Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday February 3, 2011
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PICTURES OF YOU
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Caroline Leavitt
Algonquin
ISBN 978-1565126312
335 pages
$13.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
This thoughtful novel brings up a problem all of us have to deal with in the course of our lives, unless we're lucky enough to sneak through existence without encountering misfortune of any kind. We all like to think that we're decent people, surrounded by people of equally good character. We're fond of telling those in trouble, "Remember, I'm here for you." Or, "If there's anything I can do ..." We say these things and hear them all the time, and yet the world is full of folks who can't or won't be there for us. And we don't find that out until we look to them for help and all we see is a big empty space. Worse yet, sometimes those missing persons turn out to be us.
"Pictures of You" focuses on two families that manage to meet in the worst possible way -- through a fatal car crash. April and Isabelle, two wives in their 30s, who live six blocks away from each other, happen to choose this particular day to run away from their marriages. Isabelle is justified in her decisive departure; her husband's girlfriend has just called her up and announced that she's pregnant. But April's story is a little more murky. Her son, Sam, who is 9 and has severe asthma, is in the car with her at the time of the accident. She brought a suitcase for her but not for him. And after the accident, Sam won't talk about what happened on the morning before his mother died.
The day was foggy, the road deserted, and April's car was stopped and pointed in the wrong direction when Isabelle ran into it. But their small-town newspaper has a field day describing the event, and Isabelle is portrayed as the next-best thing to a murderess. Isabelle finds herself back in her Cape Cod home town, while Luke -- that philandering husband of hers -- has it both ways, keeping up relationships with his girlfriend and his wife.
Isabelle is traumatized. She's terrified to go out in public because of the contemptuous looks she gets. She can't bear to get into a car. Above all, she can't come to terms with the fact that she's taken a human life, however inadvertently. Then, as the weeks and months slowly pass, she finds herself more or less stalking the remnants of the family she has accidentally destroyed -- April's husband, Charlie Nash, and Sam, his young asthmatic son.
Asthma -- and the complications of that or any other childhood disability -- is a central theme here. Asthma has already taken a terrible toll on Sam's family. He's has been in and out of hospitals all his life; he's been in oxygen tents; he's been mercilessly bullied in school. April had been a devoted -- if difficult -- mom, doing everything she can to keep him happy and healthy.
Isabelle feels drawn to grief-stricken Sam, who somehow gets the impression that she might be an angel sent by God to reunite him with his mother. Charlie, his dad, is an extremely believable portrait of a man utterly paralyzed by life. He sleeps with Isabelle but won't say he loves her. When Isabelle gets a little cranky about the situation, he presents her with an untenable set of demands: He wants her to stay in town and be available to him, but he wants to keep their affair a secret. His excuse? Sam's illness. "How can I promise you anything? I just have to take things moment by moment right now. Please -- we need you here. I need you." Like Isabelle's philandering husband, Luke, he's trying to have everything, without giving anything of his own away. The fact that he keeps his affection for Isabelle a secret from Sam (who's crazy about her already) is madness, but people do crazy things all the time. (And the plot hasn't even started yet.)
Leavitt had asthma as a child, and "Pictures of You" revolves around the trials that childhood illness presents to the adult world. What can be done? How can people help? The pages here are full of professionals who don't do their jobs, classmates who behave like monsters, and even Charlie, who's so afraid to do anything about his son that he may ruin Sam's life. But of course we know people try to do the right thing all the time, but often fail. This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Djibouti: A Novel
Elmore Leonard
Morrow
ISBN 978-0061735172
279 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Anna Mundow, a literary columnist for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times
Elmore Leonard, at 85, is unlikely to be described as writing at the height of his powers, and that fact must surely make this master of irony smile. Indeed, in his new adventure novel, "Djibouti," Leonard casts an amused eye on male aging and on male vanity, a weakness that he has lethally skewered in his fiction for decades.
"It's too bad you're an old man," says filmmaker Dara Barr, flirting with 72-year-old Xavier LeBo, her longtime assistant from New Orleans. They're in Djibouti, a tiny country in the Horn of Africa, to make a documentary about Somali pirates. Dara is a familiar Leonard character, the hot ticket with brains (and, in this case, a strong resemblance to real-life film director Kathryn Bigelow). But it is Xavier's world-weary eyes that take in every detail on this alien African terrain crowded with terrorists and assorted criminals. Soon he and Dara meet the swaggering pirates who make millions hijacking ships, "the bad boys with AKs and ... rockets," as Xavier describes them. "I said to one of 'em I'm talkin to in a club last night, 'You always high you out to sea?' The man say, 'If we not drunk, what are we doin in a skiff and think we can seize an oil tanker?'"
The pirate story seems an odd one for Leonard: too big, too exotic and too political. But grifters, it turns out, are grifters whatever the scam, and Leonard portrays some doozies here. In the early chapters, though, the action is muted as Dara and Xavier review the footage they've shot offshore among the pirates. Leonard cleverly shifts back and forth between what Dara is viewing on her computer and what actually happened as she filmed. This cleverness wears thin, however, and we begin to fear that Leonard, like Xavier, is a little in love with Dara.
