Janet Evanovich

Books I Read in June (with mini-reviews)

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The New Yorker, 12 June 2023. If you are like me, and I’m sure you’re not because you’re much better and more organized, sometimes the New Yorkers pile up. And up. And more up. And oh look, a new one just came sailing through the mail slot. In order to make myself (and possibly you?) feel like less of a loser, I hereby declare each issue of the New Yorker a book in and of itself, because when I put it that way, reading each New Yorker book becomes a beautiful endeavour (I purposely stuck that “u” in endeavour because of my love and admiration of Canadians). The June 12 issue is my favorite issue of the month. In it, Jiayang Fan, a writer I greatly admire, writes about her mother in What Am I Without You? This is Fan’s first piece of memoir in the wake of her mother’s death, of ALS, and in my view it’s the best thing she’s written yet. Wild. Poetic. In it, Fan states that because of the circumstances of their you-and-me-and-nobody-else shared life, she and her mother are not separate people; they merged into a single being in both life and death. I don’t know many writers who would make that claim with such unapologetic clarity. That cool fierceness is one of the things I most admire about Fan.

Ordinary Time, by Kathleen Wedl. In this, the poet’s debut collection, threads from a lifetime of marriage and family and fifty years as a psychiatric nurse are woven together into a portrait of love and wisdom. Wedl understands that the things, the literal things we draw around us in our lives, are evidence of our longings and our loves, and she is at her poetic best when describing, with trademark deadpan humor, the give and take of a long marriage of opposites: You give me Honeycrisp/I give you prickly pear. You give me Brave New World/I give you Great Expectations. In my favorite of all the poems in this lovely collection, she looks back on the years when her granddaughters sprawled out in her non-allergenic sealed space of a bedroom, with their pollen infested ripped shorts/and indoor/outdoor socks, thinking of all that she wished away, those long afternoons/all breathable air saturated with happy/chittering and chortling. So often we don’t know we loved something, or some time, or someone so much when we had them. Lovely work.

The New Yorker (again), 12 June 2023. Like so many others, I love, revere, and seek out the work of George Saunders. His latest story, Thursday in the same issue of the New Yorker as Jiayang Fan’s stunning What Am I Without You? is another Saunders story that starts out …weird? is that the word? and gradually deepens and deepens until, if you’re me, you get to the end, heart cracked and bewildered, and have to put the magazine down and take your dog on a long walk, trying to find your way out of Saunders World back into your own life while also trying to figure out just how the man does what he does. Damn.

These Walls Are Starting to Glow, by Karen Bjork Kubin. My expectations of this chapbook, based on previous experience of the poet’s beautiful work, was that it would be a hushed, inward, collection of lyrical poems that draw their power from language, artistry, and the wisdom that comes from hard-won experience. So I propped myself up on the orange couch on my pretty, sunlit porch, opened up to the first poem and…holy shit. I sat there in shock. Wild, fierce, full of fury at the cruelty of those in power and an equally furious determination to make this world better, these poems Take A Stand. Each poem begins with an epigraph from a traditional nursery rhyme about a girl or woman and then flips that narrative on its head. I read the entire chapbook in one sitting. Are you looking for a gift for someone you love, maybe someone young, someone questioning the crazy unfairness of this world? Give them this book.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, by Grace Paley. Paco the dog-child and I were out for one of our early morning rambles when we stopped by one of our favorite Little Free Libraries to inspect its contents. I saw a copy of Enormous Changes and thought, huh, it’s been many a year since I read a Grace Paley story, and I’ve never read the entire collection; perhaps it’s time. Long, long ago I read stories by both Paley and Tillie Olson at the same time, and their influence on me has been silent and deep. (I read Olson’s work with fascination and unease as a young woman born with a ferocious determination to be a writer; they read as if she were trying to tell me something about being a woman in this world, a woman with a marriage and children and housework who wanted all that and who also wanted so much more, and about how hard I would have to work to stake my claim on tough, unyielding ground. She was right.) Meanwhile, Grace Paley is a wild writer, an experimentalist icon whose stories startle and fascinate me now way more, somehow, than they did when I was young. These are daring stories in every way, from subject matter to language, and it stuns me that they were published more than fifty years ago. Structurally and in terms of voice and point of view, these stories read as if they’re inside out, almost, in that you don’t always know if you’re inside the narrator’s head or if she’s speaking. Paley is fearless, with a voice that reads to me like the precursor of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton. And she’s also disturbing, with “disturbing” meant here as a kind of troubling and exhilarating compliment.

Takedown Twenty, by Janet Evanovich. You know I’m a Stephanie Plum fan who turns to her shelf of closely guarded Stephanie novels when I need a break from the world. One of these novels goes down just like my twice-yearly bag of Lay’s classics. You end up full and satisfied and you know you won’t need another one for some time. Thank you, Stephanie Plum, Lula, Ranger, Morelli, Grandma, Giovichinni’s, Cluck in a Bucket, dear departed Uncle Sandor and your giant powder-blue Buick, and everyone who lives in the Burg. Sometimes you’re just the ticket.

