the Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Another author with a 1st book for us to read. This was fortunately a good read; no skipping pages or skimming passages or characters. It was definitely an ambitious and risky book. It was ambitious to attempt to handle so many characters, and to try doing it with depth. I think losing a quarter of the characters would have tightened things up more to my liking. Another ambitious experiment was continuously switching points of view. In one of the final chapters, I swear she shifted from Rafferty to Jack to Towner to May. Sounds like a Diants triple play. It’s more work to maintain consistency with a single POV.

I acknowledge that these days, two POVs work better when translated into film scripts, but this was just laziness or impatience in getting the book finished. Maybe I’m just a 20th century reader, but I liked the way Lawrence Durrell handled four POVs by writing four versions of the same story in “The Alexandria Quartet.”

Barry took a lot of risk using the Salem witches as the sub-theme of her plotlines. She had to succeed in coming up with new and interesting aspects to this theme. If she failed, the publishing world would pillory her for a banal exploitation of the past. However, I thought her exploration of the lace making and lace reading was brilliant. Using this as the dominant theme of the book worked, especially the use in chapter introductions and as dialogue quoted adages. Another risky adventure for Barry was choosing a central character suffering from Schizoid Personality Disorder. Moreover, twin trauma; I can’t forget that. Didn’t we have a twin-trauma book just a few months ago.?.

This is all risky because Barry has chosen an unsympathetic primary protagonist. Thankfully, she has also given us Rafferty, who is very likeable. My next-door neighbor is like Towner. She moved in three years ago with all sorts of vague references to a troubled past. She does not chitchat with the neighbors; is not friends with any of us. Her dog’s name is “Rambo” and he scares the beegeebers out of all the other neighborhood dogs. He still growls, barks, and races back and forth after all the neighbors and their dogs. I’m personally glad that Barry took the risks; it made the book more challenging to follow and intriguing as the plot unfolded. I’m sure she cut her readership in half by using a crazy female lead.

I thought the use of the Calvinists as a deus ex machina was way over the top. Probably makes a great final scene for the movie, with burning torches and pitchforks, but we’ve had 87 Frankenstein movies in the past 100 years, so maybe that bit is a little clichéd. For balance, I would have preferred more depth about the island coven, and strangely, maybe more about the fishing aspect of town. Of course, everyone would want more about Rafferty’s back-story rather and not so much about the crazy lady’s.

Overall, this novel is full of 1st book flaws, but the sheer energy behind interesting and creative ideas carries this book up into the realm of good reads for serious readers.

SixKill by Robert B. Parker

Spenser’s final story. Parker’s last book. Death was the only way to slow down Parker’s annual output of two variations a year of the same plot, same characters (sometimes by other names). Early in his long career, he fell into the trap of writing each novel with more BIFF, BAM, & ZOW than the last. He adjusted after realizing that approach wasn’t sustainable. So the pace, and fireworks, has been predictable and yet still satisfying for over twenty years now.

This iteration of the story centers around Spenser, a Phillip Marlowe type detective with modern tastes living in Boston. He is approached by a beautiful defense attorney, Rita Fiore. She, along with police captain Quirk, contrive to have Spender look into the murder of a young girl in the hotel bedroom of an on-location movie star nicknamed Jumbo. .

In Parker stories, there are two levels of bad guys: (1) dislikeable criminals who are generally there just for color and are left alone; and (2) sadistic baby-killer types with no redeeming value. The hero kills these nasty ones, usually towards the end of the book. There are many good people, and all of them are just personality variations on the hero. Parker writes a simple story, black and white, good guys and bad guys. This gives Parker a large audience that can understand and enjoy his books.

There’s a back-story on Z. Sixkill, an Indian, reminiscent of Jim Thorpe. In this book, Z is a fill in for Hawk, strong, silent sidekick to Spenser. His theme is redemption.

This is pure pulp fiction – I read it in less than 24 hours and enjoyed every moment of it. Big print – lots of blank space on the page. Funny -- and good triumphs over evil.

An Evil Eye by Jason Goodwin

Well, I made it through the fourth, and current, book in the Investigator Yashim series, “An Evil Eye.” I hope that Jason Goodwin, the author, takes a break for a few years. Four books in four years is an amazing achievement for a novice fiction writer. The money must be a welcome change to an otherwise obscure historian specializing in the 19th century Ottoman Empire.

