Lauren Bufferd

Fiction

A story with the spark of the unexpected

Review by Lauren Bufferd

It is 1980 in Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear, and the Outer Hebrides, a remote island chain off the northern coast of Scotland, has some unexpected visitors. Letty Fleming and her three children are there to mourn the death of their husband and father, Nick, and a domesticated bear has escaped from his owner and made the sea caves his temporary home. The ways in which these characters cope, find solace and even help each other survive are the unexpected pleasures in this imaginative novel.

Nick had a posting in the diplomatic corps and the family was living in Germany when he fell to his death from the roof of their apartment. With suspicions of a leak in the department, his death leaves many unanswered questions: Was it an accident, murder or suicide? Even worse, was Nick a traitor?

A former resident of the Hebrides, Letty hopes that returning to its safe embrace will be beneficial for her and her children as they try to piece their lives back together, but the isolation of the island reinforces each person’s loneliness. Instead of coming together, the family fractures even more, with Letty hovering ineffectually in the background, alternately digging into her husband’s past and taking to her bed in periods of unrestrained grief.

The portrayal of the Fleming children is the novel’s greatest strength. The dutiful oldest daughter Georgie tries to make sense of a trip to Berlin she took with her father and the enigmatic events that occurred there. Youngest boy Jamie, in his confusion and sorrow, continues to believe that his father is still alive and that the escaped bear might hold a clue to his current whereabouts. Stuck in the middle is Alba, burning with rage, cruel to her brother and jealous of her sister, and furious with the many ways the world has let her down.

The story of the escaped bear was drawn from an actual event in Pollen’s childhood when a trained animal named Hercules got loose while filming a commercial on the Hebrides. The bear roamed the island the entire summer, adding a dreamlike element to Pollen’s childhood memory. That spark of the unexpected lies at the heart of The Summer of the Bear. Though the novel occasionally suffers from the choppy rhythm resulting from multiple storytellers (even the bear narrates his own chapters), readers will be captivated by Pollen’s characters and the warmth with which her magical tale unfolds.

 

It is 1980 in Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear, and the Outer Hebrides, a remote island chain off the northern coast of Scotland, has some unexpected visitors. Letty Fleming and her three children are there to mourn the death of their husband and…

Fiction

A marriage under pressure

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Carol Edgarian’s second novel explores how many trials a marriage can stand. Lena and Charlie are struggling emotionally and financially. At one time a successful surgeon, Charlie has given up most of his practice to develop a robotic surgery device, and in the economic reversals of the current decade, few are eager to invest in his invention. After the tragic loss of a prematurely born twin, Lena gave up her job to care for the surviving daughter, who suffers from severe developmental problems, and a precocious five-year-old son. When Charlie goes behind Lena’s back to make a deal with her estranged uncle Cal, a Silicon Valley tycoon, Lena’s sense of betrayal threatens to destroy the already fragile threads that hold the family together.

Lena and Charlie’s marriage is not the only one that comes under Edgarian’s microscope. Cal and his socialite wife Ivy are at the other end of the spectrum, with financial stability and grown children. But the creature comforts of an affluent lifestyle can’t always soften the petty cruelties and misunderstandings that occur over a decades-long partnership. As Lena and Charlie are drawn more deeply into Cal and Ivy’s world, they each face the limitations a shaky economy can place on life and love.

Edgarian’s characters fully inhabit this all-too-familiar world of marital squabbles, wounded pride and unpaid bills. Her depiction of the frustrations and joys of motherhood is hilariously on target, when it’s not tragic. Her characters are caught in the rhythms of trying, failing and trying again—patterns that superbly mimic those of everyday life.

Perhaps in an attempt to provide a more panoramic snapshot of the times we live in, Edgarian creates additional problems for her couples, including the presence of an old flame of Lena’s who also works for Cal. This and the too-tidy ending threaten to capsize the network of believable emotions and events that Edgarian has so carefully constructed. Yet Three Stages of Amazement is notable for its attempt to explore how families navigate through hard times, both financial and emotional.

