#6 Paula McLain, Circling the SunBallantine 2015By Maureen ThorsonThere are adventurous people – those who willingly ride roller-coasters and go scuba-diving, those who, when asked whether they would like to go hang-gliding, respond not with a derisive sneer but an enraptured cry of “Dude!” I am not one of them, but I like reading about them, preferably in a chintz-covered armchair with a steaming mug of tea in my hand and a sleeping cat in the near environs.Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun is ostensibly the story of an adventurous person. And, indeed, because the book’s subject, Beryl Markham, was a real person, one can easily confirm that she was adventurous – a race-horse trainer and pioneering African bush pilot, and the first woman to make an East-West Atlantic flight. She was a decent writer as well. Although her autobiography, West With the Night, dropped silently into the great bucket of literature when it was first brought out in the 1940s, it was rediscovered and became a bestseller four decades later. Ernest Hemingway, for one, thought it brilliant, although he described Markham herself as a “high-grade bitch” (takes one to know one, Ernest!).That seems to be the problem for McLain, as a novelist. The woman that wrote West With the Night was funny, alive, real – but not necessarily likeable. Markham was a do-er, most at home with machines and with animals, and she lived by a code that was unsparingly unsentimental. And while Circling the Sun is meant to be the tale of a woman who didn’t let others’ (read: men’s) expectations stop her, Markham doesn’t fit the mold of plucky heroine very well. She was fascinating, yes, but I have no reason to believe she was nice.In fact, Markham was part of an almost unbelievably not-nice milieu: mainly British ex-pats with vast inherited wealth who, having no real feeling of what they should do with those riches (apparently anything that might benefit actual Africans was right out), used them to buy vast quantities of Kenya, breed race horses, hunt elephants, and die in innumerable plane crashes.Consider that Markham and her boon companions in the early days of African flying were mainly engaged in scouting for safaris. These were not happy little photography safaris. These were I-am-a-rich-guy-who-can-pay-a-lot-of-money-and-by-god-I-will-kill-all-these-elephants safaris. Markham was among the first to make a living out of finding ivory-loaded bulls by air and directing her clients straight to them, increasing their killing efficiency.Markham herself, recounting some of her adventures in West With the Night, describes elephants as sentient, and proves the point by recounting the clever ways that elephants would attempt to evade detection, and protect one another. She doesn’t appear to regret their slaughter in the least. Not likeable at all, that, but at least she isn’t coy about it. Yet in Circling the Sun, McLain desperately wants her heroine to be likable. She attempts to make her so in two ways, but strangely neglects a third way, which would have been the most successful of all.First, McLain inserts highly implausible rehabilitative conversations between Markham and her friends at points throughout her book. There’s a particularly stilted one about how terrible it is that so many animals are being killed on safaris, and how much better it would be if all these rich tourists would take photos of the animals instead. The conversation is so totally out of character and sensitized to modern tastes that it may as well have been drafted by a committee.Second, McLain’s book focuses not on Markham’s life as a horse-trainer and pilot per se, but on her relationships with men, which were fraught in the extreme. When she wasn’t being married off at a ghastly early age to a highly unsuitable suitor, she was having horses she was training taken away due to the jealousy of the owners’ wives, or getting disastrously pregnant in humiliating circumstances. It gets dour, really – as though Markham’s life were a particularly gloomy picaresque, an upside-down Pilgrim’s Progress meant to stoke the fires of readers’ feminist rage. But one can feel sorry for a person without liking them, and this brings me to the third way in which McLain could have made Markham likable.McLain could have given Markham a personality. The Markham of Circling the Sun is curiously inert: for all her adventurousness, things seem to just happen to her (men happen to her, in fact) and her reactions feel impersonal – described, not lived, as though occurring to someone under sedation. This is particularly odd because West With the Night offered McLain a good deal of writing in Markham’s actual rich, live voice, and that voice could have been emulated in Circling the Sun. But I think that might be the rub: the Markham in West With the Night is bracingly alive, but she is not likeable in any “girl-next-door, just-like-you-and-me” kind of way. She is funny, but her