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Anne Morris

FictionHistorical Fiction

The wounds of the past

Review by Anne Morris

This may be a first novel, but Jenna Blum certainly knows how to hook a reader. The opening chapter of Those Who Save Us ends with a woman shunned by her nice Minnesota neighbors following the funeral of her husband, Jack. What did Anna do to deserve this? And why is her daughter Trudy not more surprised? Trudy was only three when Anna married an American soldier at the end of World War II, and he brought them home to his Minnesota farm. Neither Jack nor Anna ever told Trudy about her real father; there was a wall of silence "she could neither penetrate or scale." Trudy grows up to be a professor of German history and becomes immersed in a project taking testimony from German Minnesotans about the war. These scenes provide context for the wartime story of Anna and Trudy. Blum's juggling of scenes as she goes back and forth in time interrupts the action and paces dramatic revelations. She uses well-chosen, unexpected details to flesh out characters and events and to make it all real. For example, readers learn that the Nazi officer whose mistress Anna became had certain sexual preoccupations. But we're also told that he was the son of a woman who left her husband to run off with a traveling salesman of wigs.

A larger question what exactly did ordinary German women such as Anna do during the Holocaust? lies behind the personal ones. As the daughter of a German mother and a Jewish father, Blum finds herself drawn to such issues. She spent four years interviewing Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. A teacher at Boston University, Blum's first fiction success dates to 1986, when she won a Seventeen magazine writing contest.

Dealing as it does with ill-fated romance, Nazi cruelty and mother/daughter guilt, Those Who Save Us could have been a terribly melodramatic book. Instead, it's sensitive and artful. In the end, this historically specific novel tells a universal story of guilt, forgiveness and love. Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

 

This may be a first novel, but Jenna Blum certainly knows how to hook a reader. The opening chapter of Those Who Save Us ends with a woman shunned by her nice Minnesota neighbors following the funeral of her husband, Jack. What did Anna do to deserve this? And why is her daughter Trudy not […]
Fiction

Toni Morrison’s alluring look at love

Review by Anne Morris

Readers perplexed by Toni Morrison's lengthy seventh novel, Paradise, will find her new one more to their liking. Titled Love, the book succeeds both as an entertainment and a moral tale. Bill Cosey, the charismatic Gatsby-like figure at its center, attracts many women. In the end, Morrison allows the reader to see him clearly, through the eyes of the only two who understood him a "sporting woman" named Celestial and a hotel cook called "L." Love begins and ends with L's narrative. Now an old woman embarrassed by the world rappers inhabit, L thinks back 40 years to "when Cosey's Hotel was the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast" and the upper classes came from as far away as Michigan and New York for the dance music, the starlit ocean, the ambience.

Morrison next shifts the point of view to follow Junior Viviane, a sexy young stranger in a too-short skirt. Readers go with her to the house of the two hate-filled old Cosey women. One is Christine, Bill Cosey's well-educated granddaughter; the other is Heed (short for Heed the Night), a low-class girl he bought to marry when she was 11. As old women they despise each other, but in childhood they were close. Heed hires Junior as her ally against Christine.

The secrets of the past permeate this story like the heavy sweet scent of southern citrus flowers. All six women in the novel once idealized Bill Cosey as father or husband or guardian or friend whatever their desperate need.

Sandler Gibbons, a man who knew Cosey better than most, acts as a moral center for the novel. How do you know people? By what they do, he says. Gibbons passes his wisdom on to his teenaged grandson, Romen, pointing out that the boy isn't helpless in the face of evil.

In this beautifully told tale, the author prompts readers to value moral choices, yet never to discount the power of love or temptation. <I>Anne Morris is a reviewer from Austin, Texas.</I>

Readers perplexed by Toni Morrison's lengthy seventh novel, Paradise, will find her new one more to their liking. Titled Love, the book succeeds both as an entertainment and a moral tale. Bill Cosey, the charismatic Gatsby-like figure at its center, attracts many women. In the end, Morrison allows the reader to see him clearly, through […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Golden dreams

Review by Anne Morris

The punishing winds of a New Zealand winter greet Joseph Blackstone, his bride Harriet, and his mother Lilian as they settle in at Cob House, their new home fashioned out of mud and straw. The year is 1864, and the three have left England to make their fortune in this bold, wild land.

