Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading: The Hundred-Year House, by Rebecca Makkai

/ Carolyn O / 10 Comments

photo (108)Like Proteus, the mythological figure invoked in one of her character’s poetry, Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred-Year House* twists and turns, refusing to be confined to any one genre or style. And like Proteus, The Hundred-Year house refuses to tell the future; instead, it charts a way through the past.

The story begins — or rather, ends — with Zee and Doug, a married couple who’ve come to live in the carriage house that belongs to Zee’s mother, Gracie and stepfather, Bruce. Zee, a self-professed “Marxist literary scholar” (as a former-ish academic myself, I loved the intradepartmental sniping at Zee’s college), and her mother Gracie are Devohrs, members of a wealthy Canadian family that built an estate called Laurelfield near Chicago, one hundred years before Zee and Doug’s arrival. One of the Devohrs, Violet, is said to be a ghost who still haunts Laurelfield; a huge oil portrait of Zee’s great-grandmother still hangs in the house.

For about thirty years, Laurelfield was an art colony, and it just so happens that one of its major residents was the poet Edwin Parfitt, the subject of Doug’s research. Doug hopes that access to Laurelfield’s records will force him to finish his book, so that he can get a teaching job, instead of surreptitiously ghost-writing a series for middle-school girls. But there’s a catch or two: Gracie’s none too keen on allowing Doug to kick up dust in the attic, and Bruce’s son and daughter-in-law arrive and upend Zee and Doug’s attempted domestic bliss.

More than enough material for a novel there, right?  Yet Ms. Makkai gives us more: another section follows giving us scenes from Laurelfield in 1955; then another section about the arts colony in 1929; and a brief prologue set in 1900. Each section is written in a different style, and reveals a bit more of the Laurelfield puzzle, which is so tantalizing that I won’t say anything more about it.

Ms. Makkai’s writing is lively, engaging, and crisp, and her pacing is sublime. As I read The Hundred-Year House,  I was caught between the impulse to keep turning pages, impatient to learn more of Laurelfield’s secrets, and the inclination to pause over each page, to note a particularly well-crafted sentence or a telling detail. It’s a marvelous novel, and highly recommended.

Tomorrow: An interview with Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House. 

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

The Poetry Concierge Recommends: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

[The Poetry Concierge is an occasional feature here on Rosemary and Reading Glasses wherein I select a poem, poet, or book of poems for individual readers based on a short questionnaire. Come play along! Read the introductory post here, my first recommendation here, and then email me at: rosemaryandreadingglasses [at] gmail [dot] com. ]

This week, our pilgrim in search of poetry is the blogger who goes by Stressing Out Student (SOS).

1. When you read fiction, who’s your go-to author?

I don’t read much of any particular author. I usually look for the content to interest me before expecting the style to interest me. But the author I’ve read the most of would likely be John Steinbeck.

2. If you read nonfiction, which subjects are most likely to interest you? (cultural history, science, biography, memoir, survival stories?)

Psychology, behaviorial/social sciences, how the mind/people work

3. If you were stuck on a desert island for a week, which five books would you bring to keep you entertained?

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth, horror short story anthology, The Stranger by Albert Camus, When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

4. If you were on a five-year mission to Mars, which five books would you bring to keep you sane?

The Stranger, Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace, 1984 by George Orwell

5. What kinds of questions are most likely to keep you up at night? (death, the nature of love, politics, environmental issues, meaning of life, end of the world, justice and injustice, etc?)

Am I doing the right thing? How can I know to do the right things at the right times? What does the future hold?

6. If you’ve read poetry before, what have you liked? What have you disliked?

I’ve liked:
“The Grasshopper” by E.E. Cummings
“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth
“Dream within a Dream” Edgar Allan Poe
All of Shel Silverstein

Dislike…
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” John Keats

 

Well, when I saw Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman on SOS’s list of favorite authors, I thought, ha! Edgar Allan Poe! — only to have my first thought dashed in question 6 (yes, if you tell me you like a poet, I do feel obliged to find a new one for you to like).

