Clock Dance / Anne Tyler

Having recently read a couple books by Alexander McCall-Smith, his wonderful knack for character development reminded me of another skilled author who is adept at drawing well-rounded 3-dimensional characters, Anne Tyler. I began reading Anne Tyler back in the 1980s with The Accidental Tourist, but it had been many years since I had picked up one of her novels. Clock Dance was available through the library's eBook service, so I reentered her world of quirky individuals, plotting their course through life.

We first meet Willa as a young girl, trying to navigate a tricky childhood with a mother whose mood swings introduce a difficult dynamic into the home. Willa holds things together, far too young to be doing so, trying to walk a tightrope and searching for that all important balance, which seems to be a recurring theme throughout her life. We next meet Willa in college, with a promising career in linguistics ahead. Instead, she acquiesces to fiance Derek's proposal of marriage which requires her to alter her future plans and concentrate on an immediate pregnancy instead. Later, Derek suddenly and tragically leaves Willa's life, and we next meet her in her 60s as she enters her senior years in a second marriage to no-nonsense Peter.

This all serves as prologue to a situation that results from an unexpected telephone call from Baltimore. (Baltimore is always calling, it seems, in Anne Tyler's novels.) Willa soon finds herself acting as a surrogate grandmother to a young girl named Cheryl while Cheryl's mother (a former paramour of Wilma's emotionally distant son) recovers from an accidental shooting in the leg. It's all a bit complicated and sometimes stretches credibility, but Willa soon finds a home with these near-strangers in their quirky neighborhood full of quirky neighbors.

I suppose the lengthy prologue summarizing Willa's early life stages is necessary to show how she always sacrificed her own ambitions, but I had rather hoped that her sister Elaine would come around, and that the story would have a more definitive ending that bookended the first part. It's a bit of a lopsided novel, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, and appreciated the wonderful multifaceted characters that I was looking for!

Comments

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog