Harvey Freedenberg

FictionLiterary Fiction

A charming, witty reimagining of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In the year in which we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler joins a distinguished group of writers that includes Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson in reinterpreting the bard’s works for Hogarth Press. Vinegar Girl transports The Taming of the Shrew from Padua to Tyler’s beloved Baltimore, and the product is a witty novel that reveals both the durability of Shakespeare’s themes and Tyler’s talent for creating pleasantly eccentric characters and engaging portraits of contemporary domestic life.

As someone who hates small children, Kate Battista couldn’t be more ill-suited for her work as a preschool teacher’s assistant. Her unfailing candor has put her job in jeopardy, and at 29 she is still living with her father, a fumbling, self-absorbed microbiology researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and a sullen sister half her age. Given Kate’s severely circumscribed prospects, it’s hardly surprising when her father seizes on the idea of having her wed his Russian research assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose visa is about to expire, saving him from deportation.

As preposterous as that union may seem, Tyler gives Kate a credible interior life, permitting her to wrestle with the absurdity of participating in what she thinks of as “human trafficking,” weighed against her fear that she’ll live out her days as the “old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father.” When her sister pleads with her to call off the wedding, Kate’s plaintive cry that “This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny,” resonates with real emotional force.

With the characteristic light touch of her 20 previous novels, Tyler plausibly depicts the halting evolution of Kate and Pyotr’s relationship as her family and friends look on with attitudes that range from bemusement to alarm. As befits such a genial comedy, the roadblocks that separate the couple from the altar are predictably mild, but Tyler deploys them to illuminate character, not garner unearned laughs. Vinegar Girl is a bittersweet novel that both honors and extends its source material.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the year in which we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler joins a distinguished group of writers that includes Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson in reinterpreting the bard’s works for Hogarth Press. Vinegar Girl transports The Taming of the Shrew from Padua to Tyler’s beloved Baltimore, and the product is a witty novel that reveals both the durability of Shakespeare’s themes and Tyler’s talent for creating pleasantly eccentric characters and engaging portraits of contemporary domestic life.
FictionComic Fiction

English do-gooders take on the world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The name Jesse Armstrong may not be familiar to you, but when you learn he was a co-writer of the British Iraq War satire In the Loop and has written for the HBO series “Veep,” you’ll have a good idea of the darkly comic sensibility that infuses his droll first novel, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. 

In the summer of 1994, a group of eight young English men and women who dub themselves the Peace Play Partnership pile into a diesel van and set off for war-ravaged Sarajevo, Bosnia. They plan to spread the message of peace through the art of theater and somehow “extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum.” Andrew, a sometime construction worker and the novel’s narrator, wangles his way into the van by falsely claiming fluency in Serbo-Croatian, but his main goal is to ingratiate himself with Penny, an African-born beauty who’s the adopted daughter of a well-connected British politico. As the group makes its way into ever more dangerous territory of the ironically named U.N. Safe Areas, the sexual tension is as thick as the humid Bosnian air.

Armstrong trains his dry wit like a laser on the fumbling progress of the English do-gooders, whose sincerity is equaled only by their naïveté. Andrew’s bathroom stop in what may be a minefield and his trip to a military commander’s headquarters to deliver a briefcase he fears contains a bomb are just two of many scenes that showcase Armstrong’s comic gift. But in his realistic depictions of sniper attacks, artillery shelling, encounters with ragtag militias and mercenaries and even a hanging, he ensures that the reality of conflict is never far from the center of an otherwise amusing story.

“Everything is complicated. Everything is simple. It depends how far away you stand, I suppose,” says Andrew. That’s an apt summing up of the tragedy of the savage war in Bosnia. Armstrong’s novel is an admirable contribution to the literature of that conflict, its mordant humor effectively balanced by a keen appreciation of the futility and irrationality of war.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The name Jesse Armstrong may not be familiar to you, but when you learn he was a co-writer of the British Iraq War satire In the Loop and has written for the HBO series “Veep,” you’ll have a good idea of the darkly comic sensibility that infuses his droll first novel, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A tragicomic take on the human condition

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Twenty-three years after creating the benighted town of North Bath, New York in his novel Nobody's Fool, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) invites readers back to find that while the lot of most of the town's inhabitants hasn't improved much, their lives and loves provide ample fodder for a fresh tragicomic encounter with the human condition.

