January 7, 2020

December Reading Recap

I closed out 2019 with a great reading month. In my next post, I'll look back at my whole reading year.

YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY by Steph Cha follows a Korean-American family and a black family in present-day Los Angeles, uncovering their connections to the city's unrest in the early 1990s. Grace works at the pharmacy owned by her immigrant parents and wishes her older sister would reconcile with their mother, or at least explain why she stopped talking to her. Shawn has been putting his life back together ever since the violent death of his older sister and hopes that his cousin's release from prison won't bring further turmoil to the family. Grace and Shawn are just trying to get along in their very different lives until a shocking crime impacts them both and raises questions about the past.

This is a masterfully crafted novel at every level. The characters, situations, and difficult topics are all presented with realistic nuance. The plot is a tense page-turner, and Cha draws on her experience writing detective novels to set up a compelling mystery. She also draws from history, basing the story's catalyst on a real event that happened around the time of the Rodney King beating, and I was fascinated to learn about it. I highly recommend this novel to all readers.

THE DUTCH HOUSE by Ann Patchett: Danny is eight and Maeve is fifteen when their father first brings Andrea to the Dutch House for a tour. The house, Dutch because of its original owners, is a grand home outside Philadelphia that Danny and Maeve's father purchased in 1946 for their mother, who left when Danny was too small to remember. By the time Danny is fifteen, he and his sister no longer live at the Dutch House, but Andrea does. The siblings begin a habit of parking on the street outside the house to observe and discuss, a tradition they continue for decades. As Danny grows up and makes a family of his own, his bond with Maeve remains central to his life, and for good or bad, so does their past in the house.

I loved this book and the brother-sister relationship at its core. Patchett is a master at crafting distinctive, fully realized characters, and I now feel like I've known Danny and Maeve personally all these years. The portrayal of a long span of time with the aid of quick jumps forward and back is similar to Patchett's equally excellent COMMONWEALTH, though this novel's approach is more methodical. The confidently rendered characters and structure, the engrossing story, and the subtle humor place THE DUTCH HOUSE among my favorite books of the year and confirm Patchett as one of my favorite authors.

GIOVANNI'S ROOM by James Baldwin opens with the narrator alone in a house in France. David's girlfriend is on a ship back to America (it's the 1950s) after understanding that he never really loved her. Giovanni, who he may have truly loved, is sentenced to die at the guillotine in the morning. From this shocking start, the novel goes back to tell of David's first sexual encounter with a boy in Brooklyn, his move to Paris to find or escape himself, and all that occurred between meeting Giovanni and Giovanni committing his crime.

This is an emotionally intense story, beautifully written but difficult to read. The setup imbues every event with foreboding, and David's conflicted feelings about his sexuality prevent him from finding happiness in his love for Giovanni. As a result, this isn't quite the celebration of gay love that I anticipated, but it's a nuanced, compassionate portrayal of several midcentury gay experiences. I hadn't read Baldwin before, and I'm glad I finally spent some time with his exemplary prose.

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder: The housekeeper narrating this novel is hired to look after a retired math professor, who lives an isolated existence with only his beloved numbers for company. While math may have always been an overwhelming focus of his life, it's now one of the sole subjects accessible to him, because he suffers from anterograde amnesia and can't form any new memories. Every morning when the housekeeper arrives, she's a stranger to him again, a situation she handles with far more kindness than his previous housekeepers. When the professor displays his love of children, she starts bringing her son along, and the two of them become eager students of the professor's number theory lessons. Despite the limits of his memory, the three create a sort of family until the outside world intrudes.

This is an interesting but frustrating story. The characters are all charming, and when things took a bad turn, I was definitely concerned and invested in everyone's fate. The math is explained well, and there's personality in how both the professor and the housekeeper think about numbers. However, for much of the book, I felt the amnesia barely impacted the plot, and a similar story might have been told if the professor's eccentricities lacked this contrivance. There were also a few places when secrets were uncovered but raised more questions than they answered. These issues made me wish for a somewhat different story, but the reading experience was mostly enjoyable.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Lincoln Michel describes the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story: "I'm interested in what devices--engines let's call them, since surely the author is always the driver (even when they're crashing their story into a ditch)--can supply power to the rest of story.... In my own writing, I typically find that plot and character are not enough and that my stories are inert until I find a different kind of engine--a thematic engine perhaps or a structure engine or a linguistic engine--that makes the thing get up and running."

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