Extravagant Love

A Fairly Honourable Defeat 

by Iris Murdoch

“You are preserving your dignity by refusing to show your feelings. But there are moments when love ought to be undignified, extravagant, even violent.”

― Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Hilda and Rupert are a perfect match. Their only concerns are Morgan, Hilda's unstable sister who recently returned from America, and their son, who dropped out. Morgan's ex-lover, Julius, arrives with the intention of mildly upending Rupert and Hilda's seemingly unbreakable marriage. His opponent, Tallis, Morgan's husband, is surprisingly spirited. The conflict between two demonic creatures—one good and one evil—is the subject of this story. It is a fairly honorable defeat for the good, but the evil one prevails. 

I was introduced to Iris Murdoch's writing for the first time through this book when it was published in the 1970s. However, I will not go into too much detail about it here other than to say that my youthful impression has been confirmed again and again over the decades. I just say that it is a really gripping, sinister tale that I really liked. Each of the characters was incredibly interesting in their own unique way, and the tense relationships that resulted maintained the level of interest.

No Sanctuary at University

I Am Charlotte Simmons 

by Tom Wolfe

“Loneliness wasn't just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt... it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It was merely that she had no friends. She didn't even have a sanctuary in which she could simply be alone.” ― Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons







The story follows Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant student from a small, rural North Carolina town, who wins a scholarship to the prestigious Dupont University. Her arrival at Dupont plunges her into a world of social hierarchies, Greek life, athletics, and intellectual snobbery, which contrasts with her sheltered upbringing. The narrative explores her journey through loss of innocence, identity, and the struggle to maintain her academic and moral integrity amidst a culture that seems to value superficial achievements and social status over genuine learning and character.
Charlotte's journey is one of self-discovery and transformation. The novel examines how individuals adapt or succumb to the pressures of their environment, questioning what it means to stay true to oneself in the face of overwhelming social forces. Wolfe critiques the American elite education system, portraying Dupont as a microcosm of broader societal issues around class, privilege, and the commodification of education. The novel tackles themes of sexual politics on campus, including consent, reputation, and the power dynamics in relationships. Wolfe suggests a critique of the meritocratic myth by showing how success at Dupont often correlates more with social manipulation or athletic prowess than with academic merit.
Wolfe's characters are vivid, often exaggerated for effect, which is a hallmark of his satirical style. Charlotte is both naive and intelligent, serving as an observer through whom readers experience the university's culture shock. Supporting characters like Hoyt Thorpe, the charismatic athlete, and Jojo Johanssen, the basketball star, are caricatures of certain societal types, used to highlight the novel's themes.
The novel excels in its critique of modern academia and its portrayal of the loss of innocence in a supposedly enlightened environment. Wolfe's satirical edge is sharp, providing both entertainment and food for thought. Wolfe's depiction of college life can seem overly cynical or one-dimensional, particularly his treatment of female characters and campus sexual culture. The narrative might also feel dated to some readers given changes in university culture since its publication in 2004.
I found it a provocative and engaging read for anyone interested in a satirical take on higher education in America, especially for readers who enjoy character-driven stories with a keen eye for social commentary.

A Raindrop

There Are Rivers in the Sky 

by Elif Shafak

“Words are like birds, when you publish books you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in mansions of gentry, in farmsteads and laborers' cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”   ― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

The water sign is used to color this book from the first to the last page. A raindrop marks the start of it, and a flood marks its conclusion. According to Elif Shafak, the secret of infinity can be found in any drop of water; rivers are particularly adept at remembering. The Thames and the Tigris are the two rivers that are most noticeable here. Their flow is made up of numerous currents, and they are both fed by different affluents. The same is true of this book, which blends a number of stories that emerge from various locations and eras.

A single drop of water connects three extraordinary lives, two enormous rivers, and one lost poem in this tale. The remains of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, are buried in the sand in the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient Mesopotamian city. Water endures and remembers throughout. When Shafak makes the same drop of water fall as rain on Ashurbanipal's head in Nineveh and fall as a teardrop in London, two and a half millennia later, she is attempting to teach this important lesson. I highly recommend this fascinating book.

Memories of Butterflies

A Revolver to Carry at Night 

by Monika Zgustová

"So Vladimir sat down again at his desk, not without some difficulty, and pretended to write, but he couldn't concentrate. He was thinking about Vera and himself when they were just twenty . . ."   -  Monika Zgustova

Zgustova convincingly conveys the interaction of memory, art, and motivation whether or not it is historical. Her provocative, psychological portrait of a remarkable woman and the man she helped steer toward greatness is presented in just 150 pages, interspersed with a number of quiet scenes. It is an engrossing, subtle depiction of the life of Véra Nabokov, who devoted herself to furthering her husband's literary career and was instrumental in the composition of his best-known works.

