Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday February 11, 2011
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THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY
Hannah Pittard
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061996054
243 pages
$22.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. He reviews books every Wednesday and can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
This year is off to a great start for new novelists -- and readers willing to sample unfamiliar names. Hannah Pittard's "The Fates Will Find Their Way" is the third impressive debut I've read in January (and I've got another for next week and the week after that). These books are a reassuring indication that new voices can still catch the attention of big publishing houses, despite what you may hear from aggrieved self-published authors.
"The Fates Will Find Their Way" ruminates over the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl and the shadow of longing she casts over the neighborhood boys. Pittard, a young short story writer who graduated from the University of Virginia, seems at first to be reworking several other authors' material. Indeed, so many kids have vanished in recent fiction they should have their own line of milk cartons. And the men who tell this tale in the plural voice must know the guys who narrated Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides" almost 20 years ago.
But Pittard isn't grasping at the coattails of abduction thrillers, nor is she rewriting Eugenides' macabre book, though she graciously acknowledges its influence. Instead, she offers a story about the dark matter of adolescent desire that pulls on the heart across decades. It's a wistful novel about how little we know of one another, but how eager we are to tape together a collage of rumors, assumptions and fantasies to answer questions we're too young, too cowardly or too polite to ask.
When 16-year-old Nora Lindell disappears from her small town on Halloween night, the mothers begin working through their phone tree while the boys gather in a basement and "interrogate each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth." Each has a recent sighting to share: She was at the mall, the airport, the swing sets or, most ominously, at the bus station, where she may have gotten into an old car. Trey Stephens claims he had sex with Nora just last month, but he goes to public school, so who knows how reliable that is? The details constantly melt and congeal into different forms as the boys frighten and titillate each other with speculation about what must have happened.
Stewart O'Nan wrote a devastating novel about a similar disappearance a few years ago called "Songs for the Missing," which followed the cruel trajectory of one family's hopes. But Pittard doesn't intrude very far into this family's grief, nor do we hear anything about the police investigation. Instead, "The Fates Will Find Their Way" stays focused on a dozen teenage boys who continue wondering about Nora while studying her younger sister with a mixture of concern and prurience. Nora becomes an integral part of their fantasy lives, their dreams of what might have been, visions of romantic perfection they quietly return to again and again throughout their lives, early in the morning while shaving or late at night, lying next to their own pretty enough wives.
Most of the novel moves like a winding confession -- not a confession of any crime, but a poignant testimony of male adolescence, steeped in nostalgia and regret. "We were boys, after all," the plural narrator admits, "which means we were creeps -- our mothers' word -- which means we were indiscreet and couldn't help ourselves when it came time to trading what we'd done or not done or when and with whom and how." One anecdote blends into another. The bull sessions in Trey's basement give way to sexual anecdotes of uncertain reliability, along with stories of mothers who talk too freely and fathers who drink too much. The boys polish these scenes into the domestic myths of their lives, such as the piercing anecdote about Nora's sister dressing up as Nora on the next Halloween.
It's an arresting incantation, and I couldn't believe how strongly the story drew me back to events in my own life that I hadn't thought of for decades, tragedies that smoldered in gossip without the oxygen of any real information: the boy across the street who shot himself after our neighborhood water fight; the friend whose father hanged himself; the student in the dorm who was raped by an administrator's son -- all of them vanished into the mists of rumor. You have your own adolescent legends, of course, and don't be surprised by the power of this evocative novel to unearth them.
As affecting as I found this book, though, I wish its plural narrator were more consistently convincing. Every individual male character Pittard creates here is wholly believable, endowed with the peculiar desires and attributes that make people saunter off the page and prick us with the sense of their reality. By the time these guys approach 50, those original differences in class, conscience and ability have scattered them across the spectrum of happiness and success in completely plausible ways. But this stitched-together narrator pulls at its own seams; such diverse men couldn't speak in a choral voice. References to "our wives" fixing dinner and taking care of "our kids" sound as dated and stylized as a '60s sitcom.
At other times, the novel's voice seems weirdly incorporeal, lacking the visceral sense of what it's like to inhabit a breathing, sweating, working male body. These "we boys" who grow up to become "we men" are an oddly sensitive, feminine ideal of male consciousness, filled with quiet sorrow for the transgressions of men. If this is the voice of a dozen guys -- jocks and geeks, executives and deadbeats, alcoholics and pedophiles -- they've been boiled together for a long time to produce a very refined broth.
