I feel like I have hit some kind of jackpot, as after months of trying to find a book to read that I found interesting enough to finish, I found two back-to-back. I just finished and wrote about Small Pleasures a few days ago, so when I picked up The Second Mrs. Hockaday by an author I had never heard of, I was more than prepared to give up on it after a couple of chapters. After all, what were the chances of me liking it so soon after finding a book I enjoyed, given that I had become so hard to please lately as far as reading was concerned? Also, the book is set during the American Civil War in the 1860s, a time period that — as I was not born in the US — feels quite remote, and, dare I say at the risk of sounding parochial, not particularly interesting to me.
In short, I was fully prepared to pass on the book after a couple of chapters. But much to my surprise, I was hooked and read it all the way through to the end in two days.
The story centers on a 17-year-old girl, Placidia, who falls in love with and marries a man and comes to back with him to his 300-acre farm in South Carolina, all within the course of a couple of days. It is a testament to the immediate attraction that she feels for the man, a Major Hockaday, and he for her. But they have barely a day to enjoy being newly-weds before he is called off to fight in the Civil War, leaving Placidia on her own to manage the farm as well as his infant son from his deceased first wife.
When Major Hockaday returns after two years, he learns that Placidia has borne a child in his absence and that this child is now dead. He feels so betrayed — the baby could not have been his — that he brings criminal charges against her. She is accused of murdering the baby she bore and is jailed. Placidia does not deny that she had a child and that it is now dead. However, she claims that she did not kill the child but that it died of illness. Also, she refuses to say who the father of the child was or how it happened. Did she have an affair or was she raped?
It is, of course, this mystery at the heart of the book that makes it so compelling and such a propulsive read. However, it was not just the suspense, it also how beautifully it was written. The story is told entirely in the form of letters, diary entries, and inquest reports, all of them capturing the details, the mood, the dialogue, the social norms, and the etiquette of that time period. The horrors of the Civil War, as experienced with full force by Placidia in the form of looting, intimidation, and violence, are also vividly portrayed. And then, of course, there was slavery, which at that time was in full force, especially in the South where the book is set. Not surprisingly, it forms one of the key plot points of the book.
The Second Mrs. Hockaday is Susan Rivers’ debut novel, which may be why I had never heard of her. But I am so glad to have found this book and its amazingly talented author.
The Second Mrs. Hockaday Author: Susan Rivers Publisher: Algonquin Books Publication Date: November 2017
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I was surprised that I had not come across any books by Clare Chambers before, given how much I ended up liking this book. The blurb at the back of the book said that its style was reminiscent of Ann Patchett and Kazuo Ishiguro – both of whom are authors I greatly admire – and while book blurbs are often exaggerated, this one wasn’t. Not only did I find myself completely engrossed in the story, I was also able to enjoy the actual telling of it, to savor the quality of the writing rather than racing through it to get to the end. This is despite the fact that it is a mystery – of sorts.
Small Pleasures is set in England in 1957, and it takes two real-life events and blends them together into a story that is so compelling that it is almost hard to believe. The main event was the search for a “virgin mother” that a popular British tabloid undertook in 1955, based on the recent discussion of a scientific concept called “parthenogenesis.” This is a form of asexual reproduction that occurs naturally in some plants and animals. Could it also be possible in humans? That was the idea behind the search, and in the fictional world of Small Pleasures, there is actually a woman who seems to have had a baby while she was still a virgin, with the baby being conceived at a time and place — bedridden in a hospital with severe rheumatoid arthritis — where she could not have had sex with a man.
Of course, for those of us who have seen the TV show, Jane the Virgin, we saw how Jane got pregnant by being accidentally artificially inseminated with a man’s sperm, but the book, Small Pleasures, is set in the 1950s, long before such a technology existed. And yet, there is Gretchen Tilbury, who claims that her daughter, Margaret — now ten years old – was born without the involvement of a man.
It is a claim that falls to Jean Swinney — who works at the newspaper that raised the question of whether parthenogenesis is possible in humans — to investigate. While the mystery of the “virgin birth” is, of course, very intriguing and keeps us riveted, the focus of the book is really on Jean and on her growing friendship and emotional attachment to Gretchen, Margaret, and Gretchen’s husband, Howard, whom Gretchen married after she found out that she was pregnant. Jean herself is close to forty, unmarried, and is a dutiful caretaker to her cantankerous widowed mother, so her life is far from joyful. This is why her deepening friendship with the Tilburys becomes a source of great personal happiness for her – making for the “small pleasures” of the book’s title. However, it also eventually brings her into conflict with her professional obligations of investigating Gretchen’s claim.
The second real-life event that the author skillfully weaves into the story is a horrendous rail accident — one of the worst in Britain’s history — that happened in the 1950s, in which two trains crashed in dense fog in south-east London, causing the deaths of 90 people and injuring many more. Although the train crash was briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, we forget all about it as we get caught up in the lives of Jane, the Tilburys, and the mystery of the virgin birth. But then, suddenly, the tragedy befalls one of the key characters in the book, and it comes as a complete shock.
It is so devastating that, by then, we don’t even care any more about the mystery of the virgin birth that the book started with — even though it does get solved by the end.
Small Pleasures Author: Clare Chambers Publisher: Mariner Books Publication Date: October 2021
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
What drew me to pick up The House of Doors to read was that one of the main characters in the book was the novelist, Somerset Maugham, who is one of my all-time favorite authors. (I wrote about one of his books, The Razor’s Edge, on this blog after re-reading it a few years ago.) It’s been decades since Maugham died so there are no more books by him that I can enjoy, which is why it was intriguing to me to be reading a novel — rather than a biography or a non-fiction book — in which he has a starring role. As himself.
In addition to Maugham, the other main character in The House of Doors is Lesley Hamlyn, an Englishwoman married to a close friend of Maugham’s who he visits for two weeks in 1921 in Penang, Malaya (currently Malaysia). Maugham was legendary for his travels all over the world, especially in the Far East, and many of his novels and stories are set there. He actually did visit Malaya in 1921 for six months, so that part is not fictionalized. However, it is not part of historical records as to exactly who he lived with while he was there, and this is where fiction in The House of Doors comes in.
The book imagines a two-week time period in which Maugham, accompanied by his secretary (who was also his secret lover — Maugham’s closeted homosexuality was real and not made up), stays in the house of his close friend, Robert Hamlyn, and his wife, Lesley. Maugham has just lost most of his savings in a bad investment and is desperate for a good story that he can use to write a bestselling book and recoup his losses. Lesley is cordial but aloof with her famous guest at first, but she soon warms to him, becomes more open, and eventually tells him not about a shocking real-life scandal but also more about herself, about Robert, and about their extra-marital relationships.
The scandal she tells Maugham about is one that actually happened in real life: an Englishwoman in Kuala Lumpur (in what was still called Malaya at that time) murdered an acquaintance, and while she was arrested and tried, it was widely expected that the trial was only a formality and that she would be freed — she claimed that the man had tried to rape her and she shot him only in self-defense. However, this didn’t happen: she was found guilty as there were inconsistences in her story and evidence pointing to the fact that the man had actually been her lover — she had killed him in a fit of jealous rage because he had started a relationship with a native woman and broken off with her. She was eventually pardoned after an appeal to the Sultan (the ruler of Malaya at that time) and forced to return to England.
