Read in October 2013
The Burgess Boys, by Elizabeth Strout
Three stars
After winning the Pulitzer for her novel-in-stories Olive Kittridge, Elizabeth Strout takes a more conventional approach in her latest novel. The story is told through the intercutting viewpoints of a half dozen or more characters, some major and several minor, and features a traditional plot spinning off several current issues in contemporary American life, including anti-Muslim hate crimes and sexual harassment in the workplace. The central characters are the Burgess siblings — Jim, an attorney who parlayed his victory in a nationally-riveting criminal case into a job with a white shoe Manhattan law firm and a wealthy wife; Bob, a legal-aid attorney who left his Maine hometown to follow his brother to the big city; and his twin, Susan, who stayed in Shirley Falls and wound up a divorced single mother raising her teenager alone. These siblings were a huge turnoff for the first half of the book, with Jim an arrogant bully contemptuous of Bob and Susan, Bob an ineffectual hangdog who submits without protest to the scornful treatment of him by his siblings, and Susan and her son enduring a nightmarish existence of disconnection and depression — a dreary dysfunctional family which utterly failed to arouse my sympathy. Strout is one of the few writers who I would keep reading after such an inauspicious beginning, and she delivers a believable redemption to each sibling by the end of the book. In Olive Kittridge, Strout gave us something fresh and unexpected, but The Burgess Boys is just another well-written commercial novel. According to the author bio, Strout now lives some of the time in New York City, which is where this novel is largely set, and I can’t help thinking that her relocation hasn’t helped her fiction. A tsunami of American fiction by women takes place in and around New York, and there is a sameness to the plots and characters of much of that fiction, which may in part be due to the parochialism of authors, agents, and editors socializing in the small pond of NYC publishing. Here’s hoping Strout gets back to Maine ASAP.
The View From Penthouse B, by Elinor Lipman
Two stars
Another disappointment from Elinor Lipman. She lost interest in this story, and so did I. How else to explain the appearance on pg. 248 of “Acknowledgements,” wherein the climax and denouement of the novel are short-circuited by the POV character basically telling the reader how it all ends up for everyone in the story. Not that it’s surprising Lipman lost interest because she picked the wrong character to tell her story. Here are her choices: Sister A, who lost all her money in the Madoff Ponzi scheme after divorcing her obgyn husband following his imprisonment for fraud after personally inseminating women looking for fertility at his Manhattan clinic, or Sister B, whose husband died in his sleep, leaving her comfortably well-off but lonely. Lipman chose Gwen — the lonely sister — but clearly the more interesting story belongs to Margo, especially when her paroled husband moves into a studio apartment in the same building and begins a campaign to get her back. While Margo is off protesting with Occupy Wall Street and blogging about her misfortune, Gwen’s main character story consists of the ins and outs of three blind dates over the course of 39 chapters. No wonder she got bored. When a writer close to finishing a manuscript comes to the unhappy conclusion that she has written a bad and boring book, there is ONLY one honorable solution: Start over. When a publisher receives a bad and boring book from a contracted author — whether brand name or obscure — there is ONLY one honorable solution: Reject the manuscript and request a rewrite. When a reader finds that two of the three most recent novels by a once-favored author were bad and boring, there is ONLY one solution: Don’t waste any more time on her fiction.