In many ways, Véra Nabokov (1902–1991) was the quintessential wife of a great man: she was acutely aware of her husband's extraordinary talent and made his success her ultimate goal throughout their fifty-two-year marriage until his death in 1977. Véra worked as an editor and typist and was the first person to read his texts. She organized their life in exile, organizing trips to Berlin, Paris, Switzerland, and most importantly, the US, where she persuaded Vladimir to concentrate on writing novels in English. She managed the family's finances and contract negotiations, and she even went so far as to audit his classes.

Monika Zgustova immerses us in the everyday lives of this extraordinary couple in this rich, expansive book, providing insights into their intricate personal and professional relationships as well as the real people who lie behind characters like Lolita. Though Véra prided herself on being independent, was she really that much of an independent woman given how much room her husband occupied? Might Nabokov have emerged as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century without Véra?

Things Happen in England and Italy

Where Angels Fear to Tread 

by E.M. Forster

"Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them … I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed … I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it’ […]

She said solemnly, ‘I wish something would happen to you, my dear friend; I wish something would happen to you."   - E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster's first novel tackles issues of national identity and the potential for interpersonal connection despite societal inequalities that would preoccupy Forster throughout his career. The action is split between England and Italy. Where Angels Fear to Tread culminates in a "song of madness and death" similar to the sad opera Lucia di Lammermoor, which turns raucously amusing in one of the novel's most memorable sequences, yet at times veers into farce.

The novel is gruesome, accomplished, and darkly humorous. The best intentions fail and well-known ideas of virtue and vice fall to pieces in it. This kind of tragedy is distinctively Jamesian, and Philip's tale unmistakably invokes The Ambassadors' storyline. Similar to Strether in James' novel, Philip goes to the continent in order to save a fellow countryman from disgrace (first Lilia, then her son), only to fall in love with the place, find himself in the unlikely position of defending it, and have additional "ambassadors" (Harriet and Caroline Abbott) sent in order to save his mission. John Marcher, the main character of Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle," and, in a way, the model for Strether, have similarities with Philip in his disengagement from life and inability to make snap decisions. However, Philip's tragedy is more difficult to accept because of his conviction that nothing can save him, which is actually the reverse of Strether's.

The action of this novel somewhat presages aspects of Forster's third novel, A Room With A View. As first novels go, this one is one of the best with a literary touch that Forster would continue to develop in his more famous later novels.

Transcripts of a Life

Stella Maris 

by Cormac McCarthy

“If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?

It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”   ― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN - 1972 Twenty-year-old Alicia Western checks herself into the hospital with $40,000 in a plastic bag. Alicia is a paranoid schizophrenia patient who is a doctorate candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. She does not want to talk about her brother Bobby because of her illness. Instead, she ponders the nature of madness and how people insist on having a single experience of the world. She also remembers a time when, at the age of seven, her own grandmother was worried about her. She also examines the nexus of physics and philosophy and introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, and the hallucinations that only she can see. She continues to be sad for Bobby, who isn't quite dead and isn't quite hers.

Stella Maris is a conceptual novel that is told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia's psychiatric sessions. It examines subjects such as the nature of consciousness, gnosticism, literary allusions, and the eschaton while remaining utterly grounded in reality. It is likely to make you question whether your life is being written by fate. It is a probing, meticulous, and intellectually demanding conclusion to The Passenger, a philosophical investigation that challenges our beliefs about God, reality, and existence. 

If you are a reader like me you will want to immediately reread these two novels after finishing Stella Maris. The combination of these two novels provide a fitting postlude to the literary life of Cormac McCarthy.

Morality and Science

The Passenger 

by Cormac McCarthy

“Mercy is in the province of the person alone. There is mass hatred and mass grief. Mass vengeance and even mass suicide. But there is no mass forgiveness. There is only you.”   ― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI, 1980 Bobby Western jumps from the Coast Guard tender into the dark at three in the morning after zipping up his wet suit jacket. Nine people are still fastened in their seats, with hair floating and eyes empty of speculation, when his dive light illuminates the sunken jet. The tenth passenger, the black box of the aircraft, and the pilot's flight bag are all missing from the crash site. Yet how? Western is haunted in body and spirit by men with badges, the ghost of his father, the man who created the atomic bomb that burned glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and his sister, who is both his soul's love and its ruin. Western is a collateral witness to plots that can only lead to his injury.