Still, "The Fates Will Find Their Way" is chilling and touching. Pittard can be harrowingly wise about the melancholy process of growing up, of moving from the horny days of high school to the burden of protecting our own children. We realize what's been lost, what's been done to us and what we've done to each other before we're mature enough to calculate the true cost. In Pittard's absorbing treatment, the tragedy of Nora's disappearance is eventually subsumed into the tragedies we all endure.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HEARTSTONE
C. J. Sansom
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022397
634 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post Book World
Good, solid, enjoyable novels are blessedly common, but exceptional, knock-your-socks-off novels are rare. I count myself lucky if I stumble upon two or three a year. But now I've devoured two in one month, both by British writers I'd not read before. The first, reviewed here recently, was Peter James' perverse tale of sexual obsession and expensive shoes, "Dead Like You." Now we have "Heartstone," the fifth book in C.J. Sansom's series about an idealistic lawyer who seeks justice in a violent age, mid-16th-century England.
The lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, is 43 years old during this story, which is set in the summer of 1545. He's also a hunchback, a widower and exceedingly trouble-prone. Early in the novel, Shardlake visits two women whose needs set the story in motion. The first, Ellen, has long been confined in Bedlam, the madhouse, under mysterious circumstances; Shardlake is determined to help her if he can. The other is Queen Catherine Parr, who had been his friend before she had the dubious honor of becoming the last of Henry VIII's six, mostly ill-starred wives. Catherine asks the lawyer to investigate the apparent suicide of the son of one of her former housekeepers.
Sansom, who is himself a lawyer, has won praise in England for his microscopic knowledge of 16th-century life. Certainly, one of the novel's glories is his ability to bring alive all levels of English society, from cutthroats and common soldiers to the king and queen themselves. Shardlake's investigations take place as a huge French fleet is sailing toward Portsmouth, on England's south coast, and an invasion seems imminent. (This is part of Henry's ill-advised war of 1544-46.) Sansom contrives to have Shardlake's legal work take him to the vicinity of Portsmouth, so that on his ride south he becomes friendly with a vivid array of soldiers who bicker, brawl and "sing bawdy versions of courtly love songs." The author spices his narrative with convincing details and dialogue from that most unruly era. For example, there's the soldier who declares that a man "should experience everything once, save incest and the plague."
Shardlake's investigation of the possible suicide -- undertaken at the queen's request -- leads to Hugh Curtey, a youth who, upon his parents' death, became the ward of a landowner named Hobbey. Shardlake suspects that Hobbey is robbing the boy of his inheritance. Clearly, something is terribly wrong in the Hobbey household, but neither Shardlake nor the reader can puzzle out what evil abides there, even after the half-mad mistress of the house cries out, "You fool! You do not see what is right in front of you!" When the truth finally emerges, it is both unexpected and unsettling.
Young Hugh runs away to volunteer as an archer in the English cause, which leads Shardlake to Portsmouth as the army gathers. Here the king arrives: "When I had seen him four years before he had been big, but now his body was vast, legs like tree trunks in golden hose sticking out from the horse's side. ... The deep-set little eyes, beaky nose, and small mouth were now surrounded by a great square of fat that seemed to press his features into the center of his head. ... In that grotesque face I thought I read pain and weariness, and something more. Fear? I wondered if even that man of titanic self-belief might think, as the French invasion force approached, what will happen now? Even, perhaps: What have I done?"
The novel has it all: an ingenious plot, ceaseless suspense, villains galore, tipsy priests, a bull-baiting, a stag hunt, several murders, the horrors of war, a brooding sense of evil and a glittering portrait of a fascinating age. I rank it with Iain Pears' "An Instance of the Fingerpost" (1998) among the very best of recent historical thrillers. Finishing it, I longed for the leisure to go back and read the previous Shardlake adventures, but my thoughts also turned to those still to come. Early in this novel, when the lawyer meets with Queen Catherine, he also chats with 11-year-old Lady Elizabeth -- Henry's daughter by second wife, Anne Boleyn -- a girl who no one imagines will one day become queen. She proves to be a precocious child who questions the lawyer about the difficulties of achieving justice in this world. (Her concern is understandable, given that her father had her mother's head chopped off and the girl herself declared illegitimate.) The cordial exchange between Shardlake and young Elizabeth suggests the possibility of a future alliance. Henry will soon die, and a bloody decade or so later, Elizabeth will miraculously become queen. Perhaps in future novels Shardlake will advise the young woman during her perilous march to power. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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A BOX OF DARKNESS: The Story of a Marriage
Sally Ryder Brady
St. Martin's
ISBN 978-0312654160
240 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Marie Arana
Marriage is hard. I've never known one that wasn't. For all the pretty mythology, for all the romance and high hopes we invest in the institution, it is tough work, a chastening business -- heaven to fall into, hellish to sustain. If we are lucky, we get as much love as we give. If we are unlucky, we take comfort in what we can: the children, the rituals, the quotidian pleasures of making our own little cornerstone of society function. But the moment we start totting up, testily enumerating who gave what and if any of it really is enough for us, surely the love is over. Why anyone would want to reckon those accounts publicly after a life partner is dead is the question I can't help but ask after reading Sally Ryder Brady's blistering memoir, "A Box of Darkness."