Locker Room Talk: Women in Private Spaces, edited by Michelle Filkins and Margaret Aldrich. Locker room talk. A familiar phrase turned hideous to so many of us by what it now evokes in the wake of the 2016 election. In this absorbing and wonderful anthology, just out from Spout Press, editors Filkins and Aldrich reclaimed the phrase by asking women writers to contribute essays and poems and memoirs about what “locker room talk” means to them. I was moved to tears by some of the contributions, include Jude Nutter’s poem about a brief, piercing airport encounter, Maureen Aitken’s memoir about the freedom of dancing in the singular bar where she felt safe, Mo Murphy’s lovely piece about all she’s learned and held in her heart in decades of work in a salon, and several others. This is a beautiful book. (Full disclosure: I have an essay in this anthology.)

Books I Read in March

Posted on by alisonmcghee

March 2023

Saints of the Household, by Ari Tison. Brothers Jay and Max live in a home charged with the constant worry and fear that their abusive father will again unleash his violence on their mother and them. Their own unspoken, buried rage at their father erupts one day when they beat up their cousin Nicole’s threatening boyfriend. That single act of violence propels the boys into both enforced counseling and a first-ever pulling away from each other. Max turns his pain into art in the form of paintings, while Jay’s awareness of his own frustrated sorrow begins to inform his plans for the future, his close friendship with Nicole, and his understanding of his place within his family. Alternating chapters in the voice of each brother interweave stories and wisdom from their Bri Bri and Anishinaabe ancestors, and the physical presence of their gentle Bri Bri grandfather lends depth and insight to their struggles. A beautiful, heartfelt book.

Away, by Amy Bloom. Damn, this writer can tell a story. Fearless, funny, written in times and places far from ours but so rich in detail that you feel as if you’re living her people’s lives right along with them, Away is the story of Lillian, who survived the massacre of her family and village back in Russia and escaped to the Lower East Side. When you’ve lost everything, you’ll do whatever it takes to thrive, and Lillian does. But the news that her daughter survived death sets her on a quest across America and into Alaska. Bloom never, not once, loses sight of the joy and humor that can be found in the darkest of circumstances. This novel propels its way forward, shimmering with light and life and laughter and love.

This Costly Season, by John Okrent. It usually takes me a while to read a book of poetry –poems I love being to me tiny emotion bombs—but not this one. A collection of free-form sonnets written by a family physician in the Pacific Northwest over several months in the beginning of the pandemic, This Costly Season is almost hallucinogenic in its evocation of those early days. The fear. The inability to help. The lack of knowledge or cure. The title of each poem is the day’s date, and each ending line is woven into the first line of the next poem. Time marches on, the pandemic deepens, questions remain unanswered but for the fact that all answers, for the living, still and always remain the same: to love our people and our world and hold them close, because time, time is always short.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve been a writer my entire life, something that influences the way I relate to structure, point of view, storytelling. Most of the time, I instinctively understand the decisions a writer made, no matter the form, because the process of writing is so familiar to me – I’ve been there and done that (this is not a negative). But with writers who are my personal giants, I am rarely able to anticipate from which deep well their books emerged or how they managed to pull them off. These writers are few. Ishiguro is one of them. I space out his books because I know each one will in a small, profound way transform me – but the transformation will not come without cost. Few writers break my heart the way Ishiguro does. Set in post-Arthurian England, The Buried Giant is odd, dreamlike, unlike anything else I’ve ever read by the man, and, like everything he writes, mesmerizing.

The Lowland, by Jhumpa Lahiri. To pick up a Lahiri novel or collection of stories is to commit yourself to a journey: through time, eras, over continents, in and out of the minds and hearts of the people who populate these deeply internal worlds. I seem to be in a heartbreaking-book streak and The Lowland is not an exception. Set in post-partition Calcutta and Rhode Island and spanning half a century, this novel, despite a plot that in one particular way occasionally strained my credulity (possibly because one of my own plots strains my credulity in the exact same way?) kept me up late. Two brothers, alike and unlike, one enigmatic woman, political divides, and the weight and painful beauty of parenthood. Carefully wrought and utterly absorbing.

Notorious Nineteen, by Janet Evanovich. Years ago my parents, believing I should read more books that make me laugh, turned me on to the Stephanie Plum novels, about a Jersey bond enforcement girl. After reading the first in the series I realized my parents were correct, so I bought the first twenty-two off eBay in one big cheap used batch. I dole them out to myself when in need. These books exist in a slightly parallel world that looks like ours but is funnier, and where everyone has a gun but the guns aren’t actually dangerous. By the end of each book Stephanie will have ordered from Cluck in a Bucket at least twice, had great sex with Joe Morelli and contemplated even greater sex with Ranger, been covered with paint, garbage, or something else icky, witnessed her car go up in a ball of fire, done something mildly illegal with her friend Lula, and rescued her grandmother from making yet another scene at yet another funeral viewing. There’s a reason people read Evanovich novels. If you know you know.