Maugham made the story of this real-life scandal, narrated to him by the fictional Lesley in The House of Doors, as the basis for the story “The Letter,” in his book, The Casuarina Tree. This is an actual book by Maugham that was published in 1962, and it is a collection of six short stories, all set in Malaya in the 1920s. The fictional The House of Doors makes it seem like the title of Maugham’s book came from an actual casuarina tree in Lesley’s house where he and Lesley had their many conversations that resulted in the book. Also, the fictional Lesley in The House of Doors is a close friend of the real-life woman who was tried and found guilty; Lesley had attended the trial which is why she knows so much about it. (I did find it somewhat confusing to separate fact from fiction in The House of Doors and had to resort to some online research to understand what was real and what was not.)
The trial, however, was not the only thing that (the fictional) Lesley tells (the real-life) Maugham about in The House of Doors. She also tells him about the affair she had with a Chinese man, Arthur, whom she met while connecting with an exiled Chinese revolutionary living in Malaya, Sun Yat-Sen. (This again, is a real person — he overthrew the dynasty ruling China at that time and became the first president of the Republic of China.) Lesley and her husband, Robert, are married in name only, as it turns out that Robert is also a closeted homosexual, which leaves Lesley emotionally free to fall in love with Arthur. Their secret meeting place is Arthur’s house, which Lesley refers to as the “House of Doors” — this is where the title of the book comes from — as it has a large number of doors that Arthur likes to collect as artifacts. Their relationship, which happens in 1910 (the same year as the trial scandal that Lesley has told Maugham about), is cut short when Arthur is forced to go back to China for the revolution following Sun Yat-Sen’s arrest in Malaya. Also, Arthur is married as well, so there wasn’t a future in their relationship anyway without resorting to divorce, which was considered very scandalous at that time.
It is only towards the last few pages of the book, when Lesley is her in her sixties, living in South Africa where she and Robert had moved on account of his health, and with Robert having died several years ago, that she gets a cryptic message — through one of Maugham’s books in fact, specifically The Casuarina Tree — to return to the House of Doors. It was presumably sent by Arthur who has returned to Penang and is waiting for her at the House of Doors. I found it such a heart-warming finale to the story of Lesley and Arthur. Because that is ultimately what The House of Doors was about, even though it did not feel like that for most of the book.
In addition to the love story that is so understatedly romantic, I found it fascinating — and utterly unique — how artfully The House of Doors combined fact and fiction: I had a hard time figuring out what was real and what was not until I looked it up. It also led me to re-read Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree — I had not read it for years and hardly remembered it — and focus on the story, “The Letter,” based on the real-life trial described in The House of Doors. I actually found Maugham’s story a lot better than the actual event, and it once again recalled for me his brilliance as an author, at how he could masterfully take an idea and craft an amazing story from it. It’s no wonder that he is one of my favorite authors. And with regard to The House of Doors, in addition to it being so unique and bringing me back to Somerset Maugham, I found it to be a beautifully written book. The quality of the prose was exceptional, and it captured the time period and the place – early 1900s in Malaya – so evocatively, it made me feel like I was there. I am so happy to have discovered another author whose work I can wholeheartedly enjoy.
The House of Doors Author: Tan Twan Eng Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Publication Date: October 2023
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
Holly is Stephen King’s latest novel, and it is as masterfully written as you would expect from such a prolific storyteller. I was drawn in right away, and it was difficult to put the book down until it had ended. And this was despite it not being a “mystery” as such, which you typically cannot stop reading because you simply have to know the “resolution” to the mystery.
The Holly of the book’s title is Holly Gibney, who has appeared in some of King’s earlier books as an investigator, including The Outsider which was published in 2018. Set in the summer of 2021 when COVID is still raging, the plot of Holly is Gibney’s investigation into the disappearance of a young woman, who seems to have literally vanished off the face of the earth. As readers, we know exactly what has happened to her – she has been abducted by an old couple, Robert and Emily Harris, who believe that consuming parts of the human body will prolong their longevity and reduce their aging-related aches and pains. They do these cannibalistic killings at regular intervals, of approximately three years, targeting young people who would seem to have a good reason for suddenly “taking off.” They are both respected professors — now retired but still active in their fields — at a local college (in an unnamed midwestern town), and not only can they do their abductions without suspicion, they are also in a good position to scout the college town where they live for the “best” victims for the human flesh they want to consume.
Although Gibney is called on to investigate the disappearance of the latest victim, she ends up uncovering the earlier disappearances as well and tying them together to ultimately lead to the Harrises. While she does have a partner in the detective agency, he is down with a bad bout of COVID, and even though she does get some investigative help from a couple of youngsters (whom the agency sometimes uses) to crack the case, she is pretty much on her own when it comes to the actual confrontation with the Harrises. There is the clichéd “shootout” at the end of the book where the hero/heroine vanquishes the villains, and even though you know it is coming, it still makes for compelling reading.
I also greatly appreciated the fact that while the crime in Holly is horribly gruesome, there is at least no supernatural element to it as there was in The Outsider. Yes, the world is full of horror and terror, but I find it way too easy — almost a copout — to ascribe this to otherworldly forces than to human evil, which is sadly all too real.
Holly Author: Stephen King Publisher: Scribner Publication Date: September 2023
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I absolutely love the “Cormoran Strike” detective series by J.K. Rowling, who is writing these books under the pseudonym, Robert Galbraith. I own all of them and ever so often, I re-read them starting from the very first book in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, immersing myself completely in the Strike-Robin universe that Rowling has created. There were six books up until the publication of the latest one, and with a length of over 600 pages on average, that’s a whole lot of immersion. It has especially been a godsend when I am feeling down — I am able to lose myself so completely in these books that I can forget about myself and my problems for a while.
While I am also a big fan of Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books and own them all, I have not found re-reading them to be as completely riveting as the “Cormoran Strike” series. In this, I am likely in the minority, as “Cormoran Strike” is hardly a household name. In fact, the real-life setting of these books — Strike’s detective agency is located in Denmark Street in London — is hardly visited let alone deluged by throngs of fans. On a recent trip to London, I actually made it a point to visit the exact address — 6 Denmark St — and had the opportunity to chat with the owner of the guitar shop on the ground floor. (In the book, the agency is on the second floor of the building.) He told me that he gets only a few visitors who are fans — and even these are fans of the TV series that the books are being made into rather than of the books themselves. He was surprised to learn that I had never watched the TV series and emphatically did not want to do so. I have such a vivid picture of Strike and Robin in my head that I don’t want them to be overwritten by actors playing their parts.
