Sukey's Favorite

Digging to America
By Anne Tyler
Random House Audio, $34.95
8.5 hours unabridged, CD
ISBN 0739333100

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For decades, Anne Tyler's brilliant Baltimore-based novels have offered a unique lens that brings family life in contemporary America into sharp focus. Tyler is incisive, yet gentle and gently wry, her unaffected prose creating indelible images and characters. Digging to America, her latest, is a slight departure. Here, Tyler uses her talents to look at identity, inclusion, isolation, foreignness and finding one's real home. And it's all explored in a wonderfully engaging story of two multigenerational families—one all-American, one Iranian-American—who meet serendipitously at the airport as their adopted daughters arrive on the same plane from Korea and whose lives from then on become closely entwined. Blair Brown, always a fine reader, is in fantastic form here, effortlessly switching from broad Baltimore to subtle, Farsi-infused accents, giving each individual, male and female, emotional breadth and depth, making them so real you'll think of them as friends you don't want to lose.

Venetian glass

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

I must admit to a great fondness for Commissario Guido Brunetti—one of the most fully dimensional and likable of the fictional investigators who ferret out the bad guys and try to bring a modicum of justice to our increasingly complex world—and for his creator, Donna Leon. Through a Glass, Darkly, Leon's 15th atmospheric mystery set in ultra-atmospheric Venice, once more brings you into this venerable, venerated city as it exists for Venetians, not tourists. This time, Brunetti finds himself embroiled in environmental politics, a murder on the island of Murano where the famed Venetian glass has been made for centuries and, as ever, in the corruption that pervades Italian bureaucracy. David Colacci, the voice of Brunetti and his brethren on the last four recordings, allows just enough of an authentic Italian accent to satisfy and gives the contemplative commissario the warm dignity he well deserves.


The wild West

Marie Antoinette Courtright, known to one and all as Nellie, is the quintessential Larry McMurtry heroine—smart, sassy, sexy and as quick to put down a man as she is to lift up her skirts. She's the star of McMurtry's latest, Telegraph Days, narrated with a vibrant pluckiness equal to Nellie's by the fabulous Annie Potts. The last remaining Courtrights (the rest of this Virginia plantation family died on their way West), Nellie and her younger brother settle in Rita Blanca where she becomes the telegraph lady. But that's only for starters in this romp across the American frontier when it was chock-a-block with cavorting cowboys, grimy gunslingers and outrageous outlaws. Fictional folk mix here with Buffalo Bill (a major player in Nellie's life), Wyatt Earp, Jesse James and even Lillian Gish, who has a cameo at the end of Nellie's long, admirable career and McMurtry's exuberant Western epic.


Listening lite

If those dog days of August are nipping at your heels and easy listening sounds soothing, I've got a quick fix. Plum Sykes, who gave us Bergdorf Blondes, now returns with another tale of Manhattan's super-rich, super-spoiled and super-superficial. The Debutante Divorcée, read by Sonya Walger, whose light, London-laced voice can turn red, white and blue with admirable ease, is told in the first person by Sylvie Mortimer. A newlywed who actually wants to stay married to her to-swoon-for, successful society husband, Sylvie is unusual among the airhead heiress set who believe that marriage should never last longer than five minutes. While the infidelities play out, and love—as long as it's accessorized by jewels, furs and Fabergé cufflinks—occasionally triumphs, you'll find out what to wear, where to eat, and how to lead a life so shallow that it leaves no impression on God's green earth. Fluff, but fun.


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