Enter Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and critic, rehabilitator of Shakespeare and Milton, and perhaps the most productive opium addict the world has ever seen. His writing influenced Wordsworth and the rest of the Romantics (and he was one himself, of course), some of his most famous poems tell strange and fantastic stories (a la Pratchett & Gaiman), and the workings of the human mind are certainly at the forefront of his poetic concerns.

(And if SOS is interested in what the future holds, perhaps she’ll have fun imagining the endings to “Kubla Kahn “and “Christabel.”)

This week’s poem of the week, and the poem I especially commend to SOS, is “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” first published in Lyrical Ballads (though this links to a later version). Why? Check out the listing of its subjects given by the Poetry Foundation: “Religion, Crime & Punishment, Living, Social Commentaries, Seas, Rivers, & Streams, Horror, Faith & Doubt, Nature, Christianity, Weather, Death, Mythology & Folklore, Animals, God & the Divine.”

This poem’s got it all. Except romance, and hey, we can all use a break from that once in a while, right?

SOS, I hope you find something to love in these poems. Thanks for writing in!

Would you like the Poetry Concierge to make a recommendation for you? Check out the introductory post, and send your answers to the questionnaire, along with the name and/or blog you’d like posted with the reply, to rosemaryandreadingglasses [at] gmail [dot] com.

Recommended Reading: Invisible Beasts, by Sharona Muir

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

Ever seen a Feral Parfumier Bee? A Beanie Shark? A Truth Bat?

Of course not. They’re invisible.

photo (106)In Sharona Muir’s charming and inventive Invisible Beasts*, which will be available tomorrow, we meet Sophie, a naturalist with a peculiar genetic quirk: she can see invisible animals. Invisible Beasts belongs to these invisible creatures, rather than to Sophie, but her humane (in the best sense) voice links each tale together, and gradually we gain a sense of her life’s contours and concerns. Her sister, Evie, is a biologist, and the two sisters are linked by their concern for the natural world, though pushed apart, sometimes by how they perceive it.

Because Invisible Beasts eschews plot in favor of description — and rightly so — it feels odd to call it a novel, when really it is, as Sophie points out, a bestiary, a compendium of beasts. Bestiaries date back to antiquity, and have been written in every age since. Often, an animal — real or imagined — is pictured, a description is given, and some sort of lesson is imparted (for example, how an animal is an allegory for a virtue or a vice). Ms. Muir’s book forgoes illustration, of course, but her descriptions are glorious in their multi-textured detail. Part of the fun of reading Invisible Beasts is the unexpected, so I won’t quote here — but I hope you’ll have the pleasure of reading it for yourself. Sophie, through her whimsical and funny descriptions of her beloved creatures, offers us insights about love, sex, truthfulness, perspective, and the passage of time.

As for lessons: Ms. Muir is significantly more subtle than her medieval predecessors, though Invisible Beasts is deeply concerned with humanity’s relationship with the natural world; this is definitely environmental fiction. Invisible Beasts is a book about, at its heart, symbiosis, and how we understand our own humanity through the non-human. 

Wednesday: An interview with Sharona Muir, author of Invisible Beasts. 

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water

/ Carolyn O / 7 Comments

photo (107)If you’re looking for a thoughtful, surprising dystopian novel that will make you see your preferred summer body of water — ocean, lake, swimming pool — in a whole new light, look no further than Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water*.

Ms. Itäranta, who is Finnish and lives in England, wrote the novel in both Finnish and English (the translation of the novel’s Finnish title is The Tea Master’s Book), and readers will find both a Scandinavian setting (albeit much different from today’s region) and lyrical prose, setting Memory of Water apart from what has now become rather standard dystopian fare.