(For those who don’t know about these books at all, Cormoran Strike is an ex-military man with an prosthetic leg — his leg was injured in a blast and had to be amputated, forcing him to leave the army — who has started a detective agency. Robin Ellacott comes to the agency in the first book as a temp but soon proves to be indispensable, works her way up solving the cases with Strike, and eventually becomes a partner in the agency. The books are as much about the cases that the agency tackles as it is about their mutual relationship. I have written about this in more detail in my write-up of the fourth book, Lethal White.)
Which brings me to the new book in the series, The Running Grave. Surprisingly, I was not even aware that it had been published this time, in contrast to previous years where it garnered at least some press from publications like the New York Times and Goodreads. (I know J.K. Rowling has been in some hot water in the last few years because of some controversial remarks/tweets, but still?) Anyway, it was only when I was in London a few weeks ago and thought of visiting 6 Denmark Street, the real-life location of Strike’s detective agency, that I looked up the series and found, to my delight, that the seventh book had already been published. I ordered it as soon as I was back home from my travels and once it had arrived, I waited with great anticipation till the weekend, which I had cleared of all commitments, to read it. I even re-read the 6th book, The Ink Black Heart, as prep, which is something I typically do before reading a new book in the series, so I can just pick up from where the previous book left off. (While the cases in each book are always resolved by the end, the relationship between Strike and Robin remains open-ended, continuing to evolve with each book but without the romantic resolution that would seem to be where it is headed.)
The main case in The Running Grave is the investigation into a religious/spiritual cult called UHC (Universal Humanitarian Church). The agency is hired by a retired civil servant whose son, Will, was lured into joining the UHC and has all but disappeared — he no longer responds to any letters and did not even acknowledge the death of his mother, who died broken-hearted that he had disappeared from their lives. The case requires Robin to go undercover and join the cult, and it ends up being not just a case to find and rescue Will from the clutches of the UHC but an investigation into the entire organization, which turns out to be not just corrupt but also criminal. It is a familiar story in relation to any cult — helmed by a very charismatic leader, the organization attracts a lot of followers who willingly sign over all their money to the organization and subject themselves to terrible abuse and trauma in the name of “spiritual cleansing.” The misdeeds of the UHC in The Running Grave also include sexual assault, unreported deaths, and child trafficking, as are uncovered by Strike and Robin by the end of the book. In addition to exposing and bringing down the UHC, they are also able to save Will from its clutches and restore him to his family.
It pains me so much to acknowledge this, given what a huge fan I am of this series, but I was so disappointed by this book. Even ignoring the clichéd storyline about a cult and how bad it actually was when exposed, a lot of the considerable length of this book — it is over 900 pages — was devoted to Robin being undercover at the cult and the abuse she was subjected to. Not only was it very painful to read, but it also meant that she and Strike were not working together for much of the book. Therefore, most of the charm of these books — which, to me, comes from Strike’s and Robin’s interaction with each other in light of their undeniable chemistry and mutual attraction, which both of them are fighting very hard to resist — is simply lost. No doubt, now that I know the storyline, I can go back and selectively re-read only those parts that are interesting to me, but it means that for this book, I will be skipping over more than half of it.
The owner of the guitar shop at 9 Denmark St that I visited told me that there were nine books in all. (He is in the know as the TV series is being filmed there.) I do hope that the last two books have more of Strike and Robin together and that the cases are more interesting and less clichéd. The seventh book ends with Strike finally admitting to Robin that he is in love with her, so there is at least the promise of some progress in their relationship in the next book. Notwithstanding my disappointment in this latest book in the “Cormoran Strike” series, I am so appreciative of the talent of J.K. Rowling who has created a world that has provided me with so much of delight. As I concluded in my writeup of The Ink Black Heart, the sixth book in the series, I am so lucky that she is still writing these books and that I enjoy them as much as I do.
The Running Grave Author: Robert Galbraith Publisher: Mulholland Books Publication Date: September 2023
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
This was such a good book that I couldn’t stop reading it once I had started until I reached the end — despite getting a terrible headache from the non-stop reading. (Believe it or not, there is actually such a thing as “too much” reading, just as there can be “too much” TV — both can make your head hurt.) I can’t remember the last time I compulsively read a book all the way through that was not a run-of-the-mill mystery or thriller.
While Homecoming does actually involve a mystery, it is anything but run-of-the-mill — in fact, it is so well-written that after I read it non-stop the first time, I went back right away to re-read it. And since I now knew the answer to the mystery, I was able to read the book much more slowly the second time around and savor the brilliance of its writing.
The mystery itself is highly unusual, one that I have not come across before. An entire family — a mother and three of her four kids — are found dead near the creek on the grounds of their house – more of an estate, really, in a town near Adelaide in South Australia — where they had come to enjoy a picnic on a sweltering hot day. There was no sign of a struggle or an intruder or any kind of violence — in fact, they looked as if they were sleeping. That is what the man who found them thought — that they had just fallen asleep after their swim. It was only when he came closer to check on them did he find that they were not breathing. After he raised the alarm and the police arrived on the scene, they found something else that was confounding — the newborn baby girl of the family, who had also been at the picnic site in a basket hanging from a tree, was not there. She wasn’t found dead at least, so there was some hope that she was still alive, but she has disappeared.
Was it murder? But there are no suspects, no sign of violence. The most likely explanation is poisoning, but how, why, and by whom? Was it a murder-suicide? Was the mother depressed and killed herself and her children? And what about the baby? Has someone taken her? Or has she fallen prey to the wild dogs — dingoes — common in Australia?
Compounding the mystery is the fact that it happened all the way back in 1959, and while it has long since disappeared from public consciousness, it resurfaces in the year 2018 for the protagonist, Jess, who turns out to be related to the family that was found dead. Born and raised in Australia, Jess is a journalist who now lives in London, and she is summoned back to Sydney after her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Nora, suffers a serious fall and is hospitalized. It turns out that Nora is the sister-in-law of the woman who was found dead with her family in 1959. Not only that, Nora was actually visiting the family at that time and was there when it happened – she didn’t, however, go to the picnic with them, as she was heavily pregnant and due to give birth soon.
Jess had no knowledge of this tragedy at all prior to her return to Australia. But based on a few words that Nora happens to say while she is in a semi-conscious state at the hospital, Jess digs deeper and deeper and ultimately manages to find out not only what happened to the family who died but also to the baby girl who disappeared. It is a heartbreaking story involving three generations of her family, including her own mother, Polly, from whom she has been estranged for several years. The end of the book not only resolves the mystery of the deaths – and in a way that makes complete sense rather than requiring the reader to suspend their disbelief – but also bridges the distance between Jess and Polly in a very natural, heartwarming way.
Despite having a suspenseful murder mystery at its core, Homecoming is very much a novel that can be classified as “literary fiction,” with an evocative writing style that delves deeply into the thoughts and feelings of its characters and vividly describes many of the little details that make up the fabric of life – both in the past in 1959 as well as in the more contemporary time period of 2018. The pace of the book is leisurely, the focus being on the “here and now” rather than on “getting on with it.” The writing is not only beautiful but also full of philosophical musings and keen insights, and as I was reading it, I kept wanting to highlight so many passages from it that I eventually just bought my own copy of the book in order to do this and returned the one I had borrowed from the library.