Everybody's Fool unfolds over a steamy Memorial Day weekend that begins with the funeral of Judge Barton Flatt—an event that's marred by police chief Douglas Raymer's tumble into the open grave—and includes murder, savage beatings, the escape of poisonous snakes, lightning strikes and a couple of nervous breakdowns.

As in its predecessor, in the heart of this chaos is the roguish Donald "Sully" Sullivan, whose fortunes have improved after he inherits the home of the town's former eighth grade English teacher, but who still spends most of his days at a local lunch counter or at one of North Bath's downmarket taverns. Sharing center stage with him this time is Chief Raymer, still in mourning over the death of his wife a year earlier in a bizarre accident on the day she planned to leave him for her lover. The return of Roy Purdy, a recidivist burglar and thug who is the ex-son-in-law of Sully's former lover Ruth, darkens the story and generates most of the action that drives it forward.

For all of Russo's deft comic sensibility and the occasionally antic quality of the novel's plot, he successfully sidesteps the trap of slapstick humor. Instead, whether it's Chief Raymer's obsession with a garage door opener he believes will reveal the identity of his wife's lover, or Sully's encounter with mortality as he realizes the two years he's been given by a VA cardiologist are "probably closer to one," Russo is more intent on placing the interior lives of these characters under a microscope than he is in making sport of their obvious flaws. And with all its frustrated dreams of development, Russo makes it clear that foul-smelling North Bath, like hundreds of small towns across America, is destined for a sad fate.

Everybody's Fool is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of that word, inviting readers to slip comfortably between its covers knowing they're in the hands of a writer who understands the foibles of human nature and can plumb its dark corners with empathy, understanding and wit.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Richard Russo about Everybody's Fool. 

 

 

Twenty-three years after creating the benighted town of North Bath, New York in his novel Nobody's Fool, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) invites readers back.
NonfictionAging

A baby boomer’s outlook on aging

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In 1993, then-42-year-old Michael Kinsley was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Now, through the lens of that experience, the former editor of The New Republic, serving as a “scout from my generation,” offers his 79 million fellow baby boomers a clear-eyed glimpse of the decline that may lie ahead, while urging them to take stock of what they’ll leave behind when life’s clock inevitably runs out. 

Despite the bad fortune of its early onset, Kinsley’s Parkinson’s has been relatively mild. It wasn’t until 2002 that he publicly disclosed his disease, seven years after he left his position as co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” He underwent a deep-brain stimulation procedure in 2006 that has slowed the advance of his symptoms. But as he reveals in his wry account of a recent battery of cognitive tests, his decline, however measured, is perceptible.

Citing the estimated 28 million baby boomers who are expected to develop Alzheimer’s disease or a related disorder, Kinsley points to the “tsunami of dementia” about to afflict this cohort. For a generation that will be remembered for its ambition and competitiveness, he argues, this slowly dawning, frightening knowledge is likely to spark a round of “competitive cognition,” where “whoever dies with more of their marbles” is considered the ultimate victor in the game of life.

Kinsley concludes Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide with a plea to his fellow boomers to make a grand gesture that would be the moral equivalent of the Greatest Generation’s triumph over Hitler: a self-imposed tax on the massive transfer of wealth they’re currently enjoying to help whittle down America’s mountain of debt. It’s a bold, if not entirely realistic, proposal from someone who understands, and has communicated here with candor and characteristic wit, the daunting challenge facing his contemporaries as they contemplate life’s final act.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1993, then-42-year-old Michael Kinsley was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Now, through the lens of that experience, the former editor of The New Republic, serving as a “scout from my generation,” offers his 79 million fellow baby boomers a clear-eyed glimpse of the decline that may lie ahead, while urging them to take stock of what they’ll leave behind when life’s clock inevitably runs out.
FictionPopular Fiction

A new family seeks answers

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

For both parents and child, the subject of adoption is fraught with emotional complications. That’s the point of departure for New York writer Boris Fishman’s perceptive second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. And like his debut novel, A Replacement Life, it also deals with the challenges facing immigrants from the former Soviet Union as they adapt to life in the United States.