It is Alicia, his sister, who is the most interesting, yet curiously difficult to understand as she has conversations with hallucinatory images. The story explores a plethora of ideas , centered on the nature of mathematics and the limits of using words to describe the world. This leads one to wonder about the nature of literature itself and the reason we tell stories.

The Passenger is a magnificent narrative about morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the insanity that is human awareness that traverses the American South, from the boisterous bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Florida. It also instills in the reader a desire to read its companion volume, Stella Maris.

An Ecstatic Life

Matrix 

by Lauren Groff

“Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.”   ― Lauren Groff, Matrix

I found this to be a bold and compelling reimagining of the life of Marie de France, a 12th-century poet and nun. While the author does not follow the exact historical record, she produces a powerful story about the life of a woman who struggles to find her place in a world that is both oppressive and liberating.

The novel begins with Marie being banished from the French court and sent to England to become the prioress of an abbey. Marie is a reluctant nun, but she soon finds herself drawn to the spiritual life and to the women who live with her at the abbey. As she learns to lead her community, Marie also begins to write again, and her poems soon become famous throughout England.

Groff's writing is lush and evocative, and she brings Marie to life with great empathy. Marie is a complex and conflicted character, and Groff does not shy away from her flaws. But she is also a woman of great strength and determination, and her story is one of triumph over adversity.

The author  paints a vivid picture of 12th-century England, and her characters come to life on the page. . The novel explores themes of faith, power, and womanhood in a thought-provoking way. While some of the characters are underdeveloped, Marie is complex and fascinating at the center demonstrating strength, intelligence, and compassion. Overall, I enjoyed Matrix and would recommend it to fans of historical fiction, women's fiction, and beautifully written novels.

Mountain Customs

The Orchard Keeper 

by Cormac McCarthy

“They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”   ― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Rereading McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, reminds me of the origins of his novels as he describes the mountain culture of East Tennessee. The story revolves around three characters: Uncle Arthur Ownby, an isolated woodsman, who lives beside a rotting apple orchard; John Wesley Rattner, a young mountain boy; and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger. It begins as the young bootlegger Marion Sylder disposes of a man's body in an abandoned peach orchard, a place that serves as a metaphor for the culture's impending decline, after killing him out of self-defense. The body is discovered by the kindly guardian of the orchard, Arthur Ownby, who chooses not to report it. For seven years, he let it to rest in peace. The elderly man also values his personal solitude and tranquility, and when they are invaded by a government holding tank placed on a neighboring hill, he shoots his X at the tank.

Both men adhere to ancient mountain customs, which are by definition ungoverned by the laws of the encroaching contemporary world. In contrast to them, the law enforcement officials who eventually apprehend Sylder, beat him, and committed him to a mental facility appear degenerate. John Wesley Rattner, a youngster who hunts and traps, who is befriended by the two men, and who matures in the novel, represents another important aspect of the book. Ironically, he is the dead man's son. Even though the ancient customs are out of date, he chooses to remain faithful to them.

This first novel shows signs of the novelist that McCarthy will become as he travels further west in his some of his subsequent novels. It is a great place to introduce yourself as a reader of one of our country's greatest novelists.

A Sense of Loss

The Swimmers 

by Julie Otsuka

“{We] glide serenely through the water, safe in our knowledge that we are nothing more than a blurry peripheral shape glimpsed in passing through the foggy, tinted goggles of the swimmer in the next lane.”   

― Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers

This is a story of a group of swimmers who, except for their individual routines (slow lane, medium lane, rapid lane) and the comfort each person finds in their morning or afternoon laps, they are strangers to one another. However, as a rift opens up in the pool's bottom, they are abandoned in a forgiving world without solace or consolation.

Alice, one of these swimmers, is gradually losing her memory. The pool served as Alice's last line of defense against the dementia that was advancing on her. Without the support of her fellow swimmers and the stability of her daily laps, she is thrown into disarray and turmoil and is reminded of her early years and the Japanese American internment camp where she spent the war. When Alice's estranged daughter unexpectedly re-enters her mother's life, she sees the tragically abrupt fall of her mother. 

The narrative is a compelling and enduring work yet from a modern artist, told in hypnotic, incantatory writing. It is a searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters, and the pangs of loss. Otsuka's style is somewhat subdued: She constructs lists and litanies that initially seem modest, even mundane, but by the time the paragraph comes to a close, you are astounded by what she has accomplished. I was moved by the lovely detail... 