What also sets the novel apart is Ms. Itäranta’s use of conventional dystopian tropes — a world changed after environmental disaster, an authoritarian government wielding violent power, scarcity of basic resources — without following standard plot-lines. Noria Kaito lives in a far-flung village of the Scandinavian Union, which is ruled by New Qian. Her mother is a scientist, and her father is a tea master, performing the traditional tea ceremony that has been handed down for generations; Noria is his apprentice. One day, her father shows her a dangerous secret: a hidden spring that only the tea master’s family knows about. With fresh water scarce — the rest of the village drinks desalinated seawater — this knowledge is illegal, and before long, a commander from New Qian arrives in town, suspecting the tea master’s secret.

When her father dies, Noria becomes the tea master — unprecedented, since she is a woman — and must decide what to do with her knowledge. At the same time, she’s navigating her friendship with Sanja and exploring old technology that they found together in the “plastic grave” near the town, technology that leads the pair to yet another dangerous secret. The military’s hold on the town becomes more brutal, and Noria is faced with extremely difficult choices about what’s best for her, for Sanja, for their village, for the world.

I loved Memory of Water for its musicality, its lyric attention to water, its innate feminism, its conjuring of a world very different from our own, but shaped with its ghostly imprint. I loved Ms. Itäranta’s refusal to grant the reader a happy ending (reaching instead for realism) without diminishing the power of hope. Highly recommended reading.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which does not affect the content of my review.

Recommended Reading: David Gilbert’s & Sons

/ Carolyn O / 16 Comments

Herewith, Dear Readers, a list.

Types of Contemporary Novels Carolyn Does Not Tend To Enjoy 

  1. books in which all the major characters are male
  2. books in whole or in part written from the perspective of teenage boys
  3. books about writers
  4. books about rich people
  5. books about New York City

photo (105)David Gilbert’s & Sons* is a book in which all the major characters are male, one of whom is a teenage boy, two of whom are writers, all of whom are wealthy, that takes place in New York City.

And I loved it.

[This was perhaps not entirely surprising, given the general acclaim that followed the novel’s publication last year (it’s now out in paperback).]

& Sons is a big, sprawling, very literary sort of novel, helmed by a somewhat unreliable and undeniably removed narrator (think Nick Carraway**) and populated with flawed and fascinating characters.

The novel’s four main characters are acclaimed novelist A. N. Dyer, a writer whose first book achieved Catcher In the Rye***-type status, sent him into Salinger-style reclusiveness and whose subsequent output seems to match Philip Roth’s; his estranged eldest sons Richard (a recovering addict with anger issues and hoped-for screenwriting career) and Jamie (an avant-garde filmmaker with commitment issues, and many other issues; and the novelist’s youngest son, Richard and Jamie’s half-brother Andy, whose birth seventeen years earlier led to A. N. Dyer’s divorce.

The death of Andrew Dyer’s best friend, Charles Topping (whose son Philip is our narrator) seems to signal the coming end for the writer; at the funeral, says Philip, “[h]is posture reminded me of a comma, its intent not yet determined” (10). He calls all his sons together, and in a few days of frenetic activity, we meet the family, and it’s not exactly a Royal Tenenbaums collection of quirky types, though there’s a showstopping twist about halfway through the novel.

As I noted above, this is a book about men; fathers and sons and brothers, especially, but a certain type of men, who grew up wealthy in New York City, were shipped off to Philips Exeter, and have all the neuroses to prove it. They sound insufferable, but in Mr. Gilbert’s excellent prose — perfect comedic timing, graceful shifts in tone and form, masterful pacing — these men become interesting, then compelling, and finally, weirdly, moving.

A note on this paperback edition: I don’t have the hardcover to compare, but offered here along with the novel is a conversation between Mr. Gilbert and Curtis Sittenfeld (author of American Wife), which is just delightful reading, as well as a series of questions posed to the reader by Mr. Gilbert, a revelatory take on the usual Reader’s Guide.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes, which did not affect the content of my review.