Here are just a few examples.
This is when Jess is at Heathrow airport waiting to board the flight to Sydney:
She eventually joined the line at the final passport check for her flight, and then made her way into the glass-walled waiting room. She preferred it here. Unlike the departure hall, which was no-man’s-land masquerading as your local shopping mall … the boarding gate didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was: a holding room for human beings who were only going in one direction from here.
This is after she has landed in Sydney and has just arrived at Nora’s home:
Tea and toast were the rule after long-haul flying. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, that a person could be fed continuously over the course of a twenty-four-hour transit only to arrive at her destination ravenous. Science was also yet to explain the unique humanizing properties of strawberry jam and butter on warm toast.
This is when she arrives at the hospital to see Nora:
The doctor might think Nora wasn’t ready to leave the hospital, but Jess knew otherwise. Nora needed to be back in her Pimpernel-papered room with its bed beneath the window. She liked to say that the view from her bedroom was all the religion she needed. “I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden,” she’d declare. “To be able to leave even a small patch of this earth more beautiful and bountiful than it was when one arrived.”
Here is a passage from 1959 at the picnic site where the family has died but has yet to be discovered:
Not far from the picnic blanket, a colony of ants continued to build their mound: diligent, resourceful, ever busy. They would realize, at some point, that a great boon of crumbs awaited them nearby, and set out to retreat them. They were at once a vital part, and yet separate from, the human story unfolding on the blanket beside them, their quest for survival no more or less important in nature ‘s eyes than that of any other creature on that blistering afternoon.
And finally, here are a couple from Polly’s point of view:
Beneath the painting was a Victorian high chair she’d bought when Jess was small and never been able to bring herself to give away. Polly liked the way old things looked. She found their small signs of damage reassuring: the scratches, the imprints from long-ago pens, the flaking paint. They understood that everybody had their bruised edges and private pasts.
A little further down, in reference to Polly’s estrangement from Jess:
Beer in hand, she wandered the narrow paths within the dense garden. She had planted it herself. There’d been nothing but long grass and a rusted car body when she moved into the house 30 odd years ago. It surprised Polly sometimes how willing things were to grow. The roses in the old claw-footed bathtub were doing very well this year. They shouldn’t be doing well, not in this climate, but Polly had always had luck with roses. It seemed she was better at raising plants than people.
I could go on and on, but I need to stop writing this post. I would just like to say, in conclusion, that a book like Homecoming shows how magnificent a good book can be and reaffirms why I fell in love with reading in the first place. Kate Morton is an amazing talent, and I am so happy to have discovered her writing.
Homecoming Author: Kate Morton Publisher: Mariner Books Publication Date: April 2023
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I have never waited as long for a library book that I placed on hold to become available as this one — there were so many borrowers waiting for it! I finally got it last week after a wait of about six months, and even now, I see that 132 people are still waiting for a copy of the book. Now that I have finished reading it, I will make sure to return my copy right away, even though the loan period is three weeks.
What this indicates to me is how popular the book is. And I found that in addition to so many people wanting to read it, it is also widely acclaimed by critics, which does not always happen with books — often, the most popular books receive less than favorable reviews. This made Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow an intriguing anomaly for me, and while I typically find books heralded by literary critics hard to get into, I went into this book with an open mind.
It was amazing. I am still having a hard time believing how good it was. And how unusual — it is centered around gaming! I have never come across a novel that goes into not just the playing of video games but also their creation in so much detail and with so much authenticity. It was almost as if it was written by someone who is a professional coder and developer of video games. But it’s obviously not, because the author, Gabrielle Zevin, is an established author who has written several novels so far (including the highly acclaimed The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, which was recently made into a movie).
The main protagonists of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow are Sadie and Sam, who meet as kids in a game room in a hospital, where Sadie is visiting her older sister who is recovering from cancer, and Sam is recovering from surgery to his foot which was all but shattered in a car accident in which his mother died. Already introverted, Sam retreats into near-complete silence after the accident, and it is only after meeting Sadie and playing Super Mario Bros with her on the Nintendo console in the hospital game room that he starts to talk again.
They have a falling out after a couple of months because of a misunderstanding, but their paths cross again when they are juniors in college — both smart, driven, and high-achieving, she at MIT and he at Harvard. Once again, it is their obsessive love for gaming that brings them together, except that this time they are the ones developing the games rather than simply playing them. They end up creating a very successful gaming company, and they are joined in this venture by Marx, who is Sam’s roommate, and who loves gaming as much as they do. He does not code, however, and he is the one managing the business side of the company. He is also a theatre buff, and the title of the book comes from a quote in the play, Macbeth, that Marx starred in when he was in college with Sam.
The book follows Sadie and Sam along their closely enmeshed personal and professional lives over the span of thirty years, their creative partnership, and the many challenges that they encounter. While Marx is an important character in the story, it is ultimately about Sam and Sadie and the deep bond they share. It is a love story, but not of the conventional kind. Their childhood friendship evolves into an unusual relationship that is even more exclusive than romantic love — they are fused together by their love for creating video games which is far above and beyond anything else in their lives. If true love is rare to find, it can be even rarer to find someone to work with, to create with, with whom you are completely in sync, who — as the cliche goes — “completes” you.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Author: Gabrielle Zevin Publisher: Knopf Publication Date: July 2022
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I picked up this book based a recommendation in the weekly NY Times magazine, where they often highlight older books that they find interesting. I hadn’t heard of Penelope Lively, let alone read any of her books. This is despite the fact that she won the Booker prize in 1987, something I found out when I researched her. The prize wasn’t for the book, According to Mark, which she wrote in 1984, although that was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize the year it was published. (Obviously, my knowledge of prize-winning authors and books is far from adequate!)
That said, I didn’t do any of this research before reading According to Mark, and I am grateful for that as I went into it with no expectations whatsoever. I ended up loving it. The writing was reminiscent of Somerset Maugham, one of my all-time favorite authors — very unassuming, not at all flashy, yet so vivid and rich in detail, capturing the everyday lives of the characters as well as the range and complexity of their emotions. There were also so many wry observations about life and living scattered throughout the book that I actually bought a copy of it (after reading the library copy) just so that I could highlight them.
According to Mark is a love story of sorts. The main protagonist, Mark, is a well-established biographer, who lives in London with his smart and sophisticated wife, Diana. They have been married for over ten years and have settled into a comfortable and companiable relationship where they each have their individual work and routines while enjoying their daily lives together. They never got around to having kids, but they have each other and are content. This is a good example:
They ate [their supper] to the accompaniment of that spasmodic conversation which is a feature of marriage and curiously restful: interludes imply not uneasiness or tension or inability to think of something to say but merely retreats into privacy.