 
 

 

Carol Edgarian’s second novel explores how many trials a marriage can stand. Lena and Charlie are struggling emotionally and financially. At one time a successful surgeon, Charlie has given up most of his practice to develop a robotic surgery device, and in the economic reversals…

FictionWorld Fiction

A city not his own

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City. Julius begins to take nightly walks as solace after breaking up with a girlfriend, but the travels soon take on a momentum of their own, offering opportunity for him to process the chaos of his days as a psychiatric intern, while allowing time to reflect on the development and diversity of the city.

Julius is good company: erudite, clever, with a wide-reaching interest in almost everyone and everything. He seeks out new experiences and finds much to remark on. Exhibitions, public monuments, novels—his commentary is as constant as his wanderings. Encounters with fellow New Yorkers, many of them immigrants, give him further occasion to ponder the changes in urban life, especially those wrought by September 11. (A frequently updated website dedicated to the novel, http://op-cit.tumblr.com, features photographs, texts and links to music mentioned in the novel which enriches the reading experience even more).

An impromptu trip to Brussels offers further opportunity for contemplation, not only of his own childhood in Lagos as the son of a Nigerian father and German mother, but on the changing ethnic make-up of this most European of cities. As in New York, Julius is attuned to the diversity of his surroundings, especially when it concerns people of color. He easily connects with his fellow travelers, from the Belgian woman sitting next to him on the plane, to the Moroccan man who runs an Internet café with whom he gets into a thoughtful discussion on the Middle East.

As Open City continues, an air of sadness settles over the story. A patient dies, as does Julius’ college advisor. Once back in New York, he runs into the sister of an old friend who shares some startling information. His response—or lack thereof—is disturbing, forcing the reader to question Julius’ emotional stability. Julius, who is hypersensitive to the traces time leaves behind in an urban landscape, is less attuned to the traces time leaves behind on people, who also bear marks left by prior experiences.

In his previous book Every Day is for the Thief, Cole returned to his hometown of Lagos, seeking out places that were strange or unfamiliar. Open City provides a mirror image of this earlier plot, as Julius looks for familiarity in cities not his own. Though more overtly fictional, it also expands upon Cole’s idea that the past is always with us. Open City is an intriguing work, though perhaps more satisfying for readers who enjoy a little ambiguity in their fiction.

Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City. Julius begins to take nightly walks as solace after breaking up with a girlfriend, but the travels soon take on a momentum of their own, offering opportunity…

FictionShort Stories

Daring debut story collection from a rising talent

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Danielle Evans’ book of eight stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, is long anticipated. Her first story, “Virgins,” was published in the Paris Review and then selected for The Best American Stories 2008. “Virgins” is a quietly devastating tale of two teenage girls navigating the rocky road to adulthood. Bored and loaded with bad choices, the girls go clubbing, and Erica leaves her friend in a risky position while she herself opts for a more benign, but still unsavory, introduction to sex. Written with what readers can now see is Evans’ characteristic insight, humor and craftsmanship, this story is just one of the gems in a polished collection.

Evans takes as her subject people in transition: adolescents, children split between divorced parents, college graduates drifting between partners and jobs. Erica in “Virgins” is a prototype for several of the other young women who appear in these pages—independent but longing for connection, educated but not savvy enough to avoid the hurts of love and life. In “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” the narrator wonders if and how she will be able to move on after an evening spent being purposely cruel to her old lover’s fiancé. In “Jellyfish,” William mulls over his planned move from Harlem to Brooklyn as he runs late to a monthly lunch with his adult daughter, Eva. Waiting in the restaurant, Eva craves her father’s attention but when he finally arrives, full of plans for a new apartment that could accommodate both father and daughter, all he can feel is her resistance.

Evans’ characters are African-American or mixed race. They live in a country where the barriers of race and class may be harder to distinguish than in previous decades, but societal challenges are ever present. Situations may have changed, but perceptions and self-esteem have not.

This is evident in “Harvest,” a story about a group of college girls joking and laughing about ads in the campus paper offering students high prices for human eggs. Though the chatter is light, the girls know that even their middle-class backgrounds and Ivy League educations won’t make their eggs desirable. What seems like a casual evening in the dorm becomes a powerful meditation on race and class, value and commerce. Similarly, in “Snakes,” a biracial girl spends the summer with her disapproving white grandmother whose attempts at scaring her with stories of deadly snakes in the lake leads to a terrible accident and a life-changing lie.