The marriage this book describes -- by all outward appearances -- was golden. Upton Brady was a successful publisher, executive editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press; Sally was bright and imaginative: a pert, pretty mother of four. Our hero was verbally gifted, impeccably dressed, a stylish man of letters; our heroine, a spirited suburbanite, attentive helpmeet, who wrote freelance in her spare time. They danced well together, had happy, fruitful sex, entertained literary luminaries. But in 1970, eight years into their marriage, he came home one morning after a drunken night out and told her he'd slept with another man.
"How many times has it happened?" she asked him, in shock. He didn't answer. He picked up his martini, knocked it back, and that was that. Subject closed. Or so he thought. Forty years later -- and three years after the heart attack that killed him -- "A Box of Darkness" is Sally Ryder Brady's attempt to answer that question. As Kafka might have said, it's a desperate axe flung at the frozen sea within.
He was gay. She suggests that in retrospect there was abundant evidence for it: Take his natural flair for dancing, for instance.
Or the fact that he always wore freshly ironed handkerchiefs tucked in his breast pocket. When they were first married and unable to afford fancy clothes, he made her an evening dress -- not from a pattern, mind you, but cut from the drape of the silk. He could knit; he could cook; he knew just what to do for her when she was nursing a baby. With such circumstantial substantiation does she argue the case.
In truth, there were concrete signs that the man was struggling with his sexual identity. After he was cremated, his body scattered to the winds, Sally found a stash of magazines hidden in his drawer, bursting with "beautiful, nude young men with gleaming bodies." After that, came a cluster of videos, tumbling unbidden from an old suitcase: The slipcases showed a bevy of naked men, frolicking openly.
As months wore on, Brady found it impossible to put those striking images out of mind. What else had he been up to when she wasn't paying attention? "I question our marriage over and over again," she writes, "wondering how he could have made love to me for all those years when what he really wanted was a male lover."
So much of Brady's story is a product of its time and place. If Upton were indeed gay, it would have been standard operating procedure, in the 1950s, for him to try to mask it, bury it away in some semblance of a married life. One can't help but feel, in this raveling narrative, that Brady doesn't comprehend that pressure. When, in 1977, she realizes that Upton's married brother is gay, she is the essence of understanding. But when it comes to her own husband, she is a woman wronged, the victim.
Upton and Sally had met at the Boston Cotillion in the summer of 1956. She was a New England WASP, Barnard girl, a budding bohemian on the cusp of a career in theater. Friends with Joan Baez, girlfriend of Nikos (a dashing Greek studying at Harvard), she was on her way to a very different life from the one Upton ultimately offered. At the cotillion, Upton cut in during a dance, propelled her across the floor, their bodies fitting "leg to leg, pelvis to pelvis." He was drunk, as he would continue to be for most of their marriage, but, oh, could he dance.
Her mother objected vehemently. He was "lace curtain" Irish and, therefore, unacceptable.
And yet his people had been "raised rich," as Upton liked to say. "They went to fancy schools, wore fancy hand-me-downs, cavorted with fancy people." His mother was the daughter of a well-known general, and had grown up in the Far East "with amahs and finger bowls." The general had sported the very same tailcoat Upton had worn at the Cotillion, except that he had worn it to the White House. Upton's father was headmaster of the exclusive Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. Strictly Catholic, occupants of good real estate, they led a life straight out of "Brideshead Revisited," complete with two sexually ambiguous sons.
Sex was an issue from the first. "I can't do this," Upton said, the first time Sally wanted it. "It's called fornicating. A sin." Eventually he gave in, and became an ardent lover, "but sometimes before and even during sex, there was a shadow, like a papal frown." Life went on. They married, began domestic rituals; children arrived; he worked his way to success. Sally became fully responsible for managing four active youngsters, keeping them quiet when Upton was home. A flowing fount of martinis kept him mellow. He could be dazzling, when he wanted to be. But one swallow too many could turn their paradise into purgatory.
He grew mean, even violent. Eventually, he started pushing her around. And then came the admission of the all-night spree with their mutual friend, the openly gay Edward.
A reader can't help but take this in with eager, almost prurient fascination. But, as Brady builds her case for her husband's bad behavior, one feels a lingering repugnance. Not to Upton's pointed, cross-gender infidelity -- God knows we've heard that story before -- but to his wife's long, self-pitying whine about it. We're told that Upton was good with words, a gifted storyteller, but there is no evidence of it here. Talents are mentioned, but seldom shown. As time wears on, he gets himself to AA and sobers up, but he becomes a ghost of himself -- out of work, impotent, grumpy -- and, all the while, our author is on a rampage of self-absorption. Dead, he becomes even more unruly. He's left magazines, videos, a backbreaking stack of unpaid bills.
