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Reading: A New Year’s Binge

Happy New Year!

I’ve been on a book binge, and have good things to report.

imagesFirst, Mary Gaitskill’s wondrous novel, The Mare. Ginger is a failed painter, a recovered alcoholic, the survivor of abuse. Now married and living in the country, she yearns to be a mother. Husband Paul is a father, of a college-age daughter. They compromise, agreeing to foster a child during the summer through the Fresh Air Fund.

Velveteen is that child, 11 when the story begins. Though she has grown up in Brooklyn, she quickly proves herself a natural with horses. Quickly, too, Ginger deceives Velvet’s mother, who is certain Velvet will fall from a horse to her death.

Class, race, education, mobility, sexuality, adultery, athleticism: Gaitskill effortlessly explores these themes through these characters’ journeys. I loved every page.

images-1Next I read Daniel Alarcón’s novel At Night We Walk in Circles (2013). I’d discovered Alarcón through his short story A City of Clowns  in The New Yorker. (Read it.)

A native of Peru, Alarcón was raised in the American South. He writes fiction in English and nonfiction in Spanish. His fiction haunts, and describes a South American society that’s brutal, stagnant, absurd: the promise of a better life in the U.S. is a constant distraction and lure.

This novel is the journey of Nelson, a struggling actor who leaves his widowed mother and pregnant girlfriend to join a traveling troupe headed by a once imprisoned playwright. It’s an entrancing ride that, of course, does not end well.

images-2Lori Osltund’s After the Parade is a steady read about a middle-age man who leaves his older lover for a new life in San Francisco. That act causes Aaron to revisit his Midwest childhood, when his abusive father fell from a parade float to his death and later, as a teen, when his troubled mother abandoned him and the cafe she’d run. Other memories flood in: of a trip to a family friend whose brother is a tusk-toothed dwarf, of a kind fat girl whose family takes Aaron in after his mother flees.

ln San Francisco, Aaron befriends a private investigator who tracks down Aaron’s now elderly mother. His visit to her is heartbreaking.

images-3I can’t recall where I read about Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Til the Well Run Dries (2014) but I’m glad I picked it up. Set in Trinidad during the 1960s, it tells the story of a beautiful seamstress with a secret past and the police officer who loves her but won’t marry her. Moving, surprisingly violent, well told.

images-4I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline, the story of a divorced mother of young children who goes to Athens, Greece to teach a writing seminar. She befriends an older man on the flight over, also divorced, who tells her of his marriages. (Their outings are the most interesting parts of the book.) Others — friends, writers, editors, students — tell their stories; the narrator mostly records. There’s no plot, and it can be maddeningly dull; still, I found the thinking and talking about marriage intriguing.

images-5Finally, thanks to this wise and funny essay by Ed Tarkington that touches on, among other things, why we read and why we write, I bought his just published novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart. It’s Southern Gothic, and very good, about a boy, his older brother and girlfriend, their parents, their neighbors, ghosts real and imagined. I’m halfway through.

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