In the final story, “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” brainy high school cheerleader Cee Cee jeopardizes her graduation and college career with an act of senseless vandalism. She is abetted by Geena, a classmate with less academic options but whose popularity and friendship supported Cee Cee through high school. Cee Cee makes a decision in order to save herself, but it is one for which she may end up paying dearly.

Moral ambiguity is explored beautifully in the best of these stories as well as the deeply felt moments of choice and regret. Evans is young to be so wise, but that youth is to the reader’s benefit; she is a writer we hope to be hearing from for a long time. 

Danielle Evans’ book of eight stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, is long anticipated. Her first story, “Virgins,” was published in the Paris Review and then selected for The Best American Stories 2008. “Virgins” is a quietly devastating tale of two teenage girls…

FictionShort Stories

Elegant stories of modern-day China

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li explores the big themes—individuality, honor, family ties and love—and sets them against a richly detailed tapestry of Chinese life. Though each story takes place in modern-day China, they are formally rigorous and crafted with an elegance that harkens back to stylists like Chekhov and William Trevor. At the same time, the contemporary settings and Li’s modern sensibility bring freshness to old themes.

The nine stories take place in small villages or provincial corners of Beijing. Li’s focus is the ordinary person trapped where the demands of history, community and family collide, and characters suffer from an internalized sense of guilt or shame. Though not overtly political, Li’s stories denote the struggle between individual and community—a particularly potent subject given China’s social and political history.

In “A Man Like Him,” Teacher Fei, a lifelong bachelor, conspires to meet a man who has been publicly—and wrongfully—accused of an indiscretion. Fei has his own past troubles that he hopes will be absolved by this meeting. In “House Fire,” five friends band together to form a detective agency devoted to domestic issues. When a man comes to them for advice regarding an unsavory rumor about his wife and father-in-law, the case threatens the unity of the group and they must decide whether or not to accept it.

But Li is also interested in the way love blooms in the most unlikely places. The title story is the masterpiece in the collection—an expertly crafted work in which a professor introduces her middle-aged son to her favorite student—an action that ignores the natures of both individuals, but also opens up their lives to the possibility of happiness. Similarly, “Number 3, Garden Road” depicts a life-altering evening in the lives of two residents in a Beijing apartment house. Both moved in when the building was new, Meilan as a child, Mr. Chang as a young husband. Many years later, Meilan has returned, twice divorced, and hopes for the newly widowed Mr. Chang to notice her at the neighborhood dances. This story, with the assertive Meilan and deliberately obtuse Chang, comes the closest to humor, but it is a most gentle kind and one that draws inspiration from wise observation.

Li is ruthless in depicting the depths of her characters’ emotional shortcomings; nevertheless her lucidity and eloquence make this collection a literary pleasure.
 

In Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li explores the big themes—individuality, honor, family ties and love—and sets them against a richly detailed tapestry of Chinese life. Though each story takes place in modern-day China, they are formally rigorous and crafted with an elegance that harkens…

Fiction

Love among the dot-com ruins

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Allegra Goodman is often described as a 21st-century Jane Austen. Like Austen, she writes subtle and engaging social comedies that focus on love, betrayal and familial loyalty. But Goodman’s settings, from the Orthodox Jewish community of Kaaterskill Falls to the cancer labs of Intuition, make her work distinct, rich in contemporary ideas and modern circumstances. In The Cookbook Collector, Goodman looks hard at two disparate worlds—antiquarian book collecting and the dot-com business—and finds interesting connections between the two.

At the core of the novel are 20-something sisters Emily and Jessamine Bach. Emily is the CEO of Veritech, a thriving computer data storage lab in Silicon Valley. Her younger sister, Jessamine, an eternal grad student living frugally in Berkeley, works at an antiquarian bookstore. Where Emily is thorough and ambitious, Jessamine is dreamy and disorganized.

Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, also owns a flourishing web start-up, though its location on the opposite coast adds strain to their relationship. Jessamine is involved with a manipulative yet charismatic leader of the Tree Savers, an eco-group dedicated to saving the redwoods. She is also drawn to her boss George, a wealthy refugee from Microsoft who has turned his fortune into an extremely comfortable lifestyle and a successful career as a book dealer. When Jessamine negotiates the purchase of a cookbook collection from a reluctant seller, her relationship with George intensifies.

The Cookbook Collector is set in the late 1990s, and the reader has the benefit of ironic distance. We can foresee not just the end of the dot-com boom that burst the financial bubble of Silicon Valley, but the events of September 2001, which changed so much politically and personally. As Emily and Jessamine search for love and fulfillment amid economic disaster and tragedy, the reader is grateful for a skilled guide like Allegra Goodman.

Allegra Goodman is often described as a 21st-century Jane Austen. Like Austen, she writes subtle and engaging social comedies that focus on love, betrayal and familial loyalty. But Goodman’s settings, from the Orthodox Jewish community of Kaaterskill Falls to the cancer labs of Intuition, make…

Fiction

Alone in the crowd

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Golden Richards is in a bad way. He has four wives but is flirting with another woman. He has 28 children but can’t stop thinking about the accidental death of his handicapped daughter, Glory. His floundering construction company has taken a job remodeling a brothel, though he tells everyone at church he’s working on a senior center. And he is trying desperately to remove chewing gum from a place where no gum should ever get stuck.

Welcome to the life of the Richards family. Golden, the lonely polygamist of the title, is trying desperately to keep wives and children content, even though he isn’t really communicating with any of them. An awkward, shy man with a bad overbite, Golden stumbles through his over-populated life unsure of just how he went from living in the backwaters of Louisiana to being the designated heir of his religious sect. His wives and children, divided among three dwellings, exist in a kind of communal chaos that only increases when Golden becomes involved with his boss’s wife and is even less available. Golden’s third wife, Rose-of-Sharon, has a breakdown and Trish, the fourth wife, begins to think maybe communal marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Rose’s son Rusty, perhaps The Lonely Polygamist’s funniest and most sympathetic character, hatches a revenge plot with deadly consequences after his plans for a unique birthday party go down the tubes.

It would have been so easy for a novel about polygamy to offer up a load of stereotypes—men in buttoned-up shirts quoting from the Book of Mormon and blank-eyed women in prairie dresses with weirdly puffy hairdos—but author Brady Udall steers clear of all caricatures. A Mormon himself (though not a polygamist!), he is comfortable with every contradiction in the Richards’ unusual lifestyle and engages the reader with fully realized characters in surprisingly touching situations, from Trish who craves the warmth and chatter of the extended family as much as she wonders what it would be like to leave it behind, to first wife Beverly whose staunch faith obscures a shame-filled past, to any one of the Richards children who simultaneously thrive in the camaraderie and suffer from the lack of attention in the extended family households. Neither a case for polygamy nor an argument against it, The Lonely Polygamist tells the story of an American family’s struggle for happiness amid discord, with enough comic dysfunction to feel familiar to any reader, no matter what kind of family they hail from.

Despite its length, The Lonely Polygamist is a pleasure to read—immediately engaging and filled with laugh-out-loud humor. Nevertheless, it would have benefited from some judicious editing. With a 30-member family and multiple outside characters, the novel hardly needs to venture into the results of nuclear testing in the desert. Also, the multiple standoffs between Golden and his tough-guy boss Ted Leo felt extraneous to the overall plot. Still, The Lonely Polygamist is a great American novel, perhaps the great American novel of the year.

Golden Richards is in a bad way. He has four wives but is flirting with another woman. He has 28 children but can’t stop thinking about the accidental death of his handicapped daughter, Glory. His floundering construction company has taken a job remodeling a brothel,…

Fiction

Lively language marks Levy’s successful second act

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Andrea Levy’s Small Island is a hard act to follow. Winner of numerous British awards in 2004 and 2005, the novel was catapulted across the Atlantic to further praise and critical acclaim. While Small Island follows the lives of four characters in post-WWII London, in Levy’s latest, The Long Song, the location shifts to 19th-century Jamaica in and around the years following the abolition of slavery. Though it lacks the span and richness of her earlier work, Levy’s exuberance, lively language and finely honed sense of the droll—mixed with the gravity of historical events—make this new novel a pleasure to read.