humor is dry and sardonic; she is a no-nonsense woman who gets things done; she is also judgmental and uncharitable. Although fond of her friends, that fondness is unsentimental; she loves self-reliance most of all. If this were manifest in Circling the Sun, the book would be more difficult, surely, but better. Instead, rather than risk having her audience dislike and like Markham in equal measure, McLain has rendered her in cardboard.It would be hard not to be interested by Beryl Markham’s life – it was the stuff of old Victorian adventure yarns, stuffed with physical action in exotic locales. The details of Markham’s life keep Circling the Sun going despite the unfocused flatness of the narration. But I’d recommend that you read West With the Night instead. As a lifelong Hemingway hater, it pains me to have to agree with the old bastard, but he was right that it’s a wonderful book.#7 Jonathan Kellerman, The Murderer’s DaughterBallantine Books, 2015By John CotterJonathan Kellerman has won loyalty from readers and praise from critics for his psychologically inflected Alex Delaware mysteries. In The Murderer's Daughter, this confident confector of bestsellers has decided to abandon his usual formula, introducing a new hero, the sharp and graceful psychiatrist-sleuth Grace Blade. Grace because she's graceful, you see, and Blade …A young, sexy genius (“she'd earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at an unreasonably young age”), skilled in the arts of self-defense and easy with guns, Grace spends her days pulling in $450 per hour from grateful patients for her life-coaching (she accepts no insurance, although “making money wasn't the point—she could have lived quite well without her practice”). By night, she drives fast on overlook roads and treats strangers in bars to the fucks of their lives.But brilliant, sexy Grace’s routine is thrown into turmoil one day when one of the strangers she seduces (“he yielded like meringue”)—a shy traveler named … wait for it … Roger – turns out to be an entirely different man with the real name of Andrew Toner who winds up murdered and who Grace realizes only too late was actually someone she knew as a child; his name then was Typhoon.Still with me? Fearing her own life may be in danger, Grace avoids the police for reasons glancingly explained and she attempts to protect herself by checking into a hotel room under an assumed name (it wouldn't be LA Noir if she didn't), vowing, to herself, that she will avenge the murder of Roger/Andrew/Typhoon. She mostly achieves this by just sort of showing up and hanging around various places connected with the victim and his suspected assassin and waiting until somebody local appears from the blue (a neighbor, a vagrant) to fill her in on everything she’s missed. She eventually does find the “creepy effete” villain (like “Roger,” he also has three alternating names) in the midst of a drug-fueled rape orgy, “lost in sadistic ecstasy,” and casually plugs him. And his henchmen.But all this is a sideshow. It is obviously not intended for a moment to distract us from the real villain of the book: progressive politics.Grace is adopted, we learn – her backstory makes up a good deal of The Murderer’s Daughter, evenly interspaced with the 'action' chapters. Like so many other orphans, she was let down by the system (“what she'd learned was that kids, even toddlers, were damn good at solving their own problems if so-called grown-ups didn't intervene and impose their will”). Baby Grace is brilliant and she is self-reliant and she works hard and she comes up heads: a pair of well-heeled psychiatrists adopt her and raise her in style. In a “real” novel, the reader would be prepared for Grace's character to expand at this point, to grow from the challenges of acclimating to a new environment, but Grace never has to acclimate: her benefactors, Malcolm and Sophie, are loners themselves, chatting at dinner about how “collectivism is simply a way to control others,” and about how, meritocracy being the law of the land, Grace should have no trouble getting into any college or graduate school she likes: no need to worry about it. And she doesn't worry: Harvard it is, then UCLA.When Mike, a close friend of her adoptive parents, arrives weeping at her door to announce that said parents have died (suddenly, both at once, in a senseless accident), Grace realizes that she feels no pity. “Empathy was the biggest lie of all.” Fortunately, Mike has the wisdom of the market to comfort him. Her benefactors invested, trusted the magic of compound interest, and now Grace is rich.Alas, her good fortune will win her no friends in the mean streets of Berkeley, where her investigations eventually lead her. Its parks and cafes are filled with lazy, deluded students, “an entitled generation” who revel in “a political climate that thrived on class envy and political correctness” and write “self-righteous student journalism. Something about