** Confession 1: I do not care for The Great Gatsby.

*** Confession 2: I loathe The Catcher in the Rye.

Recommended Reading: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Together with Sellic Spell (Edited by Christopher Tolkien)

/ Carolyn O / 13 Comments
(The dragon on the front cover is one of J.R.R. Tolkien's drawings.)

(The dragon on the front cover is one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s drawings.)

I have been looking forward to the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf* for ages, and this book more than met my expectations. It’s a treat for Tolkien aficionados like yours truly.

Here are the book’s major sections:

  • Introduction by Christopher Tolkien
  • J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf
  • Note on the text of the translation
  • Commentary on Beowulf
  • Sellic Spell
  • The Lay of Beowulf

In his preface to the work, Christopher Tolkien quotes his own foreword to The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: “‘Of its nature it is not to be judged by views prevailing in contemporary scholarship. It is intended rather as a record of his perceptions, in his own day, of a literature that he greatly admired'” (xiii). The same, he writes, applies to this version of Beowulf.

Christopher Tolkien (approaching 90) has shown a faithfulness and care for his father’s legacy that rivals Sam Gamgee’s for Frodo; without him, it’s difficult to say that we’d have The Silmarillion, or Unfinished Tales, or Children of Húrin, or The Fall of Arthur. Here, he’s provided a painstaking record of his work to bring this edition of Beowulf together, and helpfully elucidated many of his father’s notes.

Christopher Tolkien’s Introduction discusses the manuscript versions of his father’s translation, one of which, like the Beowulf manuscript itself, is damaged. J.R.R. Tolkien’s (prose) translation of the poem presented here is dense, packing nuances of meaning into every line. As one of my uncles** pointed out, quite rightly, this edition of Beowulf will not dethrone Seamus Heaney’s masterful verse translation as the edition of choice in classrooms, but it’s fascinating reading for those of us who love to read Tolkien in any form. Fans of The Lord of the Rings who read this Beowulf will recognize names and phrases that Tolkien borrowed for his own epic. Tolkien’s learned commentary (chosen from a large store of notes and lecture materials by Christopher Tolkien) illuminates particular textual cruces and passages of interest.

The hidden gems in this book are Sellic Spell and The Lay of Beowulf. The Lay of Beowulf, here presented in two versions, is a short, ballad form of the Beowulf story that is meant to be sung; Christopher Tolkien remembers his father singing it to him as a child, more than eighty years ago.

Sellic Spell is the name Tolkien gave to his reconstruction of the mythic-fairy story (as opposed to political-historic) component of Beowulf (Tolkien’s translation of his own work into Old English is also included, because yes, the man was that amazing). It’s absolutely wonderful, engrossing as the best fairy tales are, filled to the brim with descriptive touches. Parts of the dialogue recall The Hobbit, and indeed, at  twenty-five pages in the finished version, Sellic Spell is the perfect way to introduce Beowulf to younger readers, though adults  will love it, too.

This a delightful volume, a must-have for fans of Tolkien or Beowulf (or both), and highly recommended to the general reader for its inclusion of Sellic Spell and The Lay of Beowulf.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

** Happy birthday!

Recommended Reading: The Arsonist, by Sue Miller

/ Carolyn O / 3 Comments

photo (102)Sue Miller’s The Arsonist* is a work of exceedingly careful observation, so careful that for me the novel had an almost gauzy quality, as if the narrator, like an officer at a barricade, had removed me several paces back from the action. This is not to denigrate the novel by any means; The Arsonist is a thoughtful meditation on how people find and understand their places in the world even as that world is constantly in flux.

It’s the late 1990s, and Frankie Rowley has left East Africa to visit her parents in New Hampshire at what was once their summer home, but is now their full-time residence. After many years in aid work, Frankie wonders what good she’s really done, and if, maybe, it’s time to seek a permanent home back in America, with all that ‘home’ entails — partner and family included. As she thinks about what to do, she’s drawn back into her parents’ orbit, witnessing Alfie’s decline into dementia and her Sylvia’s struggles to care for him.