In this work, scenes repeat in the same way that the mind does or the way that swimmers swim laps, rather than just accumulating. These accumulations add up to a terrible sense of loss and being too late. The Swimmers is a beautiful book that mimics a companion for a time of tedium and disorder, when death is as real as it is unimaginable.

New Love or True Love?

Find Me 

by André Aciman

“Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.”   ― André Aciman, Find Me






The melancholy Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman has spoken more powerfully to modern readers about the essence of love than any book in recent memory. It was praised for being "a love letter, an invocation...an exceptionally beautiful book" (Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review) when it was first released in 2007. A popular, Academy Award-winning movie based on the best-selling book has about three quarters of a million copies in circulation. In this continuation of the story Aciman depicts Elio's father, Samuel, traveling from Florence to Rome to see his son who has become a talented classical pianist. Sami's plans are upset and his life is changed forever when he encounters a stunning young woman by chance on the train.

Elio soon relocates to Paris, where he also has become involved in a significant relationship, while Oliver, who is now a professor at a college in New England with a family, finds himself suddenly considering a return trip across the Atlantic.

Aciman is a master of sensibility, the personal details, and the subtle emotional undertones that make up passion. The question of whether true love actually ever dies is raised by Find Me, which takes us back to the magical realm of one of our greatest modern romances. However, I found the journey to be somewhat muddled and  not up to the high quality and intensity of the previous novel where Elio and Oliver first encountered each other.

Memory and Dreams

Landscape: Memory 

by Matthew Stadler

“If all memories decay, what of them will really ever be left? What is it that's growing from out of the rotting material of old memories? Is every moment of the past simply gone forever? Why can't they be held intact somehow?”   ― Matthew Stadler, Landscape: Memory





An excellent debut work that, through the lens of a homoerotic teen's diary or sketchbook, brilliantly portrays the atmosphere of San Francisco in the year 1915. With Maxwell, the narrator, his totally modern parents, and the allure of San Francisco during its second flowering—the glimmering years between the disaster of 1906 and the sobering effects of World War I—Stadler succeeds in a magnificent way. When Max visits the Pacific Exposition with his best friend Duncan, the son of a Persian sculptor, the prose is flavored with historical detail and childlike joy. Yet tragedy strikes early when Max's father crosses the Bay to Bolinas to continue his bird-watching hobby.

Memory and dreams seem to fill this novel with a unique atmosphere. It  seems like there is always something that is just beyond the horizon, a fleeting suggestion of the unknown. The combination of dramatic adult changes in circumstances contrasts with the growing young love between the two boys. The beautiful prose style and the effective narrative reminded me of William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf or John Knowles' A Separate Peace. This was an engrossing novel that deserves to be saluted for both the complexity of its themes and the author's lyricism. 

Finding One's Self

Things We Lost to the Water 

by Eric Nguyen

“In America, Ben felt like a foreigner, too, but in a different way, He couldn't have explained it. In New Orleans, he couldn't have explained how he and his family got there. There was a boat, a wind led them this way, and, like pilgrims, they settled. Here, in Paris, there was some choice in the matter.”  

 ― Eric Nguyen, Things We Lost to the Water





When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.

Huong gradually comes to the realization that she would never see her spouse again. Her kids, Tuan and Binh, grow up in the absence of their absent father, plagued by a man and a nation locked in their memories and imaginations, as she struggles to come to terms with this loss. As they proceed, the three adjust to life in America in various ways: Tuan joins a neighborhood Vietnamese gang in an effort to feel more connected to his heritage; Huong falls in love with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new to the area; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted country and his developing gay sexuality. Before a disaster strikes the city they now call home and threatens to split them apart, their search for identification as individuals and as a family until a calamity strikes the city they now call home and forces them to immediately find a new way to join together and cherish the connections that bind, which threatens to rip them apart.

With this magnificent novel I have once again found one of my certain to be top ten reads of the new year. This book swept me away with the fascinating story of an immigrant mother and her two boys. Ben, in particular, impressed me as the center of the story - he changes, learning to swim (at about the center of the narrative), learning to accept his gay persona, and deciding to go to Paris and become a writer. 

 Demonstrating a marvelous prose style and an ability to link together the characters' lives with details that held my interest, this first novel was wonderful and moving all the way to the last page. I immediately wanted to read it again and that is always the sign of a great read.