micro-triggers of pre-post-traumatic 'discomfort' due to a long list of isms ...”Most writers would be building character here, perhaps using irony to only appear to approve of Grace's selfishness, but Kellerman the writer clearly agrees with Grace, as do the best people in the book, like the homeless man she encounters in a park. We're to trust him right away, because he once studied with classical economist Friedrich Hayek before ill luck set in. Instant friends, he and Grace bond over government corruption, their disgust with the slackers around them, and “villains profiteering as they always do when collectivism and the collective unconscious collude to triumph over the will of man ...” though he cautions her “and by man I mean both sexes so please no whinnying about sexism, daughter.”At the end of the book, at a coffee shop where “the staff consists of half a dozen drowsy surfers of various ethnicities, all of whom are resentful about having to work for money” Grace treats herself to an expensive zip-line trip across a tropical chasm. She has saved the day and Kellerman has cashed a check and the reader has dispensed with five hours and $28. Who feels best about themselves?#8 Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You LoveAtria Books, 2015by Rebecca HusseyIn a New Yorker profile of Jennifer Weiner, Rebecca Mead argues that Weiner has two audiences, the “devoted consumers of her books” who place her regularly on the best-seller list, and the “writers, editors, and critics” who debate her arguments about gender bias in publishing and reviewing. According to Mead, these two groups have very little overlap. The readers love to read her while the critics love to write about her. Or, more precisely, they love to argue over her role in the literary world, her complaints about the lack of reviews for “women’s fiction” in major review outlets, and what she feels to be the outsized attention given to male writers in general and Jonathan Franzen in particular.I fit firmly in the “writers, editors, and critics” camp, the group that, on the whole, does not read Jennifer Weiner for fun. Who Do You Love is my second experience reading Weiner, after grumpily making my way through Good in Bed, her first book, published in 2001. I approached both these books hoping to find a pleasurable, absorbing reading experience of the sort the “devoted consumers” surely find. Instead, I got frustrated, in this case at the predictable plotline and the sometimes-rushed pace of the story.Most readers will immediately guess the general shape the ending will take; this is a love story with a traditional romance arc and offers no surprises there. In the best novels of this sort, readers feel tension along the way, worrying, in spite of knowing better, that the lovers will not find their way back to each other. But Who Do You Love failed to leave me in suspense. Its main characters are Rachel Blum and Andy Landis who meet in a hospital at the age of eight and spend the next three decades moving in and out of each other’s lives. Individual episodes along the way contain charming moments, but the episodes don’t work together to create drama.Rachel spends much of her childhood in hospitals because of a congenital heart defect. But she is well-loved and cared for by her comfortably well-off parents. Andy is being raised by a single mother who doesn’t have much time or money for him. Fortunately, he meets a local man, Mr. Sills, who becomes a father-figure, and he turns to running as an outlet for his anger and aggression. As it turns out, he is a talented runner, and this gets him into college on scholarship and earns him a career as a professional athlete. After their first meeting in the hospital, Rachel and Andy meet again as teenagers building low-income housing in Atlanta where their romance begins. From there the novel moves through college years and then through the years of establishing careers and reputations and experimenting with relationships. Weiner covers a lot along the way: college sororities, being a social worker in New York City, the world of professional athletics, modeling, 9/11.The strength of the novel lies in the way Weiner evokes her characters’ cultural worlds – Rachel’s Jewish family and Andy’s inner-city mixed-race parentage – with grace and (what feels like although probably isn’t) ease. Weiner can conjure up scenes vividly and convincingly, with an eye for just the right detail. When Andy gets arrested for throwing a brick through a windshield, for example, Weiner describes his mother this way:
In her tight black shirt and bright-red lipstick and a Santa hat perched on her blond head, she’d charmed the desk sergeant and even the cop who’d picked Andy up. As soon as that guy, Officer Nash, had learned that Andy was just ten – a lie that Lori told while she’d rested her hand on his forearm and let her breasts just brush his shoulder – he’d agreed to let Andy off with a warning.