There’s definitely something different about Max Rubin, the adopted 8-year-old son of Alex Rubin, of Belarus, and his wife, Maya, of Ukraine. The blonde-haired, green-eyed boy is fond of sleeping in a tent and has even taken to tasting some of the varieties of grass growing around his New Jersey townhouse. His decision to abandon the school bus and disappear one late spring afternoon throws his family into crisis.

Maya’s need to unravel the mystery that is Max eventually leads her to propose a family odyssey to Montana, where Max was born. For the suburbanites, Montana might as well be Mars, a reality Fishman adroitly reveals in describing both its geography and its culture.

At the heart of this family drama is mercurial, deeply sympathetic Maya, who senses disaster lurking around every corner. Fishman patiently uncovers the tensions embedded in the Rubins’ relationship that intensify Maya’s restlessness. They’ve reached the midpoint of their lives in an alien land without a clear vision of where life is taking them, and with a vague sense of unease that’s exacerbated by their sharp disagreements over how much of Max’s history they need to know.

Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo—the plea of Max’s young mother as she hands over her child to his adoptive parents—is a ruminative story about the often fragile bonds of family. Even the most comfortable parents and children may someday confront a crisis as unsettling as the one that afflicts the Rubins, a truth that allows this novel to resonate with unexpected force.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For both parents and child, the subject of adoption is fraught with emotional complications. That’s the point of departure for New York writer Boris Fishman’s perceptive second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. And like his debut novel, A Replacement Life, it also deals with the challenges facing immigrants from the former Soviet Union as they adapt to life in the United States.
NonfictionMemoir

A candid exploration of loss

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Prominent NPR talk show host Diane Rehm’s memoir, On  My Own, is a plainspoken but passionate account of the death from Parkinson’s disease of her husband of 54 years and of her journey through the first year of widowhood. 

Diagnosed in 2005, John Rehm, a retired lawyer, finally entered an assisted living facility in November 2012. By June 2014, his condition had deteriorated to the point that he elected to hasten his death by forgoing food, water and medications. The fact that he survived and suffered for another nine days caused Rehm to “rage at a system that would not allow John to be helped toward his own death” and spurred her to commit herself to Compassion & Choices, an organization that advocates for the right to die with medical assistance. 

But this memoir is much more than a polemic on aiding the terminally ill. Eschewing self-help clichés, the deeply religious Rehm offers a meticulous narrative of her personal struggle to come to terms with a profound loss. Though the intensity of her love for John is unmistakable, she takes pains not to portray their marriage in idyllic terms. Instead, she describes that relationship as one “filled with both times of joy and years of hostility,” and her mixed feelings clearly affected a “complicated and long-lasting” grieving process she reveals with candor and insight.

Anticipating her memoir’s publication, Rehm, who is 79, announced in December that she would leave broadcasting after 37 years, sometime after the 2016 election. Though she spends a considerable amount of time in the book musing about what it will take for her to feel useful in the years ahead, there is little doubt that this talented woman will find myriad ways to continue her valuable contributions to our world.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Prominent NPR talk show host Diane Rehm’s memoir, On My Own, is a plainspoken but passionate account of the death from Parkinson’s disease of her husband of 54 years and of her journey through the first year of widowhood.
FictionDebut Fiction

Piecing together a past life

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Sharon Guskin’s debut novel is the tender story of a mother’s desperate struggle to heal her troubled child, artfully blended with an intriguing exploration of the world of the paranormal and the provocative question of whether consciousness can survive death.

When conventional therapy fails to alter or explain the disturbing behavior of her 4-year-old son, Noah, single mother Janie Zimmerman turns in despair to the Internet. There she discovers psychiatrist Jerome Anderson, whose unconventional research into the recall of prior lives has cost him respectability in his profession. Soon, their lives are linked in an effort to resolve Noah’s debilitating condition, a quest that takes them deep inside another family’s tragedy.

Though it’s wholly original, the tale of disappearance and death that lies at the core of The Forgetting Time summons the spirit of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Guskin adroitly maintains the pace of her mystery plot while simultaneously revealing the deepening emotional bonds between Janie and Noah and Anderson in a way that contrasts effectively with the novel’s more fantastic elements. She brings that same sensitivity to her portrayal of the grieving mother whose loss draws the trio to the climax of their quest.