The Long Song is sung by Miss July, a former slave whose life began well before the 10-day Baptist War of 1831 brought an end to slavery on the island. Born on the Amity sugar plantation, the product of the rape of an African field hand by a Scottish overseer, July is taken up as a young girl by her owner’s meddling, needy sister Caroline, renamed Marguerite and moved into the house as a lady’s maid. It is under the somewhat inattentive eye of her mistress that July hears about the events that led to the end of her enforced servitude. But it is the domestic that interests her—the caprice and cruelty of her masters, the subtle ways she and the other house slaves conspire to fool Caroline and the rivalries July forms with other mulatto ladies of the town as they compete with one another for male attention. When the handsome and progressive English overseer Robert Goodwin comes to the plantation, his presence sets off a chain of events that prove life-changing for both July and her mistress.

Levy plays with July’s story by bracketing the novel with an introduction and epilogue by July’s son Thomas Kinsman, a successful Jamaican publisher whose very position in the town indicates the drastic change in the fortunes of Jamaican blacks since July’s childhood. In truth, Thomas cannot keep out of his mother’s story and periodically breaks in, allegedly to offer advice or to comply with her request for more paper, but really to remind us that no tale ever belongs to just one teller. Who is telling the better story is up to the reader.

Levy’s wit and her expert control of well-populated comic scenes, so familiar from Small Island, are not lost in The Long Song. At first, the humor seems an uneasy fit with the subject matter, but Levy’s mastery of her subject and the alternating voices of July and Kinsman, who so confidently claim their own stories, provide a solid bedrock for the occasional dip into farce.

Andrea Levy’s Small Island is a hard act to follow. Winner of numerous British awards in 2004 and 2005, the novel was catapulted across the Atlantic to further praise and critical acclaim. While Small Island follows the lives of four characters in post-WWII London, in…

Fiction

Up in the air

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Do we look up at an airplane now the same way we did before September 11, 2001? I would hazard a guess of “no,” and the protagonist of James Hynes’ Next certainly doesn’t. Over the novel’s eight-hour trajectory, Kevin Quinn spends a large amount of time either in a plane, at an airport or watching planes in the air, and his fear of terrorist action is the low-level buzz that hums behind all of his past complaints and future plans. Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Next follows the events of a single day and relies on a subtle interplay of memory, trauma and thought.

Kevin is flying to a job interview in Austin, Texas, in the midst of an international terrorism scare. Frustrated by his current relationship and tired of his dead-end job, he dares to make a midlife change. On the flight, he sits next to Kelly, a beautiful young woman; he becomes obsessed, and decides to follow her after their flight lands. Traipsing around Austin’s muggy streets gives Kevin plenty of time to rail against his current condition and ponder previous love affairs and former jobs. Though Kevin’s self-absorption is annoying at times, Hynes’ witty wordplay keeps the book moving along briskly. The novel’s pace shifts into higher gear, however, after a freak accident involving the lovely Kelly, a dog leash and a Hooters dirigible. When a kindly Latina surgeon stops to help Kevin, the reader expects redemption, or at least a happy ending.

But the final third of the book shifts radically in plot and tone as Kevin is thrust into a situation unlike any he has experienced before. The plot, which up to now has been humorous if slightly off-putting, grows more profound, the memories that float to the surface deeper, more revealing. The reader hangs on breathlessly as Kevin’s thoughts swerve from past to present and beyond, reconciling what came before with whatever is to come in a seamless flow. Next may be Hynes’ best book—and one that reveals his gifts as a serious novelist.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

Do we look up at an airplane now the same way we did before September 11, 2001? I would hazard a guess of “no,” and the protagonist of James Hynes’ Next certainly doesn’t. Over the novel’s eight-hour trajectory, Kevin Quinn spends a large amount of…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Military family faces the consequences of war

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Sadie Jones returns to the past in her new novel Small Wars, a psychologically probing story about a British military family posted to Cyprus in the 1950s. Like her first award-winning novel The Outcast, which explored the lives of two young people struggling to break free from the expectations and conformity of village life, the families in Small Wars are defined by the rigid expectations and rules, this time those of the military. But here, Jones takes things to a deeper level, showing how the principles of war affect an honorable soldier, husband and father. The political circumstances, rife with terrorism and torture, also mirror the current geopolitical situation in a striking parallel.