My reticence for further accolades might be due to my distractions as July 4th approached and I had am open house exhibit going on at the local Community Center; but it also may be due to Jason’s rush to glory while his publisher was still pushing advance checks into his face. This book shows the signs of a distracted author that weren’t there in the first three. Goodwin has been guilty of meandering in all the preceding books but with the first three, as far as we can tell, he caught himself and tied the errant thread back into the plotline. In this book, he goes off in direction and doesn’t clean things up until the very end.
Having said the above, I still heartily recommend the series. Any flaws with this last one are more than compensated for by the continued lyrical presentation of Constantinople in 1839, life in Istanbul, life in the sultan’s palace, and of course, love, life, and mystery two centuries ago.

There is no simple plotline in this fourth book in the series. Goodwin has fallen prey to a common problem of a rush to publication. Each of the first three books had clear, simple mainline plot threads: the Janissary Tree was a revolt of the old guard; the Snake Stone revolved around relics and commerce in antiquities; the Bellini Card focused on family traditions in Venice.

This plot investigates women’s lives and travails in the seraglio. Goodwin creates subplots around a young girl, another around potential mates for the sultan; then another for head woman, the sultan’s grandmother. He also follows the head woman’s rival along with the intrigues in the palace. He channels his youth growing up in the palace through an adventuresome young man. While on intrigue, he also weaves subplots around the numbers 2, 3, and 4 political officials, viziers and pashas. There are half a dozen other subplot lines and a great number of new characters introduced. There were too many for me to keep track of and I missed his elaborate attention to detail in two areas: when describing the city; and preparing a meal. These last two areas were there in the book, but not with the pizzazz of previous books.
I’m serious when I suggest that someone needs to pull together all his recipes and discussions of food and eating. Everything is available here in northern California and it just fits in well with the semi-vegetarian California cuisine.

State of Wonder --- Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is one of those authors whose new books are automatically sent to the “top of the list” as a must read. She’s an academic author. She spends a lot of time perfecting plot and characters, so we only see a new work every two or three years.
This is an amazing story and a compelling read. It’s all I can do to hold back from just reading it straight through, from cover to cover. However, like a good Armagnac, the reading is best, when one savors it over time without guzzling.

Marina Singh is a Minnesotan medical doctor with an eastern Indian father, who abandoned her, returning to India. She has nightmares about her childhood visits to Calcutta. She gave up her surgical career because of a common mistake when in residency (she never watched Dr. House or Grey’s Anatomy). At the opening, she is a lab tech with a partner, Eckman; and a quiet sexual relationship with her 20-years-older boss. The boss sends Eckman to the Amazon; Marina’s old surgery professor reports Eckman’s death after three months. Marina bonds with Eckman’s wife, who has every thing Marina really wants: kids, acceptance, and a stimulating life. Marina travels to the Amazon to pick up the pieces. She finds all those things she has been missing in her life.

Ann Patchett normally puts most of her attention on people and their psychology, motivations, and back-stories. As a change of pace, Patchett has written an action thriller here, not much psychoanalysis.
So, she has channeled Homer, using all the adventure devices we love in “The Odyssey.” We have the Lotus-Eaters, who forget their mission preferring somatic drugs [Rapps]. We have the cannibalistic Laestrygonians [Hummocca] with yellow heads and poison darts. We have the protective drug “moly” to resist Circe [malaria]. And of course, there’s an encounter with Scylla, the six-headed monster [Anaconda]. Marina exhibits growing strength and commitment as the story unfolds.

Patchett’s writing is tight: no meandering, no wasted words on fluff. I appreciate the time and effort that went into scores of revisions; they were worth it. There is never any hint of what’s going to happen next.
Marina blossoms when dropped in the Amazon jungle. Life will never be the same. Patchett explores the boundaries of love: for children, for a child, of a friend, and mentors; and not unlike Odysseus, the story ends when they get home.

There will be considerable temptation on the part of the movie director to turn this script into something like “Anaconda” or “Arachnophobia,” or even Tarzan. This is not what the book is all about and it would be a shame to have the movie miss the point, while in search of some teenager-appeasing computer graphics.