At times, Weiner’s tone is delightfully satirical, for example in her description of Andy’s visit to Rachel’s sorority house:
Andy lay in bed while Rachel paced around the room, shoes off, hair loose, telling him the story about some potential getting drunk and puking in the ladies’ room – “She told us she was on antibiotics, which, I’m sorry, but shouldn’t she have remembered that before she, like, drank three glasses of punch?” – and how she’d heard that some other sorority was ripping off their formal theme, which was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “They’re doing Midnight at the Oasis, which, I’m sorry, is basically the same thing. And I heard they rented an elephant,” she fretted.“That’s—“ Awful, he’d been going to say, but Rachel jumped in with, “I know! God, I could kill myself for not thinking of it!”
Weiner deftly moves back and forth between this light, humorous tone and something more serious, as befits the particular scene. Individual episodes, however, don’t always move from one to the next successfully, and transitions can be jarring and unconvincing. Most importantly, the whole isn’t larger than the sum of its parts. I didn’t find Weiner’s humor and descriptive abilities enough to make up for the lack of a satisfying narrative drive.But clearly many readers disagree with me. I’m not sure if satisfied readers of Who Do You Love feel differently than me about the plotline, or if they would agree but are content to enjoy the richly descriptive moments along the way. Regardless, as a member of the “writers, editors, and critics” camp that likes to discuss Weiner’s arguments in favor of taking “women’s fiction” seriously, I wish I had admired this book more. Weiner is correct about gender bias in publishing, and I would love to make the argument that Who Do You Love is deserving of the kind of serious critical attention that would help correct it.In an ideal world, perhaps the critical camp and the devoted reader camp would have much more overlap than it does. Even though that’s not the case, I celebrate the fact that Weiner has made the literary world talk about her so much. She has pushed her arguments about women’s writing into the literary conversation with great success. Sometimes this leads only to eye-rolling and dismissal, but it has the potential to get people talking about publishing’s gender problem in a way that can lead to some change. If Weiner can accomplish this while also selling many, many books – books that bring pleasure to lots of readers even if not to me – then more power to her.#9 Debbie Macomber, Silver LiningsBallantine Books, 2015By Steve DonoghueWhen it comes to the novels of Debbie Macomber, hugely popular author and winner of the Romance Writers of America's coveted RITA, you're not only able to judge her books by their covers, you're downright encouraged to, and her latest New York Times bestseller, Silver Linings, her fourth “Rose Harbor” novel, is no exception: there in the gentle summer gloaming hang ornate lanterns from tree branches, their warm light surrounded by fireflies, with gently-lapping waves in the background. It's a tranquil, inviting scene, and the hint of nostalgia it evokes is taken up directly by Macomber in her opening remarks to her readers. “My hope,” she writes, “is that you enjoy this next installment in the Rose Harbor Inn series and that your own mind will wander back to those high school days, when every emotion was so new and intense.” It could hardly be made clearer: this is a soft novel, a kind novel, a friendly novel. In the hurly-burly of your average Times bestseller list, full of gunfire, treachery, and girls on trains, a Debbie Macomber novel is meant to be every bit as much of a safe haven as Rose Harbor itself.Cedar Cove, on Puget Sound's Kitsap Peninsula, is the place where we find the Inn at Rose Harbor, a quaint little place owned and operated by Jo Marie Rose, who retreated there to heal her broken heart after the death of her husband Paul in Afghanistan. The inn's constantly-changing roster of guests in their various states of romantic disrepair affords Macomber ready-made opportunities for variations on the love-heals-all theme (in Silver Linings, this special guest star role goes to Kellie “Coco” Crenshaw and her friend Katie Gilroy, who book a stay at the inn while they're in Cedar Cove to attend their high school reunion and confront the Ones Who Got Away). But the heart of these novels is the slow, halting return of Jo Marie herself to life after Paul.One person who'd very much like to help her with that return is her Rose Harbor handyman, Mark Taylor (I'd call him “studly” or some such, but it would be ex cathedra – Macomber doesn't give physical descriptions of her characters. For all I know, Mark could have polka-dot skin and live snakes for hair). Jo Marie might often consider Mark to be “moody, cantankerous, and a pain in the butt,” but she's also grown to like him despite their frequent verbal sparring-matches. She isn't sure she's capable of loving another man after losing Paul, but Mark makes her think about the possibility, especially when, shortly before Silver Linings begins, he outright tells her that he loves her. He becomes extra-brooding and upset when she doesn't immediately gush right back, and as the novel's scene unfolds, a tense silence exists between the two, prompting Jo Marie to reflect on their relationship:
I missed the man who was a friend, who used to sit with me in the late afternoons. The one who listened as I talked about my day. Yes, he challenged and irritated me at times, but for the most part he made me think. He made me feel again when my heart had gone numb. I could laugh with Mark.