Mark is just starting out on a new project, a biography of a famous writer, Gilbert Strong. As part of the groundwork for this project, he needs to spend some time at the writer’s estate, which has been preserved after his death by a historical society and which is currently being managed by his granddaughter, Carrie. Not only is Carrie not in the least bit literary, she is completely obsessed with horticulture and is running a garden center at the site of the estate with a business partner. While Mark is by no means a romantic hero – he is in his early forties, nondescript in appearance, and very much a bookworm — Carrie is even less of a heroine — she is almost like a waif, not pretty in the conventional sense, awkward and tongue-tied, and with no interest in dressing up or, in fact, in anything apart from plants.
Despite being a happily married man, and despite Carrie being so unlike his “type,” Mark finds out after a few visits to the estate that he has fallen violently in love with her. This is deeply distressing to him, as he has never felt anything like this before (“some kind of awful involuntary seizure”) and wishes with all his heart that he didn’t. This is how he thinks of it:
It came to him that he was, quite simply, suffering a form of illness. He was temporarily disabled; there should be some kind of treatment for men of his age and situation thus stricken. It should be possible to go along to some professional but understanding bloke in a consulting room and say, ‘Look, I have this tiresome problem; I’m a busy man and I’ve fallen in love with a girl with whom I have nothing whatsoever in common and I happen to love my wife anyway and I can’t afford the expenditure of time and emotion.’ And that chap would nod and reach for a prescription pad and say, ‘There’s a lot of it around at the moment. Take these three times a day — they usually do the trick.’ And that would be that.
But Mark can’t help his feelings, and he shares them with Carrie. She, however, does not feel the same way about him, and while Mark had expected this, he cannot help being embittered that his feelings are unrequited. Carrie, on her part, feels deep compassion for him, even though she has never experienced the pain of intense passion and unrequited love herself. It is because she feels so bad for him that she agrees to accompany him on a trip to France where Mark can meet and interview her mother (who is Gilbert Strong’s daughter) for his book.
So, what happens? Does Carrie end up falling in love with Mark too? Does Mark leave his wife? And how does Diana deal with this? Does she find out what Mark is feeling? What does she do? This is what the rest of the book is about.
While I have to admit that the romantic in me was a little disappointed at how the story concluded, I still loved the book all the way through. I especially love these kind of books — where the writing is not flashy or stylistic, but the story is so powerful and told with so much of richness and depth and detail that the writing is there to simply tell the story. And nothing else.
According to Mark Author: Penelope Lively Publisher: Heinemann, UK Publication Date: 1984
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
Note: This write-up contains spoilers for the plot of the book, so if you plan to read the book (which I highly recommend), I suggest not reading this write-up.
I picked up Every Last One pretty much by random. Its author, Anna Quindlen, has a new book out that I wanted to read (it’s called, Write For Your Life), and while I was waiting for it to become available in the library, I thought I would acquaint myself with her writing, as I haven’t read any of her books.
It turned out to be such a happy accident. Every Last One has blown me away.
The book is about a suburban mom, Mary Beth, who is married to Glen and has three teenage kids — Ruby, who is going to start her senior year in high school, and a younger set of twins, Alex and Max, who are just wrapping up middle school. Glen and Mary Beth are well-liked and respected members of the close-knit community in which they live — he is an ophthalmologist, and she has her own small landscaping business. The first part of the book captures the typical everyday details of Mary Beth’s life, which, at this stage, are mostly centered on their three children. They have widely different personalities, and while she and Glen are confronted with the usual challenges of raising three teenage kids — including tantrums, mood swings, lack of communication, the occasional rudeness, bickering, and even outright rebellion at times — they are, by and large, a happy family, who hang out, go for trips, eat dinner together, throw parties, and generally, do all the things that normal, stable families do. All of these everyday events are captured in so much detail and so authentically and vividly that I could fully relate to Mary Beth as she navigates the individual challenges of parenting each of her three kids with their distinct personalities.
Halfway through the book, there is a complete shift. Mary Beth’s family is massacred by an unhinged ex-boyfriend of Ruby’s, who was very close to the whole family and felt deeply betrayed by all of them when Ruby broke up with him. One night, after a New Year Eve’s party, he comes to the house and strangles Ruby, stabs Max and Glen to death, and also stabs Mary Beth before killing himself. Mary Beth somehow survives the stabbing, and her son Alex was thankfully away on a ski trip with a friend, else he would have been killed too. All of a sudden, Mary Beth’s full, happy family no longer exists — there is only her and Alex left. The rest of her family is gone, permanently erased.
This turn of events happens so abruptly that it comes as a completely shock. I felt like I had personally been sucker-punched.
How can you cope with this kind of tragedy? How do you carry on living when most of your immediate family is suddenly gone and they are never coming back? How do you make yourself get up every morning and live through the day? And how do you make yourself do this every day?
In Mary Beth’s words:
It was not so much that I wanted to die; it was just that I could not bear the incessant feeling of being alive.
The rest of the book is focused on how Mary Beth manages to carry on living. And the only reason she has for even trying to do so is Alex. She is still a mother, and she is the only family member Alex has left, so she has to force herself to continue to live without falling apart, to ensure that he has a home and a parent. The initial numbness and shock that Mary Beth feels after she has recovered at the hospital give way to an existence in which a small part of her gradually tries to resume functioning as a normal human being in society — buying groceries, exchanging pleasantries, making small talk, attending Alex’s soccer matches, and so on — while the rest of her continues to exist in a fog. Like this:
I have two selves now, the one that goes out in the world and says what sound like the right things and nods and listens and even sometimes smiles, and the real woman, who watches her in wonder, who is nothing but a wound, a wound that will not stop throbbing except when it is anesthetized.
While there is an immediate outpouring of sympathy from everyone in the community, what really sustains Mary Beth is the steadfast support of her longtime friends and extended family members, many of whom become much closer to her than they had been before. The book closes at the end of the first year after her loss, with Mary Beth still shell-shocked but in a more stable place, settling in a new home where Alex is able to have his friends over, starting to take on some small landscaping jobs, and even being able to host a Thanksgiving dinner for all the friends and family who have provided her with their steadfast support, help, and love.
She is also able to sometimes experience moments like these:
You can’t plan them, although I suppose those people who meditate and practice yoga think you can, but there are those moments when we experience physical happiness despite ourselves, before our minds remind us of the reasons we shouldn’t. A slight breeze, a warming sun, a little bird music: Your senses say something before your good sense says something different. If only we could be creatures of the body more often.
The book ends with Mary Beth telling her mother, in response to the question of how she is holding up, that she is trying. She is trying every day. She is trying not just for Alex, but also for Ruby, Max, and Glen. It’s all she knows how to do now. This is her life. She is trying.
I found the portrayal of Mary Beth’s grief so completely authentic, so palpably real, that it was hard to believe that it was written by someone who has not personally experienced what it feels like — suddenly and irrevocably losing an immediate member of your family without whom you don’t know how to live. I know that this is what writers do all the time — imagine characters and their feelings and emotions. But I did not think it was possible for anyone to imagine what this kind of deep-seated grief — complete and utter despair, barely living, just going through the motions — feels like and to be able to capture it to a tee.
I am absolutely and completely awed by the power of fiction, and by the amazing talent of Anna Quindlen to be able to capture so vividly the depths of a despair she has not personally experienced. (She acknowledges this in an interview that is reprinted at the end of the book.)
