Lori Eshleman's Blog

The Breeding Season, Amanda Niehaus

The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Visceral and wrenching, this Australian novel looks at the afterlives of a couple whose child died before birth. Elise huddles in bed, while Dan tries to continue his work ghost-writing a memoir for his uncle, a famous artist. This is a couple who cannot talk, who cannot comfort each other, each seeing the situation from within the boundaries of their own gender and sexuality. Ultimately, Elise takes refuge in her fieldwork as a biologist who studies animals’ sexual behavior and reproduction. One animal she studies, the antechinus, mates for a couple weeks and then the male dies. Her dream is to write a book that demonstrates “how we run the show, use behavior and physiology to control reproduction. Females, I mean” (185). Meanwhile, Dan considers whether his uncle’s overtly sexual artwork evokes the male gaze, or embodies a woman’s own sexual identity – and specifically that of his uncle’s muse, the beautiful Hannah Wallace. With Elise absent on fieldtrips, Dan becomes increasingly obsessed with Hannah, whose entire body is covered with tattoos and who has a mysterious and enigmatic self-possession. As Dan and Elise finally begin to re-discover their love for each other, the end of the book brings another dark and gut-wrenching twist. Life and death, art and science, the sexual and the psychological, intermingle in this book -- much as male and female bodies come together in bursts of heat and flesh and fluid. And the fate of the human male seems to mirror that of the antechinus.



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The Giant's House, Elizabeth McCracken

The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A quixotic romance with elements of fable, this novel is both quirky and profoundly humane. Set in Brewsterville, Cape Cod, in the 1950’s, it tells the story of a red-headed boy who becomes a giant, narrated through the voice of the town librarian, Peggy Cort. A spinster herself, she becomes enthralled with the awkward and rapidly-growing young man who visits the library. She not only offers James books that suit his intense curiosity about the world and his place in it, but befriends his mother, Mrs. Sweatt, a languid alcoholic, and his uncle and aunt, with whom they live. Peggy becomes a fixture at the house, and ultimately at the large-scale, single-room giant’s house constructed in their backyard especially for James. School chums and curiosity-seekers visit the giant’s house, where Peggy becomes James’ informal assistant, after his mother’s death. Through Peggy’s eyes, McCracken lays bare James’ awareness of social isolation, his desire to be known for more than his great size, the debilitating health effects of gigantism. A sense of doom hangs over the story, because, after all, giants do not live long. The reader becomes intimately aware of his body, the huge feet that require special shoes, the braces that rub sores into his legs, the fragility of his bones, the contortions of accommodating to cars, chairs, rooms. Peggy and James embark on several adventures, notably to appear at the Barnum and Bailey’s Circus in New York, where he meets Leila, “the Smallest Woman in the World”(192). Flirty Leila asks why he and Peggy don’t marry. The question hangs over the end of the novel, because in spite of their difference in size and age, these two mismatched humans do love each other. I was completely drawn into this fable – albeit uncertain about the novel’s ending, and the manner in which Peggy Cort contrives to carry on James’ legacy. On a personal note, I loved the description of the library, which, like the Carnegie Library in my hometown, has “two stories of stacks with frosted glass floors. These floors–an invention of the nineteenth century--were composed of panes cloudy as cataracts which allowed only close-up objects to show through” (21).



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Wayward, Dana Spiotta

Wayward by Dana Spiotta

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After making an offer on a deteriorating architectural gem of a house in a run-down neighborhood of Syracuse, Sam Raymond realizes that she is leaving her husband, their comfortable suburban life – and almost incidentally, her 16-year-old daughter, Ally. Gradually the backstory emerges, of a husband and daughter to whom Sam feels invisible, or at least beside the point. Of a woman who loves history and works several days a week at the 19th century Clara Loomis House – a job she enjoys, but is surely not enough to live on. Of a perimenopausal woman subject to flashes of heat and emotion, who is seeking her place in the world, an identify of her own. But there is something driven about the way Sam embraces a narrow (but expensive!) mattress in a barely-heated old house, begins to train her body to run and lift weights, and surfs the rabbit-hole of social media and Syracuse society for feminist, edgy groups of women with whom she might identify. Everywhere she turns, she encounters hypocrisy and faux-engagement – and the well-coiffed, aging women with whom she feels little in common, whose bodies she harshly describes. Wanting to overcome her perceived weakness, to feel powerful, Sam instead runs up against a wall – of her daughter’s distance, her mother’s unwillingness to share her cancer diagnosis, of her own awkward attempts to reveal her needs and perceptions to the larger world. After witnessing the shooting of a black teenager, she is suddenly at the center of something real. But, apologetic and uncomfortable with her own privilege, she feels insufficient for this role, too.