An Intricate Road Trip

The Lincoln Highway 

by Amor Towles

“Wouldn’t it have been wonderful, thought Woolly, if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.”   ― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

I previously enjoyed both The Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, but Amor Towles has succeeded in surpassing both of those novels with The Lincoln Highway. It is a road story with four young men exploring America and finding themselves. While these four are at the center of the novel it literally explodes with characters, most of whom are fascinating. By the time an older black man named Ulysses arrives on the scene and bonds with young Billy I was hooked and found it hard to put the book down.

In June 1954, the warden of the juvenile work farm where Emmett Watson, then 18 years old, had recently completed a fifteen-month sentence for involuntary homicide, drove him back to Nebraska. Emmett plans to travel to California with his brother Billy, age 8, so they can begin a new life there after losing their mother and father, respectively, and the family farm to bank foreclosure. However, as the warden pulls away, Emmett notices that two of his work farm friends had snuck inside the car's trunk. They have come up with a completely new strategy for Emmett's future, one that will send them all on a perilous voyage in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. The suspense builds as the journeys of the main characters head toward a denouement that is worth the more than five hundred pages it takes to get there.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel was more than entertaining with his multi-layered literary styling while providing an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

An Idealistic Doctor

The Good Doctor 

by Damon Galgut

“The funny thing is, I don't care too much. You think you love something so badly, but when it's gone you find out you don't care so much.”   ― Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor







The Good Doctor was an entertaining book with fascinating lessons from the experiences of the titular character. It was a story of hope and misery, love and rejection, political success and defeat in the shifting reality of the post-apartheid South African steppes. The well wrought narrative is fleshed out in sparse prose. 

The newly hired, spotless, idealistic doctor, Laurence Waters, is greeted by Frank Eloff, a burned-out spouse, doctor, and person, on his first day on staff. They reside in two different psychic realms despite sharing a subpar bedroom and doing medical duties in an understaffed clinic that the new political administration ignored. Frank's pessimistic evaluation of Laurence is that "he won't endure." Their story and the denouement held my interest throughout the novel.

A Generous Heart

A Gentleman in Moscow 

by Amor Towles

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”   ― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow



Imagine an aristocratic man in the Soviet Union of the 1920s who has lost favor with the Communist bureaucracy. This novel takes that situation and puts the man, Count Rostov, in house arrest of a sort in an endlessly inventive narrative. The tale evolving  from this situation is suspenseful, interesting, and entertaining. 

With the tale of Count Alexander Rostov, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a different gorgeously rendered era. The count is placed under house imprisonment in the Metropol, a luxurious hotel located across the street from the Kremlin, in 1922 after being found to be an unrepentant aristocracy by a Bolshevik tribunal. Since Rostov has never worked a day in his life, he is forced to reside in an attic room as some of the most turbulent decades in Russian history take place outside the hotel. Rostov is an unflappable man of intelligence and wit. Unexpectedly, his more limited circumstances open a gateway to a vaster universe of emotional exploration for him.

This intelligent and witty Count is a man of many interests but his love of books and reading was what intrigued me the most. It is highlighted by the importance of the Essays of Montaigne in Rostov's life. Montaigne's wit and skeptical approach to life seems to have grounded the Count, providing support for his unique living situation. Amor Towles has created another fictional world with sufficient historical under-pinning's to provide readers with delightful hours of reading.

True Friends Who Search

The Chosen 

by Chaim Potok

"'Reuven, listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?" Choose a friend,' I said. 'Yes you know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.'" - Chaim Potok, The Chosen.

This was my introduction to the world of Jewish culture. I remember sitting on my Grandmother's front porch swing during August, 1969, mesmerized by this tale of friendship in a culture very different than my own. This novel, the first from the pen of Chaim Potok, is set in the 1940s with the war going on in Europe and most of the rest of the world. It is ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs. But it is also a coming of age story and most of all a novel of ideas.

At one point David Malter tells his son:
"Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?" He paused again, his eyes misty now, then went on. "I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something.
He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here."

A search for this meaning animates the entire story. Danny's father, Reb Saunders, has found meaning in serving God and his followers, but others have sought meaning in reason rather than faith. Reuven's father, David Malter, has found meaning, and hopes to give the Holocaust itself some meaning, in his political work as a Zionist. Reuven, with the study of logic, and Danny, with the study of psychology, both think that they have found the things that will fill their lives with meaning. The story becomes a sort of gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. The Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life are contrasted with the more mainstream Orthodox Jews. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist and an activist, the Hasidic Jews are fanatics; according to Danny's father, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven becomes a rabbi. 