On the night she arrives, one of the summer houses — empty — is set ablaze, and in the following weeks the small town of Pomeroy is set on edge my more and more burnings. All the burned houses belong to the summer folk, and the arsons reveal the long-simmering tensions between the town’s year-round residents and the wealthy summer people: Between the two groups stands Bud, owner and chief reporter of the local paper, a transplant from Washington, D.C. who’s working out his place in Pomeroy:

[. . . ] the fires were somehow framing a question he needed to answer for himself about whose home Pomeroy was, whose experience defined it–the chatty, self-assured summer people or the observant, perhaps resentful, year-round folks. A question about who owned the town and who merely used it. (93)

Bud falls hard and fast for Frankie. Their relationship rests on uncertain ground as the fires rage, Frankie’s father gets worse, and Frankie resists making a decision about her future.

The Arsonist is a sensitive, thoughtful book, despite the lurid suggestion of its title, far more concerned with character than with pyrotechnics. Take this passage on the meaning of home:

Maybe, Frankie thought, home–what felt like home–was just a way of being in the world that felt Alfie-like to him, like being the person he’d been before the changes that were slowly turning him into someone else began. Maybe by home he meant the time when he felt whole, when he felt like himself. The time–and perhaps one of the places–where the world seemed to recognize him in some deep way, seemed to say, Come in, we’ve been expecting you. Exactly you. (271)

This is the perfect novel for summer — it’s set in summer, long enough ago to feel  both fresh and nostalgic (remember when not everyone had a cell phone), and engaged with questions we all think about, even when, thankfully, our towns aren’t on fire.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Once More into the Breach, or, Re-reading The Iliad After Ten Years Away

/ Carolyn O / 18 Comments

photo 101When the Fates — or, the lovely people who choose Classics Club spin numbers — plunked The Iliad in front of me last month, I was neither pleased nor displeased. I’d put The Iliad on my list because it seemed like a sensible thing to do; having read it many years ago, I was due for a re-read, but I wasn’t looking forward to it the way I’m looking forward to reading Villette or Lilith’s Brood.

I bounced around looking for the right edition; the one I had in my reference section (yes, I have my own reference section) was too modern, as was another edition I found in the library. I prefer poetry to be translated into poetry, so that nixed the prose versions. Finally I settled on the verse translation by Robert Fagles, with an introduction by Bernard Knox. If you’re planning on reading The Iliad, I highly recommend this edition; the introduction is thorough, organized, and insightful, and the translation moves rapidly and flows easily. (Notes and a section on proper names are included after the text.)

The Iliad is the preeminent poem of war, and it felt somehow appropriate to be reading it while I was thinking about the poets of World War I for my weekly poetry posts. For all its focus on glory and honor — and especially the physical manifestations of those qualities — the poem doesn’t shrink from the realities of violence. It’s quite gory, and since Homer often gives us a brief bio of the fighter about to be speared, the violence is intensely personal, inflicted by one specific man on another specific man. Here’s an example (and with a poppy, too):

The archers loosed a fresh shaft from the bowstring
straight for Hector, his spirit longing to hit him–
but he missed and cut Gorgythion down instead,
a well-bred son of Priam, a handsome prince,
and the arrow pierced his chest, Gorgythion
whom Priam’s bride from Aesyme bore one day,
lovely Castianira lithe as a deathless goddess . . .
As a garden poppy, burst into red bloom, bends,
drooping its head to one side, weighed down
by its full seeds and a sudden spring shower,
so Gorgythion’s head fell limp over one shoulder,
weighed down by his helmet (8.342-53)

As Bernard Knox writes in his Introduction, Homer’s use of the word “friend” between combatants “is sincerely meant; it is a recognition of equality, the equality of men of war, all of whom must face violent death” (37). In The Iliad, even kings and gods can be injured.