The Trehernes are a military family—husband Hal is the last in a long line of army men and his wife Clara fully understands what is expected of her as a military wife. They live with their two small children on the army base in Episkopi, Cyprus during the Emergency that pitted Cypriots who wanted to unite with Greece against the occupying British government. The bombings, shootings, and bloody demonstrations begin to take a toll on Hal. His sense of right and wrong is severely tested, especially after witnessing the torture of a young Cypriot. When in a moment of despair he takes out his rage on Clara, their relationship beings to disintegrate. Things worsen as terrorist actions increase and, as a safety measure, Clara and her daughters move off base to Cyprus’ capital, Nicosia. But violence follows them there as well, leading to an unexpected personal crisis for both husband and wife.

Though Clara quickly gains our sympathy, Small Wars is really Hal’s story. An experienced, dedicated soldier proud to serve his country, he moves from unquestioning obedience to an almost grudging defiance and it is a painful journey to follow. Without the military to structure his life and his thoughts, he is adrift, questioning everything that has made him the person he is. A young novelist writing about something that happened long before her lifetime, Jones shows remarkable empathy for this man whose core is badly shaken by the brutality of this ‘small war’ and so will the reader.

 

 

Sadie Jones returns to the past in her new novel Small Wars, a psychologically probing story about a British military family posted to Cyprus in the 1950s. Like her first award-winning novel The Outcast, which explored the lives of two young people struggling to break…

FictionWorld Fiction

Love in a time of turmoil

Review by Lauren Bufferd

When Montse and Santiago meet in Barcelona in 1975, they have little idea their relationship will take them to another continent altogether. Two teenagers from different social classes, their summer romance is almost over before it started when Montse spots her young lover with a former girlfriend. Montse decides she never wants to see Santiago again, despite the fact that she is pregnant. In his despair, he decides to spend his military service as far away as he can possibly go—in the Western Sahara, which was, at the time, a Spanish colony. Not long after, word comes back to Montse that he has died there in one of the many armed conflicts after the death of Franco. It is here that the story of See How Much I Love You by Luis Leante really begins.

The Western Sahara had been the site of a little-known conflict between Morocco and a Sahawari independence movement ever since Spain pulled out of North Africa in the mid 1970s. When Santiago first arrived for duty, he became one of the few Spaniards to befriend the Sahawari troops. He was drawn to their culture and their families and was soon trusted enough to escort a colleague’s extended family over hundreds of desert miles. Thirty years later, Montse, a divorced doctor still living in Barcelona, sees a photograph of Santiago carried by one of her Sahawari patients. Realizing he is not dead, she sets out to find him, combing through the refugee camps of the Western Sahara that prove to be as dangerous to her as they were to Santiago so many years before.

See How Much I Love You was inspired by a humanitarian trip Leante took to the Western Sahara. He clearly knows a lot about the situation and there is no doubt that his heart is in the right place. But the novel suffers from the constant shifts in time and the curious plot twist that are not helped by an awkward translation.  Flawed or not, though, the novel does important work, shedding light on a little known political situation of much suffering and little hope.

When Montse and Santiago meet in Barcelona in 1975, they have little idea their relationship will take them to another continent altogether. Two teenagers from different social classes, their summer romance is almost over before it started when Montse spots her young lover with a…

Fiction

The lure of money, power and privilege

Review by Lauren Bufferd

When Adam Haslett was writing the novel that became Union Atlantic, he couldn’t have known that a book about a rogue banker, the Federal Reserve and conflicts between old and new monies would have such special resonance at the beginning of the century’s second decade. Haslett’s vision of an implosion in the financial world was certainly prescient, making this an eerily intriguing novel to read, its absorbing storytelling powered by Haslett’s intelligence and compassion.