For me the important aspect was their search for meaning in life, a search that I subsequently found in novels as disparate as The Moviegoer, The Plague, and The Razor's Edge. It is a search that continues for me and one that made this novel memorable; that and my memory of my Grandmother's front porch swing.

Strange Boy

The Wasp Factory 

by Iain Banks

“Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.”   ― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

The novel by Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory tells the story of 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame. He lives on an island (unnamed) off the cost of Scotland with his father, Angus. Frank has no official status. He has no birth certificate and no national insurance card. At the direction of his father, he must tell anyone who asks that he is the nephew of Angus—not the son.

Angus seems to be somewhat concerned and protective of Frank. He always insists on cooking and makes all of Frank's meals. Angus keeps some things from Frank. He has a study that he keeps locked and has cautioned Frank against entering—although Frank tries the door every time his father leaves. What is the secret behind that door? Angus was a scientist before his retirement so Frank assumes that his father is conducting some kind of chemical experiments. Frank has many secrets of his own. He routinely kills and mutilates small animals and uses them in his bizarre rituals.

This is a brilliantly written novel that is inexplicably irresistible. It is also noxious and one of the most horrifying and chilling books that I have ever read. If I had read all of Freud's work I am sure I would still not understand the deep meanings of the images in Iain Banks weird novel. It is the unconventional anti-hero at the center of the novel who narrates the story of obsession and macabre behavior. This is one delinquent whose creepy charm has very limited appeal. His imagination defies description and I can only recommend this book with a warning that it is not for the faint of heart.

Headmaster for Life

The Rector of Justin 

by Louis Auchincloss

“I was sophisticated enough to know that the written word is no mirror of the writer’s character, that the amateur, though a selfless angel, may show himself a pompous ass, while the professional, a monster of ego, can convince you in a phrase that he has the innocence of a child. I”   ― Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

This novel is considered by many to be a modern classic. Whether you share that opinion or not, I believe it certainly represents the author's best work in the genre. Through his skillful use of multiple narrators and viewpoints, he underscores the elusive nature of human truth, necessarily subjective in our individual perspectives, yet ultimately existing in reality no matter how difficult to discern. In his narrative he highlights the inevitable moral blindness implicit in much human endeavor.

The narrative presents the life story of Francis Prescott, from his youth as a schoolboy to his death at age 85. As Dr. Francis Prescott, he is the Rector (headmaster) and founder of the exclusive New England Episcopalian boys' school Justin Martyr (a famous prep school). The multiple narrators' attitudes toward their subject range from veneration to hatred, thus providing a depth of character that infuses the book and elucidates effectively the somewhat larger-than-life central character of the Rector. Through the character, actions, and career of Frank Prescott, Auchincloss shows both the benefits and the dangers of such a character; the dangers are perhaps most evident to Prescott himself who, perceiving the true nature of his accomplishment at the end of his life, honestly believes that he has failed in his appointed task.

Louis Auchincloss, himself a Wall Street attorney and a product of Groton, among the most eminent of American preparatory schools, has often used such schools in his fiction to help delineate the background formation of his characters. Never before or since, however, has he so successfully presented the implicit irony, or even absurdity, of the existence in the United States of an educational alternative frankly based on the elitist British public school yet ostensibly dedicated to the ideals of democracy. The book is both well written and compulsively readable, and a fine introduction to this modern author. If you enjoy this novel I would recommend Auchincloss's short stories.

Pursuing a Life of Science

Transcendent Kingdom 

by Yaa Gyasi

“...We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.”   ― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

This novel, the author's second, is a thoughtful, yet often emotional narrative of the life of a young black woman, named Gifty, who is of Ghanaian descent. She is a sixth-year PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she studies reward-seeking behavior in mice as well as the neural circuits of depression and addiction.

She is dealing with issues involving family, religion, and science as she grows up to become a intelligent scientist. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after becoming addicted to OxyContin due to an ankle injury. From the opening pages of the novel we learn about her mother who has many issues with living and has taken up residence in her bed. While her father has abandoned the family and returned to Ghana. He said to them "I'm going home to visit my brother . . . and then he never came back."

Gifty is determined to find a scientific explanation for the suffering she witnesses all around her. Even as she turns to the hard sciences to solve the mystery of her family's death, she finds herself yearning for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as enticing as it is elusive. At one point in her pursuit of science she thinks, "What's the point?" and it became a refrain for her.

I was impressed with the non-linear timeline of the first person narrative as the transition from the present to the past was never confusing. In spite of the difficulties she faces, Gifty's journey through life becomes one of hope for the future.