Guskin acknowledges her debt to the work of a pair of real-life Jerome Andersons at the Division of Perceptual Studies of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, quoting striking case studies. Regardless of your skepticism or credulity about reincarnation, you’ll come away moved by this affecting tale of maternal love and the unbreakable cords of memory.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sharon Guskin’s debut novel is the tender story of a mother’s desperate struggle to heal her troubled child, artfully blended with an intriguing exploration of the world of the paranormal and the provocative question of whether consciousness can survive death.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A poet’s poignant journey home

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The story of an aging poet transplanted from Ireland to America
 as a young man, Thomas Murphy is itself pure poetry. Roger Rosenblatt’s return to fiction after several memoirs, including two moving books dealing with the aftermath of his daughter’s sudden death, is a brief but lovely rumination on one man’s irresistible impulse to savor life’s riches, even as losses mount and the ravages of age take their relentless toll.

Five decades after leaving the tiny island of Inishmaan (population 160) for New York City, Murphy finds himself facing eviction from his Upper West Side apartment and pressure from his daughter to seek medical attention for what she believes are the early stages of dementia. Dismissive of these threats to his independence, he prefers to live by the motto, “You never crash if you go full tilt,” devoting his days to crafting simple poems and sharing his love of verse with a small group of homeless people in a church rec room.

Even Murphy is surprised by the unexpected turn his life takes when a young man he meets in a bar presents him with a bizarre request: to deliver the news to the man’s wife, a blind woman, that her husband suffers from a terminal illness. That chance encounter opens into a tender, if unconventional, love story that Rosenblatt shares with grace and insight.

The novel’s principal appeal lies in the fresh and striking stream-of-consciousness voice of its protagonist. Murphy’s zest for life shines in every anecdote and observation, but it is tempered
by his consciousness of time’s passage, reflected in the deaths
of his wife and best friend and in his vivid memories of the harsh, beautiful world he left behind in Ireland. Rosenblatt has always demonstrated an affection for the play of words on the page, and in Murphy he’s created the perfect character to showcase that facility for language.

Thomas Murphy is an invigorating example of what it means, in the words of its protagonist, to “walk through the landscape of a life.” With a character as distinctive as this clear-eyed poet by our side, it’s a rewarding journey. 

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The story of an aging poet transplanted from Ireland to America
as a young man, Thomas Murphy is itself pure poetry. Roger Rosenblatt’s return to fiction after several memoirs, including two moving books dealing with the aftermath of his daughter’s sudden death, is a brief but lovely rumination on one man’s irresistible impulse to savor life’s riches, even as losses mount and the ravages of age take their relentless toll.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The ultimate haunted house story

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, November 2015

David Mitchell’s novel Slade House first came to life as a short story delivered in 140-character bursts on Twitter. That story, “The Right Sort,” is now the first entry in a chilling novel in stories that’s an intriguing companion piece to Mitchell’s 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks, an intricate saga of a war between two groups of time travelers.

Set in an unnamed English factory town “more passed through than stopped at,” the action of Slade House unfolds at precise nine-year intervals on the last Saturday in October, in and around the imposing house that provides the novel’s title. Accessed through a black iron door in a brick wall flanking an impossibly narrow alley, it’s a virtual-reality canvas that becomes the scene for a succession of harrowing set pieces featuring twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, soul vampires compelled to find new victims to fuel their dream of eternal life. 

Though the novel’s narrative structure becomes obvious after the second tale, Mitchell is such an ingenious writer that each encounter with the shape-shifting character of Slade House feels both fresh and consistently spooky. The fate of each victim—whether an adolescent boy, a lustful police officer or a university student exploring the paranormal—is equally disturbing, as we grasp that fate in real time while hoping somehow it can be altered. And in the final story, “Astronauts,” set in 2015, Mitchell demonstrates how skillfully he’s able to maintain a high level of suspense as he simultaneously upends our expectations.