I think just about everyone knows the plot of the poem, so I’ll refrain from supplying it and just touch on a few things that struck me through this reading:

Bernard Knox elucidates one of the poem’s great conflicts — fate vs. free will:

[. . . ] in fact the coexistence of these irreconcilables is not a phenomenon confined to Homer’s imagined world. In any civilization which makes a place in its thought for free will (and therefore individual responsibility) and pattern (and therefore overall meaning), the two concepts –fixed and free–exist uneasily cheek by jowl. The only escape from this logical contradiction is the prison of rigid determinism, a pattern fixed from the beginning and not subject to change, or on the other hand, the complete freedom and meaningless anarchy of an unpredictable universe. And Greek thought, like ours (or those of us at least who still live in the humane traditions of the West), tries to embrace the logical contradiction of freedom and order combined. (40)

The sensitive portrayal of Andromache and the portrayal of fierce goddesses vs. the relentless objectification of women: The poem begins, of course, with Achilles’s rage when Agamemnon carts off Briseis, one of Achilles’s war prizes (though he claims later “I loved that woman with all my heart / though I won her like a trophy with my spear” [9.416-17]). At the funeral games for Patroclus, one of the prizes Achilles offers is a woman worth four oxen, “and skilled in many crafts” (23.785). Throughout The Iliad, women are regarded as prizes and slaves (the Greeks plan to enslave the Trojan women once the city falls); rape and enslavement are weapons of war (and still are).  Andromache herself is captured by Achilles’s son Pyrrhus (who slaughters her baby son) after Troy falls, and is enslaved as his concubine. This treatment of women is highlighted by Homer’s sensitive portrayal of Andromache, and the machinations and deep feelings of the goddesses who preside over the conflict, especially Hera, Athena, and Thetis (Achilles’s mother).

Unexpectedly moving passages: Given The Iliad‘s ancientness and its stylistic patterns, I expected to be interested by the poem, to appreciate it, but I didn’t expect to be truly moved. The grief of Achilles for Patroclus, Andromache’s scene with Hector, and Priam’s determination to recover Hector’s body were stand-out exceptions. All made me want to walk over to my bookshelf and take down Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles — which I read twice in a row when I received it for Christmas in 2012. If you haven’t read it, please do. It is beautiful and illuminates The Iliad like nothing I’ve ever read before.

Epic lists: The Iliad is well known for its Catalogue of Ships, but there are other lists in the poem, of course. My favorite is the list of the Nereids which appears in Book 18.

Robots: Well, almost. As Hephaestus sets about forging a new shield and armor for Achilles, “Handmaids ran to attend their master / all cast in gold but a match for living, breathing girls. / Intelligence fills their hearts, voice and strength their frames, / from the deathless gods they’ve learned their works of hand” (18.488-91).

And with robots, Dear Readers, I leave you with a question: what do you think of The Iliad?

Charlotte Boulay’s “Watson and the Shark” from Foxes on the Trampoline

/ Carolyn O / 5 Comments

photo (100)Charlotte Boulay is Ecco’s first addition to its roster of poets since 2008 (a roster that includes contemporary poetry heavyweights Robert Hass and Jorie Graham, among others). Having read Ms. Boulay’s debut collection, Foxes on the Trampoline*, I see why Ecco is excited to be publishing her work.

Ms. Boulay is attentive to the power of individual words; poems like “Calenture” and “Changeling” consider the experiences these words conjure up, as well as their connotations, with startling immediacy.

The collection as a whole is grounded in its speaker’s wide range experience, reflecting Ms. Boulay’s travels in France and India. In “Pallikoodam” (which means “school”) the speaker recalls, “We lived with animals: small lizards / darting up the walls, lines of tiny / imperious ants” before going on to remember the ways she found comfort after watching (on television) the towers fall on September 11, and how she and her companion “woke in the mornings / to hear someone singing, softly / as she swept the yard clean.” This combination — of otherness and familiarity, radical change and the routines of ordinary life — resonates deeply in Foxes on the Trampoline.