Fortunately, other engaging characters materialize: Billy, the Texas billionaire who is sailing the world with his test-wife, Helene; Harry, the shady, Oxford-educated, half-Saudi investigator for the International Maritime Organization; Idris, a strutting pirate captain; and Qasim, an al-Qaeda leader. But Leonard's voice seems absent, and we miss it.
Then, midway through the novel, there it is: "Before he was Jama Raisuli or Jama al Amriki he was James Russell, pronounced Russell: picked up twice on suspicion of armed robbery and released. ... This was how James Russell came to Coleman FCI in the middle of inland Florida to hang with Muslims, a means of surviving in here, twenty years old doing his first fall."
From the moment James appears, Leonard's pirates and terrorists and even Dara herself seem to fade by comparison. An instantly recognizable type from numerous Leonard novels -- the sharp, funny, ruthless operator -- James is nevertheless fresh. He converts to Islam in jail, to al-Qaeda on the outside, and meets his hero, Qasim, in Djibouti. "I'm known to rob banks," James tells the legendary terrorist, "when I don't have nothing to do." Now, James has memorized the cell phone number he can use to detonate the liquefied gas tanker hijacked by Idris and his pirate gang. That's if Billy, the Texas billionaire, doesn't get there first.
A caper, then, is what we have, one that more closely resembles a heist action movie than it does "Get Shorty," "Cat Chaser" or any other Leonard crime novel. There is a political context, certainly, and plenty of information on the mechanics and economics of modern-day piracy, but reading about all that feels like treading water while we wait for the big boom.
Nevertheless, the fact that James Russell is more riveting than any havoc he may wreak proves just how deft -- and surprising -- a writer Leonard still is. Here violence arrives unannounced and stone cold. One of James' victims, for example, "turned his head and Jama shot him where you would shoot yourself if you saw it was that time, in the temple." When James briefly ensnares a naive American homosexual, what follows is appallingly brutal, yet James, like so many of Leonard's memorable villains, remains disconcertingly engaging. And as his path converges with that of Xavier and Dara, the flirtation between the young filmmaker and her aging sidekick becomes something far more powerful than either one expects.
In "Djibouti," Leonard slyly shows us what the old man can still do.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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DANIEL
Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray
New Press
ISBN 978-1595581938
279 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by David Anthony Durham, the author of five novels, most recently "The Other Lands"
A recent NPR piece focused on a troubling aspect of the trend called "orphanage tourism." The story was about Westerners who spend their holidays with HIV-positive orphans in South Africa. To the tourists, these visits are life-affirming acts of charity in which they are touched by their interactions with unfortunate children. Critics question who is really benefiting the most from this practice. Are these Westerners bringing glimpses of love and hope? Or are they assuaging guilt at the children's expense?
Judging by his new historical novel, "Daniel," Henning Mankell would say it's both. And it's not a new conundrum. The novel (published in Swedish in 2000) opens with the discovery of the body of a murdered girl in rural Sweden in the 1870s. That may be familiar material for Mankell, who has about 30 million crime novels in print, but it's mostly a device to hook reader interest. This story is driven by the author's humanitarian concerns, which have become more and more a feature of his work.
The story really starts with Hans Bengler, a man at a loss for what to do with his life. He aspires to be a doctor, but after fainting at his first autopsy, he dumps that idea. He considers a military career, but "he had a low tolerance for pain, he wasn't particularly strong, and he was scared of loud noises." He dabbles in religion, but decides against being a pastor because of his belief that "there was no god."
While Bengler masturbates in the shade of a tree one afternoon, a butterfly lands on his hand, and he has a revelation: He'll journey to some far off country and find an insect unknown to science. He chooses the Kalahari Desert, and off he goes.
Decisive action? A man with a plan ready to manifest his destiny? Not so much. By his own estimation, he's a person "who didn't believe in anything, who didn't really want anything, who in a manifestation of the utmost vanity was looking for a fly that he could name after himself." You'd think Africa would eat him alive, but luckily for him, he's a European in a subjugated continent. His whiteness affords him almost foolproof advantages. A fellow countryman puts it this way: "It's common for Europeans who weren't good enough to come to Africa. Here they can assert their skin colour. ... Don't have to be able to do anything."
That's pretty much Bengler, except that he wants to believe he's better than his fellow countrymen. When he comes across a caged San boy whose nomadic family has been slaughtered, he claims the boy, names him Daniel and takes him back to Sweden, along with his boxes of insects.
Mankell describes this journey with melancholic prose that's unlikely to leave anyone breathless with appreciation. Though his language can be dreary, he's always asking the reader to see the irony beneath its surface. If Bengler's actions with Daniel are benevolent, why do they look like kidnapping and enslavement, with bound hands and locked doors and passage on a slave ship? If Daniel is a means for Bengler to find humanity and purpose in his life, why do his actions toward the boy increasingly rest on lies, exploitation and violence?