Mitchell’s tales can be enjoyed both by readers who want to decode their sometimes puzzling logic while deconstructing terms like “psychoesoterica” and “psychovoltage,” and those who are content simply to surrender themselves to the power of a scary story. Familiarity with Mitchell’s work is not required to appreciate Slade House, but his fans will delight in references to characters and scenes from earlier novels, which align with his intent to build what he has called an “übernovel” that links his persistent themes. 

“Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M.C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever,” one character muses. That sly description offers an apt summary of a work that almost demands to be read in a single sitting. Just be sure to leave the lights on when you do.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

David Mitchell’s novel Slade House first came to life as a short story delivered in 140-character bursts on Twitter. That story, “The Right Sort,” is now the first entry in a chilling novel in stories that’s an intriguing companion piece to Mitchell’s 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks, an intricate saga of a war between two groups of time travelers.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The world of King David

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In novels like Year of Wonders, People of the Book and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, Geraldine Brooks has demonstrated an ability to transform history into compelling, distinctive fiction. That talent is undiminished in The Secret Chord, a vivid re-creation of the life of King David.

Anyone even passingly familiar with the Hebrew Bible’s account of David’s life in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles knows the highlights: the slaying of Goliath, the unifying of the Israelites after the death of King Saul and his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon. But the achievement of Brooks’ narrative, channeled principally through the perceptive eye and voice of the prophet Natan, is to create a David who is much more than the traditional brave warrior, powerful ruler and singer of psalms.

Marked by fratricide, attempted parricide, bloody hand-to-hand combat and ceaseless political intrigue, the energy of Brooks’ novel rarely flags. “Whatever it takes. What was necessary,” was David’s guiding principle as Natan describes it, and that credo is reflected in both the decisiveness and ruthlessness of Brooks’ character. David’s path to power and his rule were notable for great achievements and great sadness. Especially poignant is the fourfold retribution he endures after Natan, through a parable, forces him to face his duplicity in dispatching Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death in battle. 

One aspect of Brooks’ novel that likely will spark controversy is her frank claim that the deep affection between David and Jonathan, Saul’s son, was anything but platonic, and was what Natan calls “a love so strong that it flouted ancient rule.” The biblical evidence supporting this view has been vigorously debated, and Brooks’ assertion hardly will resolve those arguments.

But none of this would matter if Brooks were not so adept at deploying the skills of the novelist to explore the traditional concerns of serious fiction, like character and motivation. She does so in language resonant of biblical diction and imagery, while approaching that time with the benefit of modern psychological insight. The Secret Chord may send some readers back to the biblical account of David’s life, and when they return to it, they will see that story with fresh eyes. 

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In novels like Year of Wonders, People of the Book and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, Geraldine Brooks has demonstrated an ability to transform history into compelling, distinctive fiction. That talent is undiminished in The Secret Chord, a vivid re-creation of the life of King David.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A challenging historical tale

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Tom Piazza’s new novel is a crisply told tale of race relations in Philadelphia a few years before the Civil War, one that brings into sharp relief the tensions that beset Northern society even as it was about to go to war to rid the nation of slavery.

When minstrel show performer and entrepreneur James Douglass encounters Henry Sims, playing his banjo for appreciative listeners on a Philadelphia street, he’s more concerned with the boost the talented young escaped slave will give his foundering show and the legal and practical obstacles to presenting him on stage than he is with the irony of inviting a black man to participate in a performance that holds those of his race up to ridicule. As Piazza portrays it, minstrel shows were among the era’s most popular entertainments, performed before audiences whose bigotry was every bit as entrenched as the most benighted Southerners.

It’s only when James comes face-to-face with the vicious slave hunter Tull Burton, relentlessly tracking Henry from his escaped home in Virginia, that he understands the high stakes in the game he has naively undertaken. The narrative of this fast-paced novel goes up a notch as James finds himself struggling to conceal Henry from discovery by his fellow performers while attempting to keep him out of Burton’s hands.

Piazza is never heavy-handed in dealing with the obvious moral ambiguities inherent in James’ decision to participate in minstrel shows, even as his protagonist eventually understands he and his colleagues were “complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see.” Not until James witnesses the depth of Burton’s malevolence is he impelled to action that will redeem him while giving Henry a chance at freedom. 