I am almost afraid to read any of her other books now in case it brings her down from the pedestal I have placed her on.
I did, however, go back and reread Every Last One as soon as I finished it. I found it just as heart-wrenching as the first time I read it.
Every Last One Author: Anna Quindlen Publisher: Random House Publication Date: April 2010
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
This book is more of a tribute to the author’s father than a novel as such. Although it does have a story, one involving time-travel, no less! This might seem like a strange combination, but it works. This Time Tomorrow may not be a book that you pick up for “entertainment,” but it is sweet and wise and poignant. I was glad to have read it.
First, some context. I was in Brooklyn recently and came across the bookstore, “Books Are Magic,” which I found out was owned by Emma Straub. While I was familiar with her name, I had not read any of her books. It was only after visiting the bookstore did I learn that she was the daughter of the author, Peter Straub, a prolific writer of horror and supernatural fiction, who had just died. I had not read any of his books either, but I was awed by this father-daughter connection. She had not just inherited her father’s literary talents but had also been so inspired by her father’s career as a novelist that she had chosen to follow the same path. That was amazing, especially because it is not that common in the literary world — most writers’ kids do not become writers themselves.
This Time Tomorrow is Emma Straub’s most recent book, and it is focused on the relationship between a father, who is also a writer, and his adult daughter. The parallels between the book and the real-life relationship between the author and her father are self-evident, and they reflect the deep love that the two shared. I could not read the book without always seeing the author, Emma Straub, in the protagonist, and her father, Peter Straub, in the protagonist’s father.
The protagonist of This Time Tomorrow is Alice, a 40-year-old woman, who is single, independent, has a good job, and a lifestyle she enjoys – except for the fact that her father, Leonard, is in the hospital and is slowly dying. Leonard is a writer, and he has authored a time-travel novel which has become wildly successful, with movie and TV adaptations galore. Thus, there were never any financial difficulties for Alice growing up, and apart from her mother leaving them, she had no real issues. She was always extremely close to her father, which is why seeing him now hovering on the brink of death is devastating to her.
On the night of her 40th birthday, after celebrating with her best friend at a bar, Alice happens to go to her father’s house instead of going home as it is closer and she is too drunk to take the subway home. She doesn’t have a key to the house, so she takes refuge in the garden shed, falls asleep, and wakes up on the eve of her sixteenth birthday! It turns out that the garden shed has a portal to time-travel which is only active between 3 to 4 in the middle of the night, and she happened to be there at that time, which is why she time-traveled. While she cannot believe that this is something that can actually happen in real life rather than just in the time-travel fiction that authors like her father wrote, she is thrilled to be back at a time when her father is alive and well. They spend a wonderful day together, and she has the trippy 16th birthday party at night with her high-school friends that she remembers, only this time she ends up sleeping with her high-school crush which she didn’t do when she was actually 16. When she falls asleep and wakes up, she is back to her current 40-year-old self, only this time, she is now married to that high-school crush and has two kids!
But her father, sadly, is still ailing and still in the hospital.
When she had time-traveled to when she was 16, she confided what had happened to her father, and he told her about the time-travel portal in the garden shed. (It turns out that he had been using it too, to keep returning to the day she was born. Apparently, it can only take you back to the one most momentous day of your past.) Now that she knows how to get back to that day of her 16th birthday, she time-travels again, this time with a view to persuading her father to eat healthier and quit smoking, hoping that he is not sick and dying when she is 40. That doesn’t quite work – her father is still sick when she returns to her 40-year-old self – but now she is in the version of her life where he has remarried a nice woman, Deborah, who is helping to take care of him.
Alice does the time-travel a couple of more times before realizing that you can’t always go back and change something in your past to create a desired outcome in your present, and that while the consequences of actions do create a ripple effect, they cannot be guided, let alone predicted. There will always be unintended consequences to every action. She eventually stops trying to get back to when she was 16 and just stays in one of the versions that she comes to as a 40-year-old, one in which her father is still dying, but at home rather than in a hospital. He has still remarried Deborah, who is with him till the end and who is there to work with Alice on the funeral arrangements after his death. Alice is still single in this version of her life, but she has a better job and a better apartment.
The essence of This Time Tomorrow was not really time-travel but rather, the love between a father and a daughter. The time-travel was certainly an innovative way of capturing it, and along the way, it does provide some insights on philosophical questions like to what extent we can control our lives, whether we can hold on to something we love or is it better to let it go, and above all, the importance of cherishing what we have when we have it as you never know how long it will last. But ultimately, I saw the book as an ode to Emma Straub’s love for her father, Peter Straub. I can’t think of a better way for a writer to honor her father, who was also a writer.
This Time Tomorrow Author: Emma Straub Publisher: Riverhead Books Publication Date: May 2022
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I have been having trouble getting into a book lately, so I was thrilled to find that once I started reading Hidden Pictures, it hooked me enough to want to continue reading until I finished it. I had not heard of its author before, and while I picked up the book on the basis of a recommendation in a magazine, I didn’t have high hopes, given the number of books I had picked up recently that I couldn’t read past a few pages.
The book is a ghost story, which, in itself, is so unusual. How many authors write ghost stories these days? There is Stephen King, of course, the master of horror and supernatural thrillers, but I have not really been a fan. (I did read The Outsider, which I enjoyed, but not enough to make me want to read more of his books.) Apart from him, however, no contemporary writer comes to mind.
The plot of Hidden Pictures, in brief — A young woman, Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab for drug addiction, is hired as a babysitter by a wealthy couple, Caroline and Ted, for their five-year-old son, Teddy. She moves in with them, staying in a small cottage in their property. All is hunky dory in the beginning – Teddy loves her, Caroline and Ted are warm and solicitous, and the neighborhood where they live is beautiful. The job seems like a godsend to Mallory, who has been through severe trauma and loss, culminating in substance abuse. She is looking to put the past behind her and make a fresh start.
Teddy loves to draw, and while his pictures are typical of what little kids make – with stick figures – in the beginning, they soon become more intricate and more realistic, going far beyond even what most adults could draw. And not only that, the pictures start getting more gruesome, showing a woman with a child being murdered and buried in the ground by a man. Teddy claims that he has an imaginary friend called Anya who is making him draw these pictures; and Mallory – who is really freaking out by now – suspects that the cottage she is living in is haunted by a woman who died there in mysterious circumstances decades ago and is now using Teddy to communicate what happened to her. She tries to share her fears with Caroline and Ted, but they are atheists and do not take her seriously. In normal circumstances, Mallory would have left, but she really needs this job. She also has become as attached to Teddy as he is to her.
There is, of course, no rational explanation for the pictures, and in an attempt to get Teddy to stop drawing them, Caroline gets him an iPad, leaving him too addicted to playing the game, “Angry Birds,” rather than drawing. When this happens, the “ghost” – because there is no doubt now that it is a ghost – starts channeling itself through Mallory and uses her as the medium for continuing to draw the pictures.