Bengler seems to be the character whom Mankell is most comfortable with -- his intimate understanding of this man's complex, self-deluding nature feels almost confessional -- but most of the book follows Daniel's point of view. For him, Sweden is a foreign world full of drunks, thick forests and icy fields. He feels not so much saved from a horrible fate as inexplicably separated from his loved ones' spirits and left more impoverished because of it.
Mankell describes the boy with compassion but not with much cultural specificity. San Bushmen are one of mankind's most ancient ethnic groups, with complex spiritual lives and community structures. Mankell doesn't really capture that through Daniel's perspective. He keeps our attention focused on the boy's attempts to control his fate. Will Daniel get back to Africa? Can he learn to walk on water, as he believes he can? Will Bengler be a villain or a savior by the end?
When the murdered girl from the prologue finally enters the story again, one wonders how she ended up dead and what Daniel had to do with it. I was eager to find out, and I turned the pages briskly. That said, don't read "Daniel" for the plot. This is not one of Mankell's popular Wallander mysteries. Read it instead for his ruminations on a cultural divide that Bengler and Daniel cannot cross. Even the supporting characters are trapped by the legacy of race, power and exploitation upon which colonialism was founded. The plucky female journalist who befriends Daniel, the pastor who dreams of missionary work in Africa, the kind husband and wife who attempt to understand the boy, even the king of Sweden in his pleasure yacht: All of them try to help, but most of them end up as unwitting participants in a deepening tragedy.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE DIVINER'S TALE
Bradford Morrow
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547382630
311 pages
$26
Reviewed by Gerald Bartell, an arts and travel writer in Manhattan
The words "gentle" and "quiet" are seldom used to describe a contemporary thriller, but they're apt terms for what works best in Bradford Morrow's "The Diviner's Tale." Here is a work in which no buildings explode, no one gets stabbed in the throat and no bang-up finish takes up the final 50 pages.
Instead, Morrow, also the author of "Ariel's Crossing," "Giovanni's Gift" and other novels, elicits frissons with gossamer descriptions of still moments that will have some readers drawing a sharp breath, as if they've heard a strange noise in the house. Consider the moment when Cassandra Brooks, the story's narrator, visits a deserted cemetery - deserted, at least, by anyone living: "Some pine boughs scythed the air, though there was no breeze to push them. ... (A) noise followed ... a pebble plucking its way across the earth behind me like a skipped stone but on dewy grass instead of flat water."
Later, Cassandra eyes a stalker outside her home. What she sees -- like many other dark, lyrical descriptions of nature in the book - suggests that Morrow may have been influenced by "The Night of the Hunter," a novel by Davis Grubb, and its film version directed by Charles Laughton: "I ... peered down into the front yard. There was a figure under the tree. Leaning against the trunk, looking up in the leaf-shuddering darkness. The tiny burning tip of the cigarette flared orange as the man ... took a drag."
Unfortunately, the beautifully described background in "The Diviner's Tale" beguiles the reader far more than does the action in its foreground. Morrow's plotting, moving at a too steady tempo and populated by some rather bland characters, is not always mesmerizing, despite promising subject matter. Like her father, Cassandra is a "diviner," a person who experiences visions of the future and of what is hidden from the sight of others. She recalls at the outset that her first and most traumatic premonition occurred at age 7, when she warned her 14-year-old brother, Christopher, not to join friends driving to a movie. Christopher laughed off her fears, only to die that night in a car crash.
A grown woman and a single mother of twins as the story begins, Cassandra finds that fellow residents of her rural Upstate New York hometown tend to employ her paranormal skills for a mundane purpose: They ask her to divine whether there are underground water sources on their properties. On one such assignment, she feels "a black sensation" moments before she comes upon a girl in her midteens hanging from a tree: "Her feet pointed outward in a kind of loose releve, like some ballet dancer frozen in the classic first position."
But when local police search the wooded site where Cassandra made the discovery, they find not the hanged girl but another one, also in her midteens, alive and disoriented. The police conclude that Cassandra's vision was a hallucination. As if to further shake her confidence, her father confesses that he's not really a diviner after all, just a charlatan. Cassandra thus begins examining her role in life, questioning whether she ought to abandon her paranormal pursuits and settle in as a teacher and a mother. "My problem," she says, "had always been that I could forevision what others ought to do but was too often blinded when it came to my own life, trainspotting my own future." In the meantime, a man begins stalking Cassandra, leaving threatening notes and, from the top of a lighthouse, hanging an effigy of Cassandra grasping one of her childhood dolls, which he stole from her home.
As these two plot lines develop, the reader senses a letdown coming. Is this narrative, which begins so freshly with its almost startling descriptions, going to spin a conventional stalker tale laced with the well-worn theme of the central character's path to self-acceptance? Alas, Morrow scatters clues that make the final outcome all too predictable. (A line from Werner Herzog, quoted in the preface, just about gives away the course Cassandra ultimately takes in her life's journey.)
I'm not sure whether readers will shrug off a chill after reading "The Diviner's Tale," or just shrug as its thin, sometimes meandering plot comes to a close. But there's a chance those who like their suspense subtle, distinctive and well-wrought will overlook the book's shortcomings and enjoy the shivers it evokes on a cold winter's night.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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