Happy New Year!
I’ve been on a book binge, and have good things to report.
First, Mary Gaitskill’s wondrous novel, The Mare. Ginger is a failed painter, a recovered alcoholic, the survivor of abuse. Now married and living in the country, she yearns to be a mother. Husband Paul is a father, of a college-age daughter. They compromise, agreeing to foster a child during the summer through the Fresh Air Fund.
Velveteen is that child, 11 when the story begins. Though she has grown up in Brooklyn, she quickly proves herself a natural with horses. Quickly, too, Ginger deceives Velvet’s mother, who is certain Velvet will fall from a horse to her death.
Class, race, education, mobility, sexuality, adultery, athleticism: Gaitskill effortlessly explores these themes through these characters’ journeys. I loved every page.
Next I read Daniel Alarcón’s novel At Night We Walk in Circles (2013). I’d discovered Alarcón through his short story A City of Clowns in The New Yorker. (Read it.)
A native of Peru, Alarcón was raised in the American South. He writes fiction in English and nonfiction in Spanish. His fiction haunts, and describes a South American society that’s brutal, stagnant, absurd: the promise of a better life in the U.S. is a constant distraction and lure.
This novel is the journey of Nelson, a struggling actor who leaves his widowed mother and pregnant girlfriend to join a traveling troupe headed by a once imprisoned playwright. It’s an entrancing ride that, of course, does not end well.
Lori Osltund’s After the Parade is a steady read about a middle-age man who leaves his older lover for a new life in San Francisco. That act causes Aaron to revisit his Midwest childhood, when his abusive father fell from a parade float to his death and later, as a teen, when his troubled mother abandoned him and the cafe she’d run. Other memories flood in: of a trip to a family friend whose brother is a tusk-toothed dwarf, of a kind fat girl whose family takes Aaron in after his mother flees.
ln San Francisco, Aaron befriends a private investigator who tracks down Aaron’s now elderly mother. His visit to her is heartbreaking.
I can’t recall where I read about Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Til the Well Run Dries (2014) but I’m glad I picked it up. Set in Trinidad during the 1960s, it tells the story of a beautiful seamstress with a secret past and the police officer who loves her but won’t marry her. Moving, surprisingly violent, well told.
I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the story of a divorced mother of young children who goes to Athens, Greece to teach a writing seminar. She befriends an older man on the flight over, also divorced, who tells her of his marriages. (Their outings are the most interesting parts of the book.) Others — friends, writers, editors, students — tell their stories; the narrator mostly records. There’s no plot, and it can be maddeningly dull; still, I found the thinking and talking about marriage intriguing.
Finally, thanks to this wise and funny essay by Ed Tarkington that touches on, among other things, why we read and why we write, I bought his just published novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart. It’s Southern Gothic, and very good, about a boy, his older brother and girlfriend, their parents, their neighbors, ghosts real and imagined. I’m halfway through.