Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday April 7, 2011
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A TIGER IN THE KITCHEN: A Memoir of Food and Family
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Voice
ISBN 978-1401341282
296 pages
$14.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Early in this savory memoir, New York writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan gives a sense of the caution that pervades Singapore, the city of her birth. When she called to tell her parents about her new boyfriend and mentioned his surname, Nakamura, her father pointed out that her two aunts had been killed by the Japanese. "I would have to tell him several times," she writes, "that the boyfriend was a third-generation American and could not possibly have been responsible for the Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II."
It also took some persuading before Tan's parents came to terms with her decisions to attend college in the United States and then to settle here. On a visit home, she realized that her grandmother, at least, had reconciled herself to the uprooting when Ah-ma agreed to teach her how to make popiah, a roll "filled with a melange of ingredients like minced shrimp and jicama." "She had never wanted me to be away from her," Tan writes. "But now that I was, and now that I might have a family of my own there someday soon, she wanted me to listen up and learn." At the end of the book, having deepened her relationships with several other relatives, Tan gets her mother to tell her how to make one of Asia's most labor-intensive delicacies: bird's-nest soup.
Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG
Kate Atkinson
Reagan Arthur/Little Brown
ISBN 978-0316066730
371 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Kevin Allman, a writer and editor who lives in New Orleans
"To the Pythagoreans, three was the first real number, because they saw it as having a beginning, a middle and an end," says a character early in Kate Atkinson's latest novel, the excellent "Started Early, Took My Dog." Atkinson goes on to introduce three characters and interweave meditations on other sets of three -- particularly beginnings, middles and ends.
Recently retired policewoman Tracy Waterhouse, a 50ish woman with no particular attachments and no plans for the rest of her life, has taken a job as security director of a Leeds, England, shopping mall, more out of boredom than anything else. Leaving work one day, she runs into an old nemesis, Kelly Cross, a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey." Kelly is dragging an abused toddler onto a city bus, and in a split-second Tracy finds herself asking, "How much for the kid?" An envelope changes hands, the bus pulls away, and Tracy is suddenly the guardian of Courtney, a solemn toddler she'd just purchased on impulse.
Meanwhile, former police inspector and private eye Jackson Brodie (returning from three of Atkinson's previous novels) is wandering the English back roads, looking at the endless ruins of British civilization, trying to decide if all roads lead to or away from home. His split-second decision arrives when he sees a man brutalizing a small dog in a park. Brodie finds himself with a dog he's not quite sure what to do with.
As Waterhouse and Brodie both get things they're not sure they want, an elderly character actress is losing the one thing that matters to her: her memory. Tilly Squires, currently playing the mother of a detective on a cheapjack TV crime drama, is becoming known among her co-workers as "Ten-take Tilly" because of her failing faculties. When the producers finally decide to kill her off, sending her into retirement like Waterhouse and Brodie, it's all Tilly can do to remember that she's standing on a set and the woman aiming a gun at her is another actress.
How Atkinson interweaves these lives -- in the past, the present and the uncertain future -- is her particular gift as a writer, and her plot remains clear and straight even as she unfolds her stories at leisure. Along the way, she introduces threads from the past, including another lost toddler from a 1975 murder scene investigated by Waterhouse. All the tales tie together into a knot that's complicated, elegant and completely satisfying.
"Started Early, Took My Dog" -- the first line of one of Emily Dickinson's simplest and most ambiguous poems -- is as much an examination of the way we live as it is a suspenser. Waterhouse and Brodie both inhabit a world of iPhones and a disappearing middle class, finding themselves stunned and adrift on the sidelines of life, obsolete at 50 with nothing ahead but decades of make-work menial jobs. Both have seen too much to have faith in a world where the child abusers and dog torturers seem to be winning, and it has turned them slightly numb, with only occasional prickles of interest in being alive. When Waterhouse begins fantasizing about running away with her purchased child, reinventing themselves as a proper mother and daughter named "Imogen" and "Lucy," it's a fantasy so tempting that she takes baby steps to make it happen, just to amuse herself. When she commits to the charade, she becomes Tilly's mirror opposite: a woman who wants nothing more than to retreat into a fantasy world.
Waterhouse is a marvelously original character. When another aging cop sighs and tells her it's a different world these days, "Tracy thought she must be missing something, it felt like the same world as ever to her. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, kids everywhere falling through the cracks. The Victorians would have recognized it. People just watched a lot more TV and found celebrities interesting, that was all that was different."
