So Good!

I confess I’ve never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, I have read James by Percival Everett. You should too. 

I did not know Percival Everett until I read this book, despite the fact he has published 30 books of fiction and poetry, has an entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, and has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the Booker Prizes.

James has been described as the reimagining of Mark Twain’s novel.  In Everett’s novel, Twain’s Jim becomes the focal point of the novel. But it is not simply the same story from a new perspective. It’s more. 

The title is brilliant. This novel addresses seeing people and things differently, just as “James” is a more formal moniker than “Jim.” The same but different, very different. 

James is literate, educated. He speaks two languages: English on a scale superior in form to his white masters and “slave,” the language that allows him to survive as a slave in the pre-Civil War South. He writes. In fact, he thirsts to write. His prize possessions are a pencil stub and a half-used, water-logged journal, with its racist doggerel which James intends to re-write, to destroy and rebuild. 

The episode with the Virginia Minstrels, a vaudeville troupe of white men costumed in blackface to appear as silly, naïve Blacks, is telling.  James joins the Minstrels because they need a tenor. Everett uses this section masterfully to convey the absurdity of racial distinctions. The troupe includes Norman, a Black man who passes as white but wears blackface to “be” Black. While James has the cadence and structure of Twain’s original, this is a much more violent novel, both in its ideas and its story.  

This book is well worth your time. And yes, I promise, I am going to read Huck Finn. 

Chicken Hill of the 1930s is a dilapidated neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. It’s a place where immigrant Jews and African Americans (and an Italian or two) live side by side and share their lives, in spite of their sometimes insular viewpoint.  It’s a community without reliable water and otherwise neglected by the town. For many, it is a place to live until you have a better option. This is the improbable setting for James McBride’s novel, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

Moshe Ludlow and his wife Chona are Jewish. When they have the option to move someplace better, Moshe is ready to take it, but Chona is determined to stay in Chicken Hill. Chona, whose father was responsible for building the local Jewish sanctuary, runs the Heaven and Earth grocery store that doesn’t make money, but is an important piece of the neighborhood. 

Surrounding these two characters are a host of others, all richly drawn, most lovingly imagined, and many humorously described. This book is ultimately about the characters. Sure, many in the neighborhood have a part to play in the rescue of a Black boy, Dodo, from a state institution where he has been cast away because he is deaf and presumed “dumb.” But this rescue is not the point of the novel. McBride wants us to live in the world of these characters and to drink in the beauty of Chicken Hill, muddy streets and all. 

“McBride's roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning, and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy…. McBride looks squarely at savage truths about race and prejudice, but he also insists on humor and hope,” writes Maureen Corrigan for NPR. It’s the hope in this novel, and the love, both often well hidden, that makes this book special. 

"Like a fist to the solar plexus" is how Laura Miller in The New Yorker describes Lehane's latest book, what may be his last book. Lehane, a Boston native and the author of fourteen novels, including Gone Baby Gone and Mystic River, has suggested that he might devote himself full-time to writing screenplays.

Small Mercies is set in Boston during the summer of 1974 as the city braces for the start of forced busing to integrate its public schools. Mary Pat Fennessy, having lost a husband to divorce and a son to drugs, is living a desperate life in the housing projects of South Boston. Hers is an insular Irish American community where folks take care of their own yet are deeply fearful of everyone else. Carol Iaciofano Aucoin, writing for WBUR, states: “So much of the story flows from the maddening powerlessness over their lives that the Southie residents keenly feel .... "

When her teenage daughter does not return home one night, Mary Pat sets out on a relentless quest to find her remaining child. Her search leads her to the Butler gang, a criminal organization deeply woven into the fabric of South Boston. 

"Lehane is a rare writer who makes you want to read fast and slow at the same time," Aucoin continues. "His propulsive plots compel you to keep turning pages. Yet, his profoundly perceptive writing makes you want to pause — to laugh at an exquisitely caustic description or to tend the hairline crack a character has just opened in your heart ... 

This a great crime story that has much to say about community and the repercussions of not conforming. Racism and fear also play outside roles in the book. 

This is a fine book; one I highly recommend. 

I found Fatherland on Five Books, a fantastic resourse, which I describe under the Our Friends tab above. 

I was attracted by the setting of the book, which Graham Hurley describes so well: "Fatherland’s central conceit is that it takes place in Hitler’s Berlin in 1964. The novel is cast as a thriller, which is a very clever decision on Robert Harris's part. It starts off with a body in the Havel, near a favoured island in Berlin called Schwanenwerder." More bodies are ultimately found, and Detective March, the protagonist, makes the connection, which ultimately leads us to a compelling conclusion. 

Hurley continues: "It’s a good tale well told. As ever, his background research is brilliant. What worked, above all, for me is the way he inserts, en passant, little gems of the way things are. What happened to Churchill? What happened to the British royal family? They’re all in Canada. What happened to the Russians? The Russians have been pushed back east of the Urals. There’s still a guerrilla war going on. It’s being funded by the Americans and offers no real challenge to the Germans, who are settling into the Greater German Reich. In vast areas of the Ukraine, Germans are growing crops. America is under President Kennedy, but it’s not Jack Kennedy, it’s Joe Kennedy, who was ambassador to London, the great appeaser. The ambassador to Berlin is no other than Charles Lindbergh."

It is indeed a "good tale, well told." The relationship between March and his young son is compelling. Unfortunately, March falls easily into the category of cynical detective with a good heart. His accomplice, the beautiful, scrappy, young American woman, we have also seen before. But these are minor quibbles. I throughly enjoyed this book. 

I loved Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I am not alone. Kingsolver won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for the book (together with Herman Diaz, for his book Trust). As described on the Pulitzer website, the novel is “A masterful recasting of David Copperfield, narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse–and his efforts to conquer them.”

While based on Charles Dickens' novel, you need not have read Dickens' book to be enthralled by Demon Copperhead. I missed David Copperfield somewhere in my education (along with a lot of other stuff), but I never felt left out of an inside joke when reading this novel. 

As Joan Gaylord wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, “Kingsolver...gives [her characters] a voice as she infuses the bleak tale with a depth that brings warmth, humor, and dignity to the characters. She empowers them to speak for themselves as she illuminates the motives and goals that allow some to succeed while others perish ... For many readers, sticking with the book is time well spent: Her exquisite writing takes a wrenching story and makes it worthwhile. The details are difficult, but they are never gratuitous.”

The details are indeed difficult. I have dear friends who had to put it down. But for me, this was an excellent book.