband one Sunday afternoon. According to Italian law, legally the shop can only sell tobacco products on Sundays, nothing else, but Valeria manages to coerce the shop owner into selling her the blank journal that catches her eye. Valeria has been bothered that she has no private space of her own to claim: her husband has his study, and her children each have a bedroom of their own. She, however, has no place to be alone, and when she gets back home that Sunday afternoon, Valeria realizes that she doesn't even have a place to hide the journal from the prying eyes of her family- much less the actual opportunity to sit and write down her own secrets and personal feelings about what goes on around her. She's never before had the time to think much about herself in relationship to her husband and children, and how she really feels about the way each of them takes for granted that she will always be there to do whatever they need her to do for them.

But Valeria figures it out. She starts staying up long after everyone else has gone to sleep with the excuse that she needs to finish up one more household task or another. Nervous as it all makes her, she has carved out a little private time for herself, and she makes the most of it. Gradually, Valeria begins to realize that the very act of composing her thoughts before putting them to paper has made her see her world and her family in a way she never has before. And she begins to realize that she wants more from life - and more importantly that she deserves more.

The author very cleverly uses Valeria's written words exclusively to tell of her transformation, so the reader is able to watch it all happen exactly as she experiences it. This works remarkably well to pace the novel in a way that allows the reader's eyes to be opened to a more realistic view of what Italian women of the fifties were experiencing layer by layer, just as Valeria was figuring it all out for herself layer by layer. 

Forbidden Notebook is a brilliant novel with a lot to say - and thanks to Astra House, you don't have to miss it.

Alba De Céspedes jacket photo