Rose Tremain’s enthralling ninth novel, The Colour, is set against the background of the New Zealand gold rush, for “the colour” is what these prospectors called gold. Fans of Tremain’s earlier historical novels know well her skill at luring the reader into a faraway world. With sensual images and telling details about the region, she practices a high form of literary escapism. Before you know it, you are ensnared by different strands of story and the fates of diverse characters. Like many immigrants before and after him, Joseph sought to escape his past. Tremain states simply that “in England, he had done a disgraceful thing.” The shadow of it haunts him all through the book only to be revealed near the end.

She creates a worthy heroine in Harriet, the tall, former governess who “carries herself well.” Harriet proves an excellent settler for this new land, as eager to adapt as her mother-in-law Lilian is reluctant. An early scene at Cob House shows Joseph’s mother meticulously mending her English china, broken on the voyage. Joseph saw then that “he had failed her, just as he had always and always failed her . . . he couldn’t remember any single day when he had pleased her enough.”

Joseph’s story turns into a fevered search for gold in a setting filled with desperate men. Harriet’s is something else again. No true villains exist in The Colour—just flawed human beings following their dreams in a natural world that seems bent on squashing them.

The punishing winds of a New Zealand winter greet Joseph Blackstone, his bride Harriet, and his mother Lilian as they settle in at Cob House, their new home fashioned out of mud and straw. The year is 1864, and the three have left England to make their fortune in this bold, wild land. Rose Tremain’s […]
Fiction

Smiley’s satire of a greedy decade

Review by Anne Morris

Joe Stratford inspires trust, even if he is a real estate agent.

As the narrator of Jane Smiley's new satirical novel about greed, sex and real estate in the heady 1980s, Joe treats the reader like a friend. Only later do we learn he's never had many of those not best friends, anyway.

The New Jersey countryside on the brink of runaway development provides the setting for Good Faith, Smiley's 11th novel. Once again, this talented writer takes on a different world and an entirely new challenge. Her early novel, Duplicate Keys, was a murder mystery; A Thousand Acres redid Shakespeare'sKing Lear; Moo satirized academia; and Horse Heaven skewered the world of thoroughbred racing. Now it's real estate and banking.

In Good Faith, Smiley looks at what happens when old values are abandoned in the rush to get ahead. She easily enters the mind of her lead character, a 40-year-old divorced male real estate agent. A moral guy who "really liked selling old houses to decent people," Joe began to change once a former IRS agent named Marcus Burns convinced him he was letting opportunity slip away. "It's like everything in the world turned into money," Marcus says. In legal terms, "good faith" is a state of mind denoting honesty, faithfulness to one's duty or obligation, and absence of any intent to defraud. When the novel begins, Joe's reputation for "good faith" appears secure. He's a likeable guy with regular habits who is good to his religious parents. Just being associated with him almost makes an enterprise more viable. When he loses that reputation, he sees for the first time that his good name was worth more than money.

While Joe respects his parents, the family he really belongs to is the much looser one of Gordon Baldwin, the realtor who gave him a job when he finished college. Gordon's daughter, Felicity, married to the wrong man for 20 years, initiates an affair with Joe, and their inventive stolen sex scenes spice up long days of driving around to show real estate. Smiley has fun with these scenes, and sometimes her overblown words come right out of a realtor's book, as when Joe describes "the dark house that we made by pressing the portals of our lips together, so spacious and fascinating a place that our whole selves could go right in there and live." Though readers don't know exactly what Joe looks like, and probably can't recall what kind of car he drives, those details about everyone else are nailed down, as are the quirks of buyers and sellers and investors. You learn a lot about the business, as well as about human nature, in these pages.