Atkinson's dark wit and mastery at sketching connections -- between people, places, times, things, emotions -- are reminiscent of Ruth Rendell, and Atkinson shares that grand master's facility in balancing cynicism, compassion and pragmatism. The result is crime fiction that's also splendid modern literature.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE NIGHT SEASON
Chelsea Cain
Minotaur
ISBN 978-0312619763
322 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University
The problem with reviewing mysteries is that one can't talk about who-(or what)-dun-it, yet sometimes the story's ultimate value rests on that revelation. Take Dorothy Sayers' 1934 classic, "The Nine Tailors." If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about; if you haven't read it, do so. Now. The atmosphere of the English fen country in the novel is haunting, and the character of Lord Peter Wimsey is, as always, blandly erudite. The ending, however, in which the murderer is unmasked, is so brilliant that it boosts Sayers' creeper into the Golden Age of Mystery Hall of Fame.
Then there's the opposite situation. I am talking about middling crime stories that creak along agreeably enough until a killer so preposterous is revealed that readers feel ashamed for ever having lost themselves for one nanosecond in that fictional world. Unfortunately, I meandered into Chelsea Cain's "The Night Season" and didn't have the good sense to quit reading before the most inane murderer I've ever encountered in mystery fiction was exposed. If I told you who-(or what)-dun-it, you would know how ludicrous this story is. But I can't tell you. I can only say that my 12-year-old daughter asked me why I was snorting, rolling my eyes and shaking my head as I read the end of Cain's book. I then told her the identity of the killer. She wisely commented, "It sounds like a 12-year-old boy who's read too much manga wrote that book." Yup.
So what else is there to say about "The Night Season," which is the fourth in Cain's series starring Portland, Ore., police detective Archie Sheridan? Well, Cain gives a nice sense of foreboding with her many weather descriptions. When the novel begins, a monsoon is hitting Portland, the city dikes are about to crumble, and ferocious flooding is about to ensue. To add to this misery, a serial crazy is at work amid all the rain and wind. A female corpse is discovered in a deserted city amusement park. Since Archie has already had a prolonged, close encounter with a different serial killer earlier in this series, he eventually figures out the absurd modus operandi of this latest maniac. In between, a lot of splashing around on the soggy streets of Portland takes place.
As so often happens in mystery-land, a contemporary natural disaster stirs up remnants of the past. In this case, the flood disturbs a skeleton left over from the real-life Vanport City Flood that occurred on May 30, 1948. That flood, according to historical accounts, killed 15 people and destroyed the city when a dike holding back the Columbia River crumbled. Archie's love interest, reporter Susan Ward, who writes the "quirky crime roundup column" for the local, barely breathing newspaper, pounds out a story about the disinterred skeleton, thus ensuring that she, too, will soon be a target of the crazed evildoer who has ties to the sins of the past. Those ties seemed pretty murky to me and, thus, not credible as a motive to make this person dive off the deep end, so to speak. But, then, my mind was already weakened by the aforesaid loony revelation about the identity of the killer, so maybe I was no longer capable of judgment.
"The Night Season" is a silly mystery that will be enjoyed only by readers who don't think the genre is capable of better. In 1930, the Detection Club, of which Dorothy Sayers (along with other immortals like Agatha Christie and G.K. Chesterton) was a member, approved a set of famous rules for mystery writers, known as "The Decalogue." Though somewhat in jest, the Decalogue, among other things, banned the reliance on "hitherto undiscovered poisons; supernatural agencies; and more than one secret room or passage" in mystery novels. I think it's safe to say that had Cain's "The Night Season" been written early in the last century, her dopey culprit would have been immediately added to "The Decalogue's" list of don'ts.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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EMILY, ALONE
Stewart O'Nan
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022359
255 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Lately, Stewart O'Nan hasn't made it easy to recommend his novels. The only thing they've got going for them is their superb quality. But ask, "What's it about?" and his fans sound defensive or pretend they're getting an important call on their cellphones. Just try persuading your book club to read a novel about the day a Red Lobster restaurant closes. (Without incident.) Or how about a novel that describes an old lady waiting for spring? (It comes.) Face it: O'Nan has become the Kobayashi Maru scenario of book marketing. Even when his novels promise heart-stopping spectacle -- Daughter kidnapped! Husband killed! Teens crash! -- he resists every expected dramatic element. This is an author who would drive all around town to avoid running over a single cheap thrill. He subverts our desire for commotion, and searches instead for drama in the quotidian motions of survivors.
His new novel is an even harder sell than usual. It's about an 80-year-old widow in Pittsburgh named Emily. She's relatively healthy and financially secure. Highlights of the plot include lunch at the art museum, discovering a scratch on the car, waiting for thank-you notes to arrive. This may be why nobody ever asks for the "Geriatric Fiction" section.
But maybe they should. Consider, for instance, how many supposedly "daring," "illuminating," "startling" novels we get every year about disaffected young men, while the lives of the elderly -- the fastest growing segment of our population -- remain the stuff of grim or ribald caricatures. This strikes me as a failure of nerve more than imagination. After all, most of us would like to hang around long enough to bankrupt Social Security, but for all the novels we've got about death, the real undiscovered country would seem to be old age.
Which is what makes me enthusiastic about "Emily, Alone." It quietly shuffles in where few authors have dared to go. And it's so humane and so finely executed that I hope it finds those sensitive readers who will appreciate it.
Six years have passed since Emily Maxwell's husband died, and since then she's lived alone, managing just fine, thank you very much, though it's annoying not to drive anymore. "After a run-in with a fire hydrant, followed quickly by another with a Duquesne Light truck, she admitted -- bitterly, since it went against her innate thriftiness -- that maybe taking taxis was the better part of valor." That wry tone runs throughout this quiet novel, never subjecting Emily to satire, but allowing her to enjoy a bit of comedy at her own expense. "She was dying, yes, fine, they all were, by degrees," O'Nan writes, catching the spirit of her fortitude just right. "If Dr. Sayid expected her to be devastated by the idea, that only showed how young he was. There was no point in going into hysterics. It wasn't the end of the world, just the end of her, and lately she'd come to think that was natural, and possibly something to be desired, if it could be achieved with a modicum of dignity."
Through short, crisp chapters we follow Emily's well-ordered, dignified life, frequently challenged by calamities and disappointments large and small, all gently captured in O'Nan's precise, unadorned prose. Some of these scenes are exquisite in their perfect balance of poignancy and restraint, while others sport a dark wit that's never maudlin: "She didn't need to be reminded," he writes, "that she was a single misstep from disaster," but that's no reason to be late with one's Christmas cards. The terror of being driven around town by her nearsighted, easily distracted sister-in-law makes her consider buying a new car. Her ancient, obese dog keeps threatening to die, a loss that scares her almost more than the death of her remaining friends. And Pittsburgh, so long her home, now seems to be slipping away from her memories, one rehab after another.
But the emotional heart of the novel is Emily's concern for her two adult children. The smoke has long since cleared from the old battles of their teenage years, and now Emily must negotiate with them carefully, from a position of confirmed weakness, knowing that they hold (and will use) the ultimate weapon: access to her grandchildren, those increasingly modern and remote beings. O'Nan has an uncanny sensitivity to the silent tensions that run beneath the most ordinary conversations, the unexpressed disappointment that follows when family members fail to match our enthusiasm for a holiday visit, a lecture on frugality or "The Nutcracker." Emily's barely repressed anticipation of Christmas will tweak the conscience of any irritated adult child. And O'Nan's ability to record the loaded comments around the dining room table makes me feel it's already late December.
O'Nan details all this tenderly, with no more sentimentality than Emily allows herself. "The temptation was to mourn those days," he writes, "when they were young and busy and alive. As much as Emily missed them, she understood the reason that era seemed so rich -- partly, at least -- was because it was past, memorialized, the task they'd set themselves of raising families accomplished."
"Emily, Alone" is a sequel to "Wish You Were Here" (2002), O'Nan's long, multifaceted story about a family's last summer vacation in Chautauqua, N.Y. It's tempting to assume that this new novel, at half the first one's length and with its narrow, sclerotic plot, is just a death rattle from the original story, but in fact it's better. Shorter, wittier, much more tightly focused, "Emily, Alone" makes the perfect demonstration of O'Nan's humanizing vision. Yes, there's always the danger that he's writing what Frank Norris once disparaged as "the drama of the broken tea cup." But what saves him is his profound respect for Emily, the hopes and fears that lie beyond her old-lady foibles and fussiness, which, even if you aren't an old lady and never will be, turn out to be the same hopes and fears we all harbor alone.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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