I have two very different books to write about this morning. First comes The Piano Teacher, a novel by Janice Y.K. Lee, a love story (of sorts) set in Hong Kong that moves between WWII and the war's aftermath in the 1950s. the pace is slow at first and I had almost given up when things got livlier with the actual onset of the war and its impact on the city's residents, Chinese and otherwise. The earlier plot centers on Will, an Englishman and his affair with Trudy, a gorgeous Eurasian with a somewhat mysterious life that turns tragic when the enemy arrives and she becomes entangled with a Japanese general while Will languishes in a detention center. The sections that take place in the '50s feature Claire, a new bride just out from England with her boring husband who falls in love with Will and he with her. The catch is that the dynamics of their affair are governed by the past that Will cannot escape, his possible betrayal of Trudy and his inflexible moral standards. Lee is very good at depicting at first, a city in crisis and then a place coming to terms after the war with what went on during it. Claire, a rather dull character at the start, comes gradually comes to life and in the end, makes a startling choice that seems quite believable, even enviable.
The second book I recommend is Patrick French's "authorized biography" of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. I have never especially liked Naipaul's work, except for the reasonably benign A House for Mr. Biswas. One of his novels, Guerrillas, I found especially troubling in its depiction of violent sex. Further, he always struck me as an arrogant, blinkered and thoroughly unpleasant man. French's inclusive, lengthy biography did little or nothing to change my thinking, but, and it's a big but, it is a fascinating re-creation of the man's life, written with insight, sympathy, and objectivity. Some aspects of it--Naipaul's tratment of his long-suffering wife Pat and his long-time mistress Margaret Murray--are indeed repellent, yet they are part of the story and of the man himself, whom in the end French makes almost sympathetic. I can't imagine a better biography. I may even do some rereading of Naipaul and that seems the highest possible praise for a biographer.

Still Alice is Lisa Genova’s first novel. A spare-no-details depiction of a woman’s descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, it makes for grim reading—how grim might depend on your age and/or family history. Alice Howland is a psychology professor at Harvard. At the top of her demanding profession, she is married with three grown children and a husband who is also a high-performing academic. Genova is not a born writer and her prose, especially in the book’s early sections, is stiff and unconvincing—we see Alice but don’t feel her. Ironically, the story gets better as Alice disintegrates. Her husband’s unwillingness to accept the diagnosis and her children’s initial confusion are convincing, as is Alice’s prolonged refusal to give in to the truth of her rapidly failing sense of reality. It’s easy to believe that this is how it might feel to lose one’s mind, literally. Genova bravely sticks to her established point of view, which is Alice’s, even when confronted with depicting a mental condition that is beyond language and for the most part, carries it off. In a sense this is not so much a novel as a psychological study of a woman suffering from a disease the reader can only hope to be spared.

The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks is by Robin Romm, whose first book, The Mother Garden was a volume of short stories that had a lot to say about dying mothers. It should be no surprise then that her latest is a brief narrative of the three weeks surrounding her mother’s death from cancer when Romm herself is in her twenties, young to lose a mother. She says in her afterword that when her mother was dying, she “found very few books that spoke of the particulars of loss,” that much “gets said about healing, but what of the violence of the actual event?” I suppose she has a point, although it seems to me that each such slow and painful death, as her mother’s was, is so particular, so freighted with emotions that escape articulation, that writing about them is impossible. Romm’s approach is to describe her anger, frustration and grief in detail in order to convey the loudness and ferocity of the experience. In some ways this is effective, in others it’s irritating. I found myself totally sympathetic to her devastating descriptions of the Hospice nurse with her bag of deadly drugs, the well-meaning friends bringing by inedible casseroles, the funeral home attendants who remove the body, like emissaries from some unspeakable underworld. But I also got impatient with her own retreats into drugged sleep, her lack of empathy for those well-meaning friends. Yes, I understand that she is trying to write in and of the moment, but sometimes it’s too much for the reader—not too much emotion, just too much self. Her thoughtful afterword helps to alleviate that in speaking of her “recovery,” although, as she rightly points out, grief loosens its grip but never let us go. It’s been said that the past is another country, and in the same way grief is another place. Once there, we never quite leave.

The Given Day is Dennis Lehane’s eighth novel. A lengthy ambitious work that portrays Boston at a critical moment in its history—right after WWI--it’s a good read that sometimes bogs down in the details. The narrative centers on two families, the Coughlins, Boston Irish who have chosen the police force as a means of advancement in a closed society, and Luther Laurence, an African American from Tulsa who flees to Boston to escape his unintentional involvement in a gang murder, leaving behind his pregnant wife. In Boston, Luther comes in contact with Danny Coughlin, the rebellious member of his family, who although a policeman himself, is unhappy with the status quo. Meanwhile, the Spanish Influenza is decimating the population, workers are threatening to strike and “Bolshevik radicals” are making their presence known. The novel opens with a segment about Babe Ruth, who resurfaces throughout the story, as do other historical figures such as Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts. The climax of the novel, when everything comes together, is the 1919 Boston Police Strike, a devastating event that left parts of the city in ruins and many victims on both sides. Lehane is at his best when depicting the Coughlin household and the politics of the police force, less comfortable with Luther Laurence and the educated African American couple who take him in. Still, the pace is swift and the ending believable. It turns out that although they survive, perhaps to establish a better future, there is no place in Boston for either Luther or Danny and so they head west, the archetypal solution for so many Americans.

Here is a section from Charles Wright's book-length poem, Littlefoot:

Orpheus walked, the poets say, down to the black river.
Nobody recognized him,
Of course, and the boat came,
the gondola with its singular oarsman,
And the crowd got in, a thousand souls,
So light that the boat drew no water, not even a half-inch.
On the other side, the one paved road, and they took it.

Afterward, echoes of thge great song webbed in their ears,
They took the same road back to the waiting gondola,
The two of them,
the first to ever have returned to the soot-free shore.
The oarsman's stroke never faltered, and he hummed the song
He had caught the faint edges of
from the distant, marble halls.
It won't work, he thought to himself, it won't work. And it didn't.

I love this, with its image of the boatload of souls that weighs not a thing, and with the implacable Charon just doing his job, enjoying Orpheus's song but sure "it won't work." Is he cynical, or just knowing, like the poet who knows that poetry never makes anything happen? Perhaps he's sad that this is the case, perhaps not. So the lovers are doomed from the start. Then I saw the Met Opera's HD live transmission of Gluck's , "Orpheus ed Eurydice" in which quite the reverse happens: Orpheus (sung by the incomparable Stephanie Blythe) gives up and looks back at his love, as he has promised not to do, But all is not lost; Amor is so impressed with Orpheus's devotion that he descends from the heavens to announce that Eurydice is spared and the lovers are to be reunited. Eurydice comes back to life and all celebrate. In short, it works.
Yes, I suppose this is wonderful--but Wright's vision is so much more satisfactory, is it not?