Among the New Yorkers discovering the area are clients such as the two gay men, both named David, who purchase instinctively, deciding on a house before they've even stepped inside. Then, there are the usually careful Sloans, who look and look, but buy impulsively when the wife sees a cookie-cutter house and decides that "this one won't last a day." No matter that her husband's dreams of more romantic vistas are left behind. Considerable humor lurks in Smiley's descriptions of housing developments, as when one character speaks of "a place where people who've watched a lot of TV feel comfortable." An underlying theme, epitomized by Felicity's long-suffering environmentalist husband Hank, is the rape of the land the fact that in all the growth, few seem to care what happens to the place itself. This sounds like a moral tale, and in some ways it is, but Smiley's delivery is never stuffy or condescending. On the last page, she tosses the reader a happy ending. To believe in it, all you need is faith in coincidence.

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin.

Joe Stratford inspires trust, even if he is a real estate agent. As the narrator of Jane Smiley's new satirical novel about greed, sex and real estate in the heady 1980s, Joe treats the reader like a friend. Only later do we learn he's never had many of those not best friends, anyway. The New […]
Fiction

A prodigal daughter’s return to the farm

Review by Anne Morris

Growing up in Idaho potato country with an odd Japanese mother and a pro-life American father, exotic-looking Yumi Fuller felt like "a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes." She ran away at 14 and did not return for almost 25 years.

Was "Yummy" a bad girl? The apple of her father's eye, gone rotten? Not really. Readers of Ruth Ozeki's splendid earlier novel, the provocative My Year of Meats (1998), know this author seldom judges. She merely bears witness to paradox and compromise.

All Over Creation describes a prodigal daughter's return to see for one last time her ill, aged parents. The mother, Momoko, has Alzheimer's; the father, Lloyd, is dying. Yummy's old friend Cass locates her through the Internet and summons her back home.

This serious book by a former filmmaker is leavened with outrageous visual humor as when Yummy's teenaged son Phoenix takes the labels his grandfather made for his grandmother (STOVE, REFRIGERATOR, etc.) and attaches them to all the wrong objects.

Readers soon regard all Ozeki's characters as old friends, for they seem as contradictory as real people. Even the seemingly selfless Cass a cancer survivor who looked after the Fuller parents in Yummy's absence is not without sin. She was the lumpy child assigned to play the potato in their school's Thanksgiving pageant, while beautiful Yummy was always the Indian princess.

"Yummy, do you know what it's like to go through life as a side dish?" Cass asks, years later.

"No." "I didn't think so." Cass, an earth mother type married to a Vietnam vet and living on a potato farm, has only miscarriages; Yummy lives in lush Hawaii and has three cute children she cares for haphazardly. Yet somehow the women's old friendship rekindles believably.

As an occasional first-person narrator, Yummy provides the outsider's perspective on life in potato country. She finds herself drinking and smoking more than she's done in a while, and escaping into hot sex with someone she never expected to see again.

Chapter Two introduces a band of young radical protesters the Seeds of Resistance traveling the land in a camper that runs on discarded oil from fast-food restaurants. To support their mission of saving the world, the Seeds operate a pornographic Web site. But if you think they're not sweet, loving people, watch them at Yummy's parents' farm.

Like My Year of Meats, this novel looks critically at what happens to America's food before it reaches the table. Genetically engineered potatoes not beef draw the author's ire this time. But the real culprits are the commercial interests who would keep the truth hidden, covering up dangers to the public.

Even more emotionally satisfying than Ozeki's first novel, All Over Creation will likely leave many readers praying for the creation of a sequel.

Growing up in Idaho potato country with an odd Japanese mother and a pro-life American father, exotic-looking Yumi Fuller felt like "a random fruit in a field of genetically identical potatoes." She ran away at 14 and did not return for almost 25 years. Was "Yummy" a bad girl? The apple of her father's eye, […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Scaling the ivory tower

Review by Anne Morris

Fiona was in her 30s when she fell in love with her university department chairman, a powerful and married older man. Now, nine years later, she's suddenly aware of Sigmund's wispy gray arm hairs and sagging muscles. When he confesses he has no plan to back her upcoming promotion, fondness departs.