In tandem with Sam’s quest, we hear Ally’s story and watch her come of age in a seedy relationship with an older man who is her mentor. More centered than her mother, Ally also seeks to push across her boundaries, but seems little unsettled by the experience. Sam’s mother Lily comes across as another strong woman, yet keeps her daughter at arm’s length. Finally, there is the story of Clara Loomis, a 19th century advocate of free love who runs off to the utopian Oneida Community as a teenager – another transgressor whose story in some sense parallels Ally’s and Sam’s. Some of the most enjoyable aspects of this novel are the settings in Syracuse, the careful descriptions of architecture, and the forays into history focused on the fictional Clara Loomis House. I found the novel at times funny, at times riveting, at times unsympathetic. Sam seems stuck in the rut of her own anger and self-doubt. The end of the story unexpectedly pulls the three women into a mystical generational union, beyond aging and death – yet there are few hints of such comfort earlier.




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The Souvenir Museum, by Elizabeth McCracken

The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book of short stories was my first experience with Elizabeth McCracken, and I was mesmerized. The second story narrates the difficult relationship between a widowed father in the early stages of dementia and his dutiful son, who takes him on a trip to Scotland. Braving the rocky shores of Scottish Islands in search of puffins and other seabirds, the elderly, bird-lover father embraces life and adventure with open arms, while his cautious son comes face-to-face with his own fears and disengagement – leaving the reader wondering which one is actually more limited? Themes of theater and theme-parks and magic weave in and out, suggesting the many faces of humans, the allure of the pretend, and how the pretend can point to the true. In “Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark” a gay couple takes their young son, Cody, to a waterpark because he loves rivers. As in the first story, the two men are a study in personality difference, yet bound together by love – including love of red-haired Cody. Through a series of mishaps at the hilariously German-themed waterpark, the older man, Bruno, comes to realize just how much he cares for both his son and his partner. In several stories, we encounter Jack and Sadie, whose love affair begins when Sadie encounters Jack at the end of a parade where he appears as a giant puppet: Sadie, short and not a lover of puppets, but definitely struck by Jack, “tall and skeletal” (176). Later in life, we encounter the couple on their honeymoon on a houseboat in Amsterdam, where they find that it’s impossible to get tickets to Anne Franks’ house and that being married brings new expectations and frictions. In the wake of an argument about having a child and news of a sudden death in the family, Sadie thinks, “She loved puppets, too, of course she did. Before, and during, and even after, she loved them, those dear beings…who died of abandonment over and over. And then were resurrected” (239).



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The Vietri Project, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

The Vietri Project by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A 25-year-old Italian-American woman travels the world, ever on the move, driven by mistrust of her genetics, wariness of her mother’s Italian family, and an inability to craft a sense of self. Gabriele ends up in Rome, where she launches a quest to uncover the life of an elderly man, Giordano Vietri, who had ordered hundreds of esoteric books from the bookstore in Berkley where she worked. In the process, she hopes to give her own life a shape and purpose. Her research unveils the Italian past, including the fascist years and the campaign in Africa, the site of a massacre of civilians by Italian soldiers. At first, except for her cousin Andrea, Gabriele avoids her Italian relatives, whom she hasn’t seen for a decade. Her self-doubt focuses on a fear of being swallowed up by the large Italian family, “imagining the sticky ties that were already trying to pull me in” (126) -- and by the idée-fixe that she will share her mother’s fate in becoming schizophrenic in her twenties. It took me some time to engage with this novel, but as Gabriele uncovers the history of signor Vietri, entwined as it is with the life of a famous Italian artist, the Italian campaign in Africa, and prisoner of war camps in England, I could not put the novel down. I wondered along with the narrator, “What was one to do with all of this? Nothing could ever be only one thing in Rome, everything had already been touched by so many wars, traumas, millennia, the city was greedy for history…” (125-6) Although I was bothered by the many comma splices piled on top of each other, denying order to the writing, the style mirrors Gabriele’s inability to form goals or decide what she likes: “What was wrong with me that I’d now seen the better part of another continent and I couldn’t name a place I liked best” (93). The journalist, Roberto, whom she meets near the end of the novel, warns her about her obsessive research, “Of course. It’s something you have to learn as a journalist…When to let a story go” (186). Indeed, I wondered how the author would bring this story to an end, but in some way she does.



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The Northern Reach, by W. S. Winslow

The Northern Reach by W.S. Winslow

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set on the coast of Maine, this novel intertwines the lives of several generations of families who make a hard-scrabble living off of fishing, farming, and tending to the needs of the locals. These are hard-drinking, hard-living folk who sooner break apart their families than stay together. Among the characters who stand out is Liliane Bertrand Baines, a Frenchwoman who marries an officer in the American merchant marines and finds herself marooned in an alien place lacking the comforts of French food and manners, with a husband who is absent at sea much of the time. Small wonder she accepts nice cuts of meat and more from a local man who speaks French. Then there’s Victoria Moody, or Vicky, who fled small-town Wellbridge as soon as she graduated, and only returns (on the arm of a city fiancé) for her father’s funeral -- the father who did time for driving a snowmobile into her mother. But things go wrong at the funeral when her estranged mother shows up in a red miniskirt and her drunken relatives return to the cemetery at night, intent on digging up the body. After getting arrested, Vicky finds herself back in Wellbridge for good. Some of my favorite chapters are at the end of the book, which deals, appropriately, with death. Well-heeled Alice Culligan has the disconcerting experience of hovering around her children in spirit-form after her death, hearing what they really think of her and who they really are. “Alice lingered just long enough to gather up all the things she should have known, and with her last thought, she gave herself over to the smoke, blended with it, became it, wafting, whisper, wisp, gone” (192). In the eerie “Trinity,” the old vegetable farmer Albert Edgecomb suffers daily visits from the ghosts of his parents, pointing like a divining rod toward the searing moment of his father’s death and the sense of guilt he carries decades later. It is such characters, their imperfect and truncated lives, and their entangled family trees that leave an imprint on the reader that cannot be washed away.



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Antiquities, by Cynthia Ozick

Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Narrated as a memoir dated in the 1940’s, this short novel reflects on the family history and schoolmates of an elderly man, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, who lives in a retirement home remodeled from the very school he attended as a young man, the Temple Academy. Lloyd describes his prized possessions – antiquities brought back from Egypt by his father, whose cousin was a famous archaeologist. Also the Remington typewriter that he inherited from his former secretary and lover, Peg. When his typewriter is sabotaged, apparently by one of the octogenarians who live in the retirement home, Lloyd’s view of his elderly neighbors turns spiteful and he is not sorry when the man breaks a hip and dies. Through his eyes we see the biased attitudes that prevailed at the school, such that any Jewish student who attended was bullied and humiliated. Of particular interest in Lloyd’s narrative is the mysterious Ben-Zion Elefantin, who claims descent from inhabitants of the island of Elephantine in the Nile, whose history parallels that of the Israelites. Lloyd details their afternoon chess games together, tries to transcribe the ancestry told to him by Ben-Zion, and hints at a romantic affection for the other boy. Because of their mutual connection to Egypt, he imagines they have some commonality, but Ben-Zion scoffs at the antiquities Lloyd shows him, as false tourist goods. From time to time Lloyd questions his own memory and whether the Elefantin history is real or just a figment of his own imagination: “Is Ben-Zion Elefantin’s testimony, if I may take it to be that, a wizardly act of my own deceit?” (108). Years later, Lloyd wonders whether Ben-Zion rejected him, not because of the Egyptian stork vase he tried to gift him: “Was my father’s stork, with its blinded eye, the abomination, or was it I?” (157). While at first, I found this novel’s style old-fashioned, I was ultimately pulled into the tension between the staid and respectable narrator and his affection for this long-lost young man; between the anti-Semitism he and his schoolmates took for granted and the fascination with a Jewish boy and his history. Much as archaeology reveals what is unseen, so excavating this story exposes what we may be unaware of. As Lloyd asks, “can memory, like dream, fabricate what ordinary consciousness cannot?” (167).