It's as pure a sign of what kind of novel Silver Linings is that only one page, a mere handful of paragraphs later, Jo Marie tells us the exact same thing again in almost the same words:
The thing with Mark was that we disagreed on almost every subject. It took me a while to catch on that he purposely egged me on. At first he infuriated me. Not until later did I realize that arguing with him stirred my senses. I'd wallowed in my grief for months. Arguing with Mark lit a fire under me and proved my emotions hadn't stagnated. I still had the ability to feel.
This is what you get with Debbie Macomber: everything is gentled and rounded off and calmly repeated for easy retention. Silver Linings – and all the other Rose Harbor novels – are systematically, almost fairy-tale simplified stories, with no violence, no sex, anguish, and practically no pulse. They're antidotes to the dysfunctional families and free-wheeling psychopaths (both fictional and elected) who run rampant over so much of the rest of the bestseller lists. If you're daft or weak-kneed enough to want such a haven, these books are waiting for you with a patient smile and a fresh-baked pie on the kitchen window sill.#10 Kristin Hannah, The NightingaleSt. Martin’s Press, 2015By Sam SacksThe two defining events of World War II—the Holocaust and the unleashing of the atom bomb—changed the course of the novel in two different ways. With the Holocaust, novelists were faced with something they could not write about. Fiction writers had previously found ways to make art from epidemic illness, economic collapse and even trench warfare. But the death camps presented a reality that could not be distilled into coherence or meaning. There was nothing to add to or take away from them. They existed outside the bounds of the imagination, a truth that couldn’t really be believed. For the first time in its history, the realistic novel faced a terminus.The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki couldn’t be evoked in fiction either, but this was more a limitation of language than imagination—you also can’t write the moment of a grenade’s explosion. Nuclear weapons instead changed literature the way that they changed war itself: They made it fundamentally ambivalent. As war ceased to be an activity that could be decisively won or lost—since to use nuclear bombs was to invite mutually assured destruction or, if the fighting were asymmetrical, to commit a war crime of such magnitude that the concept of victory would be a macabre joke—its goals shifted toward contingency, abstraction, and absurdity. The contemporary novel had little choice but to follow.It’s now clear that time has erased the first proscription. Because of the widespread textbook familiarity with the Holocaust, and because genocides in general have become increasingly commonplace, the cattle cars and gas chambers have now been integrated into the collective pool of known experience. These things no longer belong to the realm of the sacred and profane; they’ve been absorbed by narrative.But the sense of moral uncertainty that appeared in the fallout of the atom bombs has never dispersed. And conversely, the yearning for that lost confidence has grown deeper. It was telling that on the 70th anniversary of Nagasaki this past August, so many commentators continued to mount ethical defenses of the bombing, as if it were somehow possible to normalize nuclear weaponry in the public consciousness.Bestseller lists, like op-ed pages, tend to reflect the desire for moral assurance. Two of the most popular books of 2014 turned back to a time when Hiroshima was merely an industrial city in Japan’s interior. Daniel James Brown’s work of narrative nonfiction, The Boys in the Boat, told the story of the underdog American crew team that overcame the odds to defeat the German rowers at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, featured a blind French child who hides a priceless jewel from a maniacal Nazi treasure hunter, all while aiding her uncle in the Resistance. Part history, part fairy tale, these books had a throwback sensibility that allowed them to stage clear and dramatic contests between good and evil. Readers always knew who to root for.Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale is the latest smash success spun from the defeat of the Nazis. Hannah is the author of dozens of books that are typically categorized as “women’s fiction”— tearjerker tales of love lost and recaptured—but her first venture into World War II has resulted in her most popular book by a huge margin. Indeed, it may be the most widely acclaimed adult-marketed novel of the century: As of this writing, it has 12,611 customer reviews on Amazon.com, of which an incredible 86 percent come with 5-star ratings. That makes it by far the highest-rated novel among any with comparable sales. Its 5-star tally on Goodreads has eclipsed 40,000, handily outstripping all other fiction published this year.It’s not difficult to see the book’s appeal. The Nightingale is about the Rossignol sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, and their struggle for survival during the Nazi occupation of France. Isabelle, the firebrand youngest, joins the Resistance and becomes a legendary passeur, guiding scores of downed Allied airmen on escape routes across the Pyrenees and into Spain. In the process she falls for a rugged Resistance fighter called Gaëtan, occasioning the book’s most passionate love scenes:
At his kiss, something opened up inside the scraped, empty interior of her heart, unfurled. For the first time, her romantic novels made sense; she realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.
Vianne’s parallel story is less cinematically sexy but in many ways more involving. Left alone with her daughter in a village in the Loire Valley after her husband is taken prisoner, she is compelled to give room and board to a succession of increasingly vicious Nazi officers. Though her instinct at first is to quietly cooperate with the occupiers, their depredations push her into her own forms of courageous opposition—most notably her efforts to save Jewish children from deportation by hiding them in the church orphanage or even, in one case, by claiming a boy as her own.The Nightingale is a nice long book, amply furnished with stock characters and plot contrivances. At times, particularly in the description of the panicked flight from Paris after the Nazi invasion and in the figure of the doomed “good German” who lives with Vianne, Hannah cribs a little too transparently from Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous bestseller Suite Française. And some of the book’s nods towards thriller-dom seem a bit half-hearted. Why would Isabelle go by the nom de guerre Nightingale, when it’s the same word as her surname (Rossignol)? You’d think the Nazis might catch on.Yet the schmaltz is kept to fairly digestible portions. For much of the novel, Hannah writes with intelligent understatement, letting the course of history dictate events. Her depiction of the first wave of arrests of French Jews keeps a cautious distance from the scene, yet still accesses the outrage and disgust felt by the characters:
For the first time in months, the barricades on the side streets of Paris were unmanned. [Isabelle] ducked around one and ran down the street, toward the river, past closed-up shops and empty cafes. Only a few blocks away, she came to a breathless stop across the street from the stadium. An endless stream of buses jammed with people drew up alongside the huge building and disgorged passengers. Then the doors wheezed shut and the buses drove off again; others drove up to take their place. She saw a sea of yellow stars.There were thousands of men, women, and children, looking confused and despairing, being herded into the stadium. Most were wearing layers of clothing—too much for the July heat. Police patrolled the perimeter like American cowboys herding cattle, blowing whistles, shouting orders, forcing the Jewish people forward, into the stadium or onto other buses.
The Nazi occupiers grow more and more savage as the war—and the novel—nears its conclusion. By this point, readers will be openly rooting for Isabelle and her fellow freedom fighters to elude pursuit and for Vianne to protect the lives of the town’s children without sacrificing her own humanity in the bargain. The Nightingale is a two-pronged tale of unabashed heroism—a little oasis in an age with few heroes. If its stockpile of five-star rating is any indication, we can expect more like it.____
The 2015 Bestseller Feature Begins