Lynn Miller describes Fiona's next weeks in a witty first novel that is part academic satire, part middle-aged coming-of-age story. The Fool's Journey, set in Austin at a school obviously meant to be the University of Texas, shows how the foolish protagonist makes her way to self-knowledge. Her guides: other women professors, a reader of tarot cards, some gay friends and the writer Edith Wharton.

What makes the novel fun are the people Fiona knows. Miller creates excellent outlandish academics. Fiona's buxom friend, Bettina, who teaches seminars about Virginia Woolf, exudes Eros to such a degree that she attracts women as well as men. Her husband, Martin, a quiet former botany professor, provides contrast. Various slick deans and department chairmen appear, occasionally in romantic roles. (One seduces both Bettina and Fiona, though not at the same time.) The Fool's Journey kills any notion that life in the ivory tower is primarily intellectual or, as Daphne, the tarot card reader, tells Fiona, "Much of your conflict is bound up in the academy, an edifice supposedly built on ideas but powered by emotion the quest for recognition, greed for accolades, the envy of others' success." Miller has a fine, understated wit that allows her to skewer even what she seems to revere. For example, at the end of Fiona's tarot card session, she's thinking to herself that knowledge is priceless when Daphne says, "That will be seventy-five dollars. If you prefer, I accept all credit cards. Except Discover." The novel is like a visit to Austin. Fiona takes off for a holiday at Port Aransas, submerges herself in the frigid water of Barton Springs and attends parties in Hyde Park. You wonder why Miller calls the school Austin University instead of UT. Could it be because she teaches performance studies at UT and wants some distance? Anne Morris writes from Austin, Texas.

Fiona was in her 30s when she fell in love with her university department chairman, a powerful and married older man. Now, nine years later, she's suddenly aware of Sigmund's wispy gray arm hairs and sagging muscles. When he confesses he has no plan to back her upcoming promotion, fondness departs. Lynn Miller describes Fiona's […]
FictionDebut Fiction

CATHERINE CANTRELL

Review by Anne Morris

How much of an artist's life can be seen in an artist's work? Catherine Cantrell, asks that question in the first paragraph of her debut novel, Constance, then goes on to play with the idea for a couple of hundred pages.

Told from the point of view of the editor at a New York publishing house who discovers Constance's poetry, the novel introduces the reader bit by bit to this beautiful young literary artist. Whether or not you value the poetry as highly as does Morgan, the editor, you will be intrigued by Constance Chamberlain. She is dedicated to pure art and feels a kinship with Emily Dickinson, but also manages a secret relationship with Lou, a powerful older married man who was once her professor in business school.

Her professor where? That's right, in business school at Columbia. Don't all poets get an MBA? The editor's voice as she tells this tale is nonetheless convincing. A lonely young widow, Morgan becomes fascinated by Constance. She finds the young poet refreshing after meeting so many writers who pursue money first, and art, second.

Ever tempting the reader to see parallels between herself and Constance, the author gives the protagonist the same double-C initials as her own and a similar background, in upper class Lake Forest, Illinois. Both dedicate their first book simply, To My Mother. And for both, it's a novel that includes original poems.

Brought to the attention of Random House by writer William Styron, Catherine Cantrell seems likely to capture others' attention, too, with this haunting debut. Though the final pages, with their return to Constance's girlhood home, raise many questions, you come away with an answer to the big one. Yes, some artists do put very much of themselves into their art.

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin.

 

How much of an artist's life can be seen in an artist's work? Catherine Cantrell, asks that question in the first paragraph of her debut novel, Constance, then goes on to play with the idea for a couple of hundred pages. Told from the point of view of the editor at a New York publishing […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Jennifer Haigh

Interview by Anne Morris

One after another, three women marry the same wrong man, each believing her life will be complete once she becomes Mrs. Ken Kimble. In a provocative first novel titled simply Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh uses portraits of these three characters to question why women think they have to marry.