Worse, she'll never know whether he really loved her or whether he felt loved in return. "Get over it," her son tells her.
By mid-book, although we'll go on and read every last word, we want to shout out the very same thing.
Most unnerving of all, perhaps, is that the publisher insists that "Box" is an act of great love. It feels like anything but that. This is no eloquent examination of a marriage -- as was Joan Didion's searing "Year of Magical Thinking," or Christopher Buckley's tough but profoundly tender "Losing Mum and Pup," or John Bayley's deeply moral "Elegy for Iris." We come away feeling as if we've watched a wife drag her husband into the ring and give him the thrashing he very well may have deserved. Except that the man is dead.
"Do you mind?" she asks Upton in the end. No. Certainly not.
But we do.
Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE NAKED MOM: A Modern Mom's Fearless Revelations, Savvy Advice, and Soulful Reflections 
Brooke Burke
New American Library
ISBN 978-0451232335
307 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Jen Chaney
At first glance, "The Naked Mom" does not look like a book that the average harried mother will embrace. Perhaps it's the nudity.
Yes, on the cover there's Brooke Burke -- former bikini model, current co-host of "Dancing With the Stars" and now published author -- all smiles and no clothes, tucking her knees in front of her body just strategically enough for prominent placement at Barnes & Noble. And there's the book jacket's promise of what this pseudo-memoir will deliver: fearless revelations, savvy advice and soulful reflections. Go ahead, ladies. Refrain from rolling your eyes. Can't do it without pulling a muscle, can you?
Indeed, it's hard to believe that this one-time Maxim cover girl, a woman who counts Denise Richards and Tori Spelling among her close friends and admits to having her own "glam squad," genuinely understands what it's like to handle day-care drop-offs, post-baby weight gain and toddlers who scream way past bedtime. Yet somehow, "The Naked Mom" turns out to be an often enjoyable, albeit frothy, read, one that presents Burke as a mostly down-to-earth mother of four who also happens to hang out with celebrity ballroom dancers for a living.
The book admittedly has a split personality; it can't decide whether it wants to be a memoir, a self-help title or a hardcover version of a mommy blog. But it's just fun and breezy enough to qualify as a guilty pleasure, one that also touches on practical matters, like how to condition your hair with guacamole. (Look, we said breezy. We did not say National Book Award winner.)
Burke, who is also co-chief executive of the website Modernmom.com, openly admits that she had some help with her first foray into authorhood. In the acknowledgments, she thanks former Washington Post reporter Tamara Jones for acting as her writing partner. It's hard to know where Jones' help ends and Burke's talent begins, but based on Burke's blog and her Twitter feed -- which boasts 1.7 million followers -- the celebrity mama's voice remains intact here. And that voice rings most true when Burke is at her bluntest, such as her appraisal of the goal of work-life balance: "Balance," she says, "is bull (expletive).
End of story."
She also writes with wry humor about managing her four children, two of whom she had with her first husband, plastic surgeon Garth Fisher, and two of whom are the product of her relationship with fiance David Charvet.
"When Shaya hit his terrible twos," she says of her youngest, "his tantrums were so over the top that we once actually had to leave a zoo because we were disturbing the wildlife."
At moments like this, any reader can empathize with Burke, no matter what her dress size. She seems real. She seems funny.
She seems like a woman you could trade potty-training tips with while waiting in line at Buy Buy Baby.
But then reality intrudes, and Burke starts to write like a sexy celebrity with sexy celebrity friends living a sexy life in Malibu that sounds pretty dreamy compared with the reality experienced by most Americans.
She begins sentences with: "I was going through a hellish period of my life several years ago, and I'll never forget the insight and advice I got from my makeup artist." Or she recalls what she said to a personal trainer shortly after delivering her first child: "This is not a time to be experimenting here. I need to be in Belize posing on a beach in a bikini in three months." (Oh, who hasn't said that postpartum?)
It's a classic case of celebrity tone deafness, and it undermines the book. I wish an editor had suggested she remove those sections, along with some of the sidebars and silly lists that pop up throughout the text. Readers want to know how a person like Burke juggles motherhood and a busy professional life, but they probably don't care that she includes Joss Stone and Sade on her playlist for a calm house.
Some will pick up "The Naked Mom" purely to search for juicy backstage tidbits about "Dancing With the Stars." There are a few here and there; Burke writes at length about her experience as a contestant, and ultimately the winner, of the seventh season, noting that she wanted to be kicked off so badly at one point that she nearly cursed on live television when voters gave her permission to return for another week. She also insists that Kate Gosselin, who managed to clodhop her way through part of the 10th season, was "genuinely warm and likable" when the cameras were off.
Burke confesses that she grew up equating beauty with stupidity. With "The Naked Mom," she may not have written a work that rivals Tolstoy, but she proves she's hardly stupid.
Jen Chaney can be reached at jen.chaney(at symbol)wpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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