You can read a selection of Charlotte Boulay’s poems on the Boston Review site, including our poem of the week, “Watson and the Shark.” In this poem, the speaker remembers a childhood encounter with the famous John Singleton Copley painting of the same name (the copy he made of his original version), which is on view at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (we just visited the MFA this past weekend, so this poem jumped out at me. The last stanza is amazing.

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Recommended Reading: Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng

/ Carolyn O / 17 Comments

photo (97)I admired so much about Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You*: the seemingly effortless structure that passes seamlessly between decades; the rounded, careful characterizations; the gradual revelation of a loving family’s best-kept secrets.

When I first heard about Everything I Never Told You, I was in equal parts eager and nervous about reading it. Eager because the praise was already coming in, and because I recognized Ms. Ng’s name; we attended the same high school and edited the same high school creative arts magazine (four years apart; we’ve never met). And nervous because, given the book’s opening lines (“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.”), I thought that I might be reading something akin to The Lovely Bones, and I wasn’t sure I had the emotional energy in reserve. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried.

Everything I Never Told You is a nuanced portrayal of the ways in which a family copes with a loss both profound and mysterious. It’s also an exploration of how that family came into being, and how the histories of parents shape their children. It’s a novel in which a skillful writer reveals that privates dramas — made of extraordinary-ordinary stuff, no skeletons in the attic — are astonishingly compelling, and astonishingly important.

In their small Ohio town, the Lees stand out as the sole Chinese American family, a distinction that causes difficulties for them, to say the least. James Lee is the son of immigrants (their story, given in brief, is both poignant and gripping, and made me want to hear more about them); Marilyn was raised by her mother and dreamed of becoming a doctor before marriage and motherhood derailed her plans. James respects his wife’s intellect, and did not deliberately keep her from a career; like so many of us, the Lees make their decisions about work and family with practical exigencies in mind and ideal scenarios too far out of reach.

The three Lee children are Nathan (Nath), Lydia, and Hannah. Nath looks forward to leaving for Harvard in the fall; Lydia struggles with her parents’ expectations; and little Hannah is at once nearly invisible and the one who sees best what’s going on around her.

One spring morning in 1977, the Lee family realizes that Lydia is missing. Once her body is recovered, each member of the family starts to look for answers, but their searching reveals just how much has been unspoken among them, and how difficult it will be to knit together an unraveled family.

Ms. Ng’s prose is gorgeous, gliding from character to character in a manner that reminded me of Ian McEwan’s style in, say, Atonement. Here’s one passage I loved:

For the first time, she wishes she were the sort of woman, like her mother, who carried a handkerchief. She would have pressed it to her face and let it filter air, and when she lowered it the cloth would be dirty pink, the color of old bricks. Beside her, Hannah knits her fingers. She would like to worm her hand onto her mother’s lap, but she doesn’t dare. Nor does she dare look at the coffin. Lydia is not inside, she reminds herself, taking a deep breath, only her body–but then where is Lydia herself? Everyone is so still that to the birds floating overhead, she thinks, they must look like a cluster of statues. (60)

I love the detail here, and the way Ms. Ng lights on these two sad figures for just a moment, to give us a sense of what a small moment of loss feels like, how it looks.

Everything I Never Told You is a novel that asks us to examine how we define our own success or happiness, to wonder what it means to belong (in all the senses of the word) and to try mightily to understand each other better. Highly recommended.

Coming Soon: An interview with Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You

*I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Bostonians: You have two opportunities in July to hear Celeste Ng read from Everything I Never Told You!

July 23: BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH. 7:00 PM

279 Harvard Street
Brookline MA 02446

July 29: NEWTONVILLE BOOKS. 7:00 PM

10 Langley Road
Newton Centre
Newton, MA 02459