"Ken Kimble is what I call a serial marrier," Haigh says by phone from Boston, where she moved after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop last year. "He has these serious character flaws, but he has no problem finding women to marry." Haigh has firm opinions about why such a man can always find a bride. "We're raised as women to value marriage and family," she says, "and to believe that unless we've achieved those things, the rest of our accomplishments don't really count for very much."

The somewhat controversial subject of the novel, the spare beauty of her writing and the fact that everybody knows someone like Ken made Haigh's manuscript a hot item in the publishing world—the novel sold only a month after she gave it to an agent. "Publishing it was a lot easier than writing it, and a lot faster," Haigh says wryly.

Like most overnight successes, Haigh has practiced her craft all her life. As a bookish little girl growing up in Barresboro, Pennsylvania, she kept journals. Later, at Dickinson College, she began to write fiction seriously. "Very seriously and very badly," she says. "I look back at the stories I wrote as a very young writer, and they're exactly like everybody else's the evil boyfriends, the tragic breakups, the fights with my parents." No story was as good as she wanted it to be. She put fiction aside for five or six years. "I grew up and had a job and worked a little bit, then came back to it when I had a bit more to say."

During those intervening years, Haigh studied in France on a Fulbright scholarship, worked as an editor at Self magazine and taught yoga, which she still practices faithfully. "It's a great, great help for writers in terms of slowing down, being patient and staying focused on the work. Hard, hard things to do."

Before writing Mrs. Kimble, Haigh had been successful with short stories, publishing in Good Housekeeping magazine and various literary journals. Moving from the short story to the novel was not an easy process; two novels she calls "miscarriages" preceded this one.

Haigh, who is 34 and single, maintains that nothing from her personal life inspired her debut novel. "I had this very well-adjusted upbringing. My parents are still married to each other. They live in the same house I grew up in. None of that made it into Mrs. Kimble."

Yet, somehow, Haigh has a gift for empathizing with all Ken's wives. Birdie, the first, is a Southern girl who in 1961, at age 19, fell for the handsome choir director at her all-girl Bible college and bore him two children. The second wife, Joan, is Jewish and a writer for Newsweek, brought South by her father's death in Florida and detained there by breast cancer. Ken steps into her life in 1969, and ends up the richer for it. Third is Dinah, who as a teenager baby-sat for Birdie and Ken's children. After a chance re-encounter, they marry in 1979. 

Birdie seems almost too extreme in her isolation—never having known a white woman who worked, for example—and somewhat unlikely in her youthful romance with a black neighbor. Joan is perfect in her imperfection, as is Dinah, with her unsightly birthmark.

The wives are different types, from different generations, all with different expectations of men. Yet, all three fall for this same worthless blue-eyed charmer, seemingly attuned to their needs but actually caring very little about them.

The idea for the novel began with Birdie. "The first scene in the book I wrote," Haigh says, "was the scene in the store where Birdie is drunk and Charlie is helping her buy groceries . . . Years ago, I was living in Tampa, Florida, and I saw something similar happen in the little corner store a drunk mother with a small child. And that stuck with me."

The scene also sticks with the reader, as do other elements of this clever book.  

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

 

One after another, three women marry the same wrong man, each believing her life will be complete once she becomes Mrs. Ken Kimble. In a provocative first novel titled simply Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh uses portraits of these three characters to question why women think they have to marry. "Ken Kimble is what I call […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Elisabeth Robinson

Interview by Anne Morris

Elisabeth Robinson knew she would eventually write something about her sister not because of the way she died, but because of the way she lived. She could have written a memoir, but it wouldn't have had a comic outlet. She might have written a screenplay, since she has written several others. Yet, that form felt too confining. Instead, Robinson ended up creating a terrific novel, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters.

"It's somewhat autobiographical in that my sister went through sort of what happens in the book," Robinson says, explaining that her sister died of leukemia in 1998.

"She always had been the idealistic one, and I was always the sort of crabby, cynical one," Robinson says by phone from her New York apartment. "When she was diagnosed, she didn't change, and I was kind of amazed at that. And after she died, I was even haunted by that. How could she possibly think the world is beautiful when such unfair, terrible things happen?"