Readers familiar with Solomon Northup’s memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, may discern faint echoes of that story in A Free State. But apart from a couple of graphic scenes of Burton’s brutality and glimpses of the casual cruelty of the slave owners, Piazza is more interested in telling a story that will have thoughtful readers slipping into James’ shoes and asking themselves: What would I have done?

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tom Piazza’s new novel is a crisply told tale of race relations in Philadelphia a few years before the Civil War, one that brings into sharp relief the tensions that beset Northern society even as it was about to go to war to rid the nation of slavery.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A widower seeks solace and understanding

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

British novelist Amanda Coe’s The Love She Left Behind is a tart family drama that examines how a selfish act of adultery mars the lives of adult children a generation after its occurrence. In this, her second novel, Coe demonstrates a keen eye for the intricate dynamics of family life and an even sharper ear for the language we use both to conceal and to wound.

Thirty years after what began as a “big love story” in the late 1970s, Patrick Conway’s marriage has ended with the death of his wife, Sara. The playwright, author of a controversial drama about Britain’s Falklands War but unproductive thereafter, consoles himself with alcohol and cigarettes in his crumbling Cornwall homestead. Sara’s children, Nigel, a London lawyer, and Louise, a struggling mother to a sullen teenage daughter, bear the scars of their mother’s choice to abandon them for a life with Patrick. In Nigel’s case it’s a lifelong battle with gastrointestinal problems, while Louise seeks solace in a psychic’s advice.  

Coe flashes back to Nigel and Louise’s lives as teenagers, as they did their best to cope with Sara’s departure. An ill-matched pair, their differences are played out in their disagreement over what will become of Patrick’s house after his death. Whatever chance they had for a normal relationship, Coe suggests, was lost when their mother chose Patrick over them.

Family life is complicated by the presence of Mia, a graduate student who’s writing her thesis on Patrick’s work. Whether her involvement with a man who’s old enough to be her grandfather will develop into something more adds intrigue to the novel’s plot. 

“What happens in the heart simply happens,” wrote poet Ted Hughes, whose observation provides one of the epigraphs for The Love She Left Behind. Whether or not that offhanded explanation for infidelity suffices to ease the pain of children who survive divorce, Coe coolly reminds us that it is a fact of life. 

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

British novelist Amanda Coe’s The Love She Left Behind is a tart family drama that examines how a selfish act of adultery mars the lives of adult children a generation after its occurrence. In this, her second novel, Coe demonstrates a keen eye for the intricate dynamics of family life and an even sharper ear for the language we use both to conceal and to wound.
NonfictionMemoir

One of America’s greatest reporters looks inward

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

From a bicycle trip through Chile and Argentina to a South African journey to report on Nelson Mandela’s final days, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had no intention of slowing down as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in February 2013. What he didn’t count on was a cancer diagnosis a few months later that would transform the next 16 months of his life into one in which cancer became “the scrim through which all of life is viewed.”

Brokaw suffers from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow’s plasma cells that is treatable, but not curable. A Lucky Life Interrupted is the product of the journal Brokaw, ever the reporter, kept to document his experience. He frankly describes cancer’s physical and emotional toll as his treatment proceeded, but he leavens that often sobering account with vivid reminiscences from a career that helped earn him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

With a loving family that includes an emergency room physician daughter as well as access to world-class specialists at leading hospitals, Brokaw realizes that his good fortune in health didn’t desert him in sickness. But even with those advantages, he takes some pointed shots at a health care system in which the efforts of his team of doctors were poorly coordinated at times and where a single chemotherapy pill cost $500.

“I’ve had a life rich in personal and professional rewards beyond what should be anyone’s even exaggerated expectations,” Brokaw writes. He’s clear-eyed about the challenges that lie ahead, but no doubt he’ll face them with a renewed appreciation for his good life and a determination to live whatever remains of it to the fullest.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From a bicycle trip through Chile and Argentina to a South African journey to report on Nelson Mandela’s final days, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had no intention of slowing down as he celebrated his 73rd birthday in February 2013. What he didn’t count on was a cancer diagnosis a few months later that would transform the next 16 months of his life into one in which cancer became “the scrim through which all of life is viewed.”

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