At this point, the book becomes totally riveting and it is hard to put it down until you get to know how the story is resolved. There is a plot twist at the end that I did not see coming, and it is to the credit of the author that it is believable rather than ludicrous. The book is also well written – not a literary masterpiece by any means, but at the same time, not pedestrian.
And then, of course, there are the pictures that the ghost draws, first through Teddy and then through Mallory. They are all shown, making the story a lot more real, rather than leaving it up to our imaginations. And they are gorgeous.
All in all, I really liked this book. It was a quick and enjoyable read and thankfully broke the not-finding-anything-good-to-read jinx for me.
Hidden Pictures Author: Jason Rekulak Publisher: Flatiron Books Publication Date: May 2022
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
This is the sixth book in the Cormoran Strike series by J.K. Rowling, who is writing these novels under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. I absolutely love the books in this series and getting a new one to read is such a treat for me. I pre-order them as soon as they are announced and spend the days leading up to the launch by re-reading the preceding book (or books) in the series in order to “get ready” for the new one, so I can pick up where the last one ended. For The Ink Black Heart, I re-read the last book, Troubled Blood and thoroughly enjoyed it. There is so much detail in the books that it almost feels new every time I read it.
The series is centered around a detective agency started by Cormoran Strike, an ex-military man who was forced to leave the army when he was injured in a blast and had to have his leg amputated. The other main character is Robin Ellacott, who starts in the first book of the series, TheCuckoo’s Calling, as a temp for the agency and has worked her way up to now being Strike’s business partner in the agency. (I provided a more detailed overview of the series, as well as on the relationship between Strike and Robin, in my write-up of the fourth book, Lethal White.)
While the agency is typically working on multiple cases, each book in the series focuses on one main case. The new book, The Ink Black Heart, takes place in 2016 and the crime it is centered on is very contemporary, involving YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, gaming, and online stalking and trolling. The case involves finding the identity of an online persona called Anomie who has murdered the main creator, Edie, of a popular YouTube cartoon called “The Ink Heart Place,” which has been optioned by Netflix to become a show. Anomie had created an online game inspired by the cartoon, but it was disparaged by Edie, making Anomie furious and causing him/her (Anomie’s identity remains unknown till the end of the book) to disparage and humiliate Edie at every opportunity, both in the game — which has attracted a huge fan following of its own — as well as on Twitter. This vendetta is sustained for all the three or so years between the launch of the game and the murder, not just by Anomie, by many additional characters in the game who also vilify Edie, including some from a right-wing hate group. There are nasty tweets galore, as well as pages upon pages of in-game conversations between the characters, many of them running in parallel as “private channels” (a common feature in online games). This makes for an even lengthier book than is usual for this series — The Ink Black Heart is 1012 pages compared to the 927 pages of its predecessor, Troubled Blood.
While having such a lengthy book translates to more reading pleasure for anyone who loves these books (and is therefore welcomed!), it is likely to be considered as needlessly long by others. I can’t see this book being appreciated unless you are a diehard fan like me, and even I skipped most of the in-game conversations between the players. I did, however, have to plod through many of the tweets as they seemed to be important to the plot point, even though they were horribly vile and offensive, as many abusive tweets tend to be. There were too many characters in the story making for too many potential suspects, and there were even more characters online in the game and on Twitter, with no way of knowing which online user was which character in real life.
All in all, I found it quite confusing, and I am happy that I have a copy of the book to re-read to make it clearer. I will also likely enjoy the book better on subsequent re-reads, as knowing the solution to the central mystery will allow me to focus on the sheer mastery of the writing, the incredible level of detail, and the characters of Strike and Robin that are fleshed out so vividly that I feel like I know them personally.
Talking of Strike and Robin, their relationship — which the whole series revolves around — hardly progresses in this book. Of course, it cannot be successfully resolved until the last book in the series — and the fact that it is left hanging at least assures fans like me that there are more books coming! — but it was, nevertheless, a little disappointing. Strike is hardly any kind of romantic figure — he is curmudgeonly, out of shape, smokes endlessly, and is always eating burgers and chips and drinking endless pints of beer or lager. (Towards the end of this book, he is forced to be hospitalized as his amputated stump is acting up, and he might start taking better care of his health in the next book.) Robin, on the other hand, who is more conventionally pretty, does not find Strike “remotely sexy,” as she confided to a friend.
Yet, a high level of character and integrity, along with a passion for detective work, is what draws them to each other and deepens their mutual respect and admiration. They care deeply for each other and have acknowledged (this was in the last book) that they are each other’s best friends. They have built up a great business partnership, which they understandably do not wish to jeopardize by crossing the boundary to a romantic relationship. So they continue to suppress the mutual attraction they feel for each other. I find this relationship — and how well it is built up over the course of the series — to be one of the best parts of the books.
I consider myself lucky that I get so much happiness from reading these books and that J.K. Rowling is still writing them.
The Ink Black Heart Author: Robert Galbraith (Pseudonym of J.K. Rowling) Publisher: Mulholland Books Publication Date: August 2022
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
This is a follow-up to the book Election which was made into a very successful movie in which the character of Tracy Flick was immortalized by Reese Witherspoon. While I haven’t read that book, I have read some of Tom Perrotta’s other books (Little Children and The Leftovers) and found them well-written, very enjoyable, and easy to get into and read. (The latter is especially important for me as I grow older, as I don’t have the patience to plod through a book in the hope that it will soon get interesting – it has to grip me right away!)
Track Flick from Election – in that book, she was in high school competing in the election to be School President – is now in her 40s and an Assistant Principal in a high school where the Principal has announced his retirement, and Tracy, being as driven as ever, wants the job. Of course, her ambitions are much more modest now than when she was in high school. At that time, her ambition was to be the President of US – the first woman President – and it was something she seriously aspired to and was well on track for – studying at Georgetown (on a full scholarship), getting an internship in DC – until she had to move back home to care for her mother, who was very ill. She had to give up on those aspirations, but now, given how qualified she is – she has been the Assistant Principal for 20 years and has been doing a stellar job of it – is it too much to ask for that she succeed as the Principal?
But of course, these things are never easy, as the decision has to be made by a Search Committee, the position has to be advertised, and other candidates have to be interviewed. This is the plot of the book, Tracy Flick Can’t Win, with the backdrop being Tracy’s ambition to be the Principal. In addition to Tracy, there are several additional characters that are involved, including the other members of the Search Committee and some of the alumni of the school. One of the key people on the Committee is the head of the Parent Association, a wealthy ex-techie from Silicon Valley who has returned with his family to settle in the town he grew up in and has two kids who are in the high school. He wants to establish a Hall of Fame in the school to inspire the students, and in addition to a new principal, the search is also on for the inaugural inductees into this new Hall of Fame, which is where the alumni who are under consideration come in.
Thus, there are several characters in the book, and the story is told from the point of view of many of these people, often in first person. In addition to all the grown-ups and their partners and significant others, we also get into the minds of the two students who are on the Search Committee. All in all, the story includes a diverse cast of characters including a non-binary person (who is the love interest of one of the students), an Internet personality (who is the love interest of the other student), an ex-NBA player (who is the main star being inducted into the Hall of Fame), and many more. The chapters are short and fast-paced, dipping into the minds of each of these characters and then moving on to another characters. The book never drags or gets boring.