How, indeed? And how could Robinson write an entertaining novel about a tragic and untimely death? Yet, Hunt Sisters is by turns a touching and hilarious reading experience. The secret lies in its lead character, Olivia Hunt, Robinson's sassy equivalent who tells the whole story through her letters. A screenwriter and producer recently fired by Universal Pictures, Olivia is working on the fourth draft of her own suicide note when the call comes that her 28-year-old sister back in Shawnee Falls, Ohio, has real trouble leukemia.

"All your life you try to imagine what bad news sounds like," Olivia writes in a letter to her childhood friend, Tina, "but when you actually hear bad news, it simply makes no sense; it's like being told the definition of a black hole by a physicist, directions by a local, the evidence of God by a priest." Hoping for the best, Olivia flies home. There, it becomes her job to prop up her mother and father, and try to make up for all the times she was a less than stellar big sister to Madeleine. Simultaneously, Olivia is trying to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend Michael, and to bring to production a long-dormant film version of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Robinson herself once worked on a Don Quixote film project with Robin Williams, but it never got made. "It's one of the most impossible movies to make," she explains. "It's perfect here because the theme of Don Quixote Does courage require a craziness? Is courage a form of delusion? dovetails with Madeleine's optimism and idealism."

Robinson decided to write the novel in letters after her mother sent her some of the family's real-life correspondence she had found in the attic. The author discovered they had an inherent drama because of what was not there. She liked the form, and readers will, too.

Olivia says what we would like to. To the boyfriend: "I've decided I like writing to you precisely because you don't respond. You're like a dog that way. A great listener. Man's best friend."

To her mom: "Read that folder I put together, particularly the stuff I highlighted. And I implore you to get a prescription for Xanax. Don't be anxious about taking anti-anxiety drugs; you won't become an addict."

To Madeleine: "A man of medicine, a healer, should not do his ICU rounds in black Bruno Magli slip-ons, the kind OJ wore when he sliced off his wife's head."

To a former colleague: "I guess you weren't in film school the day they taught that lesson about being nice to everyone just in case one day you fall from your totally undeserved place of power."

Letters telling off doctors, boyfriends and former colleagues amount to wish-fulfillment for Robinson. A screenwriter with credits on such award-winning films as Braveheart and Last Orders, she worked in Hollywood for years, and her send-up of the entertainment business is dead-on.

Robinson's film career began in New York, where she scouted books to make into movies. But her love of writing started even earlier, when she was growing up in the Detroit suburb where her parents still live. "I wrote my first story when I was eight," she says. "I only know that because the teacher mimeographed it and passed it out. It was about a turkey who hid in the closet because it didn't want to get eaten." Robinson wrote stories all through high school, but lost her nerve when she went to Oberlin, instead deciding to study philosophy and economics. After college, she headed for New York. Her big-haired, friendly sister, on the other hand, never left Michigan, married her hometown boyfriend and seemed on her way to living happily ever after when tragedy struck.

For the fictional retelling of her sister's experience, Robinson originally chose the title A Species of Happiness, taken from this quote by Samuel Johnson: "Hope is itself a species of happiness and perhaps the chief happiness this world affords." Robinson says she compared that quote with this one from her sister's cancer literature: "The prognosis for people with this cancer is dismal."

"I wanted to learn," the author says, "how you can feel hope in the face of something like this."

Robinson admits to being nervous about all the favorable advance publicity her book has received, including blurbs in major magazines. "I was just talking to a friend of mine about the movie Lost in Translation," she says. "I saw it before it got all the publicity, and I liked it. But I wonder how much I could have liked it if I had been told ahead of time, 'You're going to like it.'"

Not a bad problem to have. Madeleine would tell her to quit worrying.

 

Anne Morris is a writer in Austin, Texas.

Elisabeth Robinson knew she would eventually write something about her sister not because of the way she died, but because of the way she lived. She could have written a memoir, but it wouldn't have had a comic outlet. She might have written a screenplay, since she has written several others. Yet, that form felt […]

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