The plot of Union Atlantic is two-pronged—focusing on a legal battle and a banking crisis—both of which explore the class and cultural tensions that shape America’s current conditions. A veteran of the Gulf War, Doug Fanning works for Union Atlantic bank. Doug oversaw the bank’s transformation from a local community savings and loan to a player in the world markets, a transition that made billions, and he continues to manage the bank’s multinational funds. Raised in a working class family, he uses some of his newfound wealth to build a McMansion on a parcel of land originally donated to the town by the affluent and privileged Graves family. This enrages Charlotte Graves, a retired schoolteacher and granddaughter of the donor who is eking out a living as a tutor. Charlotte’s brother Henry, who runs the Federal Reserve, is drawn into the story, first when Charlotte sues Doug over what she considers to be a gross misuse of the property, and secondly when the Federal Reserve is called upon to bail out the Union Atlantic as it teeters on the edge of dissolution. Into the fray walks Nate Fuller, an awkward teenager who is sympathetic to his tutor Charlotte, but also drawn to Doug’s irresistible wealth and power. The troubled but trusting teen is used by both adults as each one schemes to outwit the other.

Haslett’s 2002 book of short stories You Are Not a Stranger Here explored with lucid sympathy pivotal moments in the lives of troubled adults. The damaged characters of Union Atlantic inhabit a similar world of depression and loss. Haslett’s empathy for his characters is remarkable, drawing us past the surface into the key moments that shape their decisions, choices and core identities. This is especially true of Charlotte Graves, whose righteous anger will feel all too familiar to anyone bewildered by today’s financial headlines.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

When Adam Haslett was writing the novel that became Union Atlantic, he couldn’t have known that a book about a rogue banker, the Federal Reserve and conflicts between old and new monies would have such special resonance at the beginning of the century’s second decade.…

Fiction

Keeping the faith in uncertain times

Review by Lauren Bufferd

It’s only January, but if you plan on reading just one great novel in 2010, this might be it. Unfinished Desires is a big old-fashioned book about jealousy and passion at a Catholic girl’s school, written with best-selling author Gail Godwin’s trademark depth and humor. It goes down easy, but Godwin’s 13th novel is filled with penetrating observations on women’s friendships, family and faith; it may just surprise you with its profundity.

The novel opens with the elderly Mother Suzanne Ravenel, former headmistress of Mount St. Gabriel, who has been chosen by alumni to write a memoir and history of the school. Mount St. Gabriel, a Catholic school set in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, was founded by a British nun whose personal concept of “holy daring” supported her through conversion to Catholicism, immigration to the United States and the opening of a Catholic school in a predominantly Protestant community. Ravenel attended Mount St. Gabriel as a boarding student in the 1920s and stayed on as teacher and headmistress until the school closed in 1990. Her memories flow freely, but she cannot get past the difficult year of 1952, when the actions of a single headstrong ninth grader resulted in several girls leaving the school and her own temporary leave of absence. This incident continues to haunt Ravenel with feelings of unresolved anger and shame.

The teenager at the center of the commotion is Tildy Stratton, an obstinate and precocious young woman. Tildy’s older sister, aunt and mother all attended Mount St. Gabriel, and Tildy is torn between forging her own path and following the course of those who went before her. Her best friends, early bloomer Maud Norton and Chloe Vick, haunted by the memory of her dead mother (also a Mount St. Gabriel alumna), both struggle to assert themselves against the conflicting wishes, dreams and desires of family and friends. All the girls hover at the mid-point between childhood and adulthood, aware of their womanly powers and burgeoning knowledge but reluctant to make full use of them.

Complex intergenerational relationships of blood, friendship and passion abound in this powerful novel. Best friends jockey for position, closeness threatens to spill over into physical intimacy and the power struggles between mothers and daughters, teachers and students seethe and swarm. Godwin’s characters are worthy of our outrage as well as our sympathy and understanding, and she never shies away from the messy or the complex.

Unfinished Desires is based on Godwin’s own experiences at a Catholic day school in North Carolina, but the wise, human story she tells reaches beyond the boundaries of region and religion, satisfying any reader looking for a good story.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

It’s only January, but if you plan on reading just one great novel in 2010, this might be it. Unfinished Desires is a big old-fashioned book about jealousy and passion at a Catholic girl’s school, written with best-selling author Gail Godwin’s trademark depth and humor.…

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