Overall, I found Tracy Flick Can’t Win a very enjoyable read and can well see Reese Witherspoon returning to play the character of Tracy Flick once again in the movie adaptation of the book. Just like its predecessor, I think it would be a huge hit.
Tracy Flick Can’t Win Author: Tom Perrotta Publisher: Scribner Publication Date: June 2022
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
I picked up this book on my recent trip to London. I was specifically looking for current bestselling British authors that we don’t hear much about in the US, and I saw Sorrow and Bliss displayed prominently in several London bookstores. I typically do not buy books without reading them first (I get them from the library and buy only those books I really like), but I took a chance on this one. Not only was it heralded as the “Novel of the Year” by several leading British newspapers like the Guardian and the Sunday Times, it also had a blurb on the back cover by Ann Patchett, whose work I greatly admire. That was what “clinched the deal” for me.
I am so glad that I found this book – it was amazing. However, the brilliance is not evident right at the start, such as, for instance, in a runway hit like The Girl on the Train (by Paula Hawkins, another contemporary British author), which was a book that was immediately gripping. In fact, not only does Sorrow and Bliss not draw you in right away, the languid pace at which it starts is the same pace that is maintained throughout the book, and it is only when you get to the end that you can appreciate what a masterful creation it was that you have just had the privilege of consuming.
At its heart, Sorrow and Bliss is a story about mental illness. It is told in first person from the perspective of a woman, Martha, who suffers from a mental condition that impacts everything she does and all of her relationships, right from when she was a teenager. On the surface, she would seem to have everything that anyone could wish for to be happy – she is beautiful and talented, she has a loving extended family included a sister with whom she is very close and a father who cares deeply about her, and above all, she has a husband who has loved her since she was 17 and continues to be steadfast in his love and support for her despite her depression and frequent emotional breakdowns. But her mental illness – which it turns out, has been passed on her by her mother – makes it impossible for her to live a normal life, hold down a job, have friends, socialize, etc., and almost ends up destroying her relationships with the two people closest to her, her husband, Patrick, and her sister, Ingrid.
If you don’t suffer from a mental illness, it is almost impossible to “get” it, to understand how a person who has mental health issues feels and behaves. But Sorrow and Bliss was able to do this for me – I was able to get into Martha’s head and feel what she feels, experience her grief and helplessness as she inadvertently pushes away the people closest to her almost to the breaking point, and understand what she means when she says to a therapist that she would like to simply “not exist” rather than just kill herself (which is the ultimate fear we have for those have a mental illness). In fact, the writing is so visceral in capturing what goes on in Martha’s head that I could hardly believe that this was a made-up story rather than a first-person account of someone who has lived with mental illness for an extended period of time. How else can you even conceive of someone who says they don’t know “how to live” in the world?
While I think that all of us are somewhere on the spectrum when it comes to mental health, it is rare to be able to get inside the skin of someone at the extreme end of the spectrum and feel their pain, their helplessness, their frustration, and their despair. Sorrow and Bliss is not an easy read, but I found it gut-wrenchingly emotional, poignant, hopeful, and in the end, deeply satisfying. I also think it has enhanced my understanding, not just of people with severe mental illness, but also of human behavior as a whole and the extent to which our lives are shaped by the chemistry of our brains.
Sorrow and Bliss Author: Meg Mason Publisher and Publication Date of this UK edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, April 2022 Original Publisher and Publication Date: HarperCollins Publishers Australia, 2020
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
Gillian Flynn is best known for her best-selling novel, Gone Girl, which was subsequently made into a very successful movie with top-of-the-line stars including Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, and Neil Patrick Harris. I loved that book when it came out in 2012 and also enjoyed it thoroughly when I re-read it a few years ago. Which is why when I was unable to find something compelling to read for a few months, I turned to one of her earlier books, Dark Places, which was published in 2009. While I have already read that book — I bought it shortly after I was mesmerized by Gone Girl — it’s been a while and I had little to no recollection of the plot. So re-reading it would be almost like reading a new book by Gillian Flynn, with an assurance that I would enjoy it. Because what I do remember about Dark Places when I read it the first time is that I really liked it.
The plot in brief — The protagonist is a woman called Libby Day, who suffered a brutal tragedy when she was a kid. Her family grew up dirt poor in Kansas, and one night, her mother and her two older sisters were massacred. Her brother, Ben, who was 15 at that time, was arrested for the murders, partially based on Libby’s testimony — even though she was only 7 years old then and very suggestible – and partly because of the lack of any other suspects or any other evidence pointing to anyone else. He was convicted and is now in prison. Libby was quite close to Ben when she was a kid, but she severed ties with him when he was arrested and is no longer in touch. This changes once she gets commissioned by the members of a “Kill Club” looking into the murders, who are convinced that Ben is innocent. Libby needs the money and starts looking at the case again, chasing down all the people who were involved. This, eventually, leads to the truth coming out about what really happened that day.
The story is told in two alternating timelines, one set in the present day and told from Libby’s first-person point of view, and the other on the day of the murders, told from a third person point of view at different times that day, following both Ben as well as his mother, Patty. It gives you a sense of how that day unfolds, starting from the morning to late at night when the murders happened. The suspense is maintained throughout, and you get to know what really happened that day only at the end of the book.
Meanwhile, in the current timeline, you get to be inside Libby’s head and feel the sense of hopelessness and depression that she lives with every day. She has never really recovered from the trauma of what happened to her and her family, and it is only the money that she is offered for looking at the murders again — which she needs, as she has come to the end of the charitable contributions that poured in to help her as the only survivor of the massacres — that pulls her up and forces her to function. As she starts to dig deeper into the events of that day and start hunting down the different people involved, she begins to get more interested in finding out the truth for its own sake rather than just for the money she is being offered to look into it. She also reconnects with Ben and even makes another friend, of sorts, so that, in addition to the murder mystery being solved at the end, there is some kind of resolution to her life as well.
I think what elevates a book like this from a run-of-the-mill potboiler is the quality of the writing. I found it amazing and so authentic, all the way from capturing the details of life in poor farming communities in Kansas to the breakdown of Libby’s life after the murders and the permanent damage it has done to her psyche. You can get a sense of this from the starting lines of the book itself, which is from Libby’s first-person point of view in the present moment:
I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders. Little Orphan Libby grew up sullen and boneless, shuffled around a group of lesser relatives – second cousins and great-aunts and friends of friends – stuck in a series of mobile homes or rotting ranch houses all across Kansas.
Such is the quality of the writing throughout the book – so compelling, so gripping, that you don’t want to miss a word.
What a gift! And how lucky we are to be able to enjoy the fruits of it.
Gillian Flynn deserves every bit of the success that has come to her so far.
Dark Places Author: Gillian Flynn Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (Random House) Publication Date: May 2009 (1st edition)
Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani is a fan of the written word.
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