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Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set in an Italian city, each brief chapter offers a slice of life of the narrator, a forty-something unmarried woman as she goes about her daily life: dinner parties with friends; running into a certain man she likes, who is married to a friend; visiting her elderly mother in another town. In each chapter she explores her sense of self – a person detached from the typical life of spouse and children, pets and home-ownership; a person who prefers to stay in her place, her town, rather than venture out into something new and strange. A person who reflects on her relationship to her distant, measured father, and her angry mother. Who grew up with a sense of falling short. Of her father, she thinks, “You always wanted calm seas. You used to claim that you got along with everyone, that you kept to yourself, that you needed nothing from no one. But one can’t ask the sea to never swell into rage” (147). As she says, “There’s no escape from the shadows that mount, inexorably, in this darkening season. Nor can we escape the shadows our families cast” (112). Voyeuristically, she looks on at her friend and the man she likes, even following them on one occasion; only when she pet-sits for them during an emergency do the feelings of envy diminish, replaced by a sense of the mundane. At the end of the novel, she prepares to leave for a year for a fellowship in a new place. Walking along the street before leaving, she sees a woman dressed exactly like herself, and follows her. “My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I’m me and also someone else, that I’m leaving and also staying” (151). This phrase, that one can both leave and stay, gave me a measure of comfort, knitting the past and the present together, stasis and change. Because in moving forward, we also do not leave the past behind.



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The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Despite the title, much of this novel focuses on the body, specifically on the body of an adjunct English professor named Dorothy who is experiencing a slow-motion medically-managed miscarriage due to the failure of her embryo to develop. Dorothy keeps this secret from everyone but her partner Rog – even from her best friend Gaby and her therapist (or more precisely both her therapists). She concludes, “The body was ruled by irregularity. All was chaos” (214). As for the life of the mind, her mind mixes together thoughts about her bodily functions, intense insecurities in her social interactions, and critical literature theories from graduate school. As an underpaid and office-less adjunct faculty toiling over a printer in the library and dealing with social media-absorbed students, though, she “thought how naïve she had once been to believe there was anything glamorous about the life of the mind” (212). The novel also explores the drive for success and the strait-jacket hierarchies of academia, as fellow Harvard graduates surge past her with their successful books and conference papers. I started this novel with high hopes, but found the main character unsympathetic, as the author herself states in the voice of her 2nd therapist; and full of “useless contrarianism and resignation” (113), in the words of a book she has a conversation with. But this novel does offer unique perspectives on loss, identity, and the jumbled stream of thoughts we are all subject to. For example, as someone who recently lost a beloved pet, I found this statement moving: “Thus, Dorothy reasoned, the trauma when a pet dies—not only has the owner lost companionship, but time itself has ruptured or split open” (100).



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The Promise, Damon Galgut

The Promise by Damon Galgut

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This South African novel covers three decades in the life of the Swart family and their farm, from the time of apartheid to the resignation of President Jacob Zuma. The novel is organized around the sequential deaths of four family members, and – rather like Howard’s End – around a promise made to give a house to the black family housekeeper, Salome. A promise long-delayed. Among the family, only the youngest daughter, Amor, seems troubled by this broken vow. Among the tensions in the family, religion is prominent. The mother, Rachel, wants to be buried in the Jewish traditions of her upbringing, which greatly offends her husband. Manie is a follower of an evangelical preacher who has wheedled him out of some of his land to build a church adjacent to the farm. Among Manie’s other ventures is a Reptile Park, which draws tourists. The unhappy eldest son, Anton, despises religion and middle-class society and dreams of writing a novel. In conflict with his father, he deserts the army and leads a vagabond life a while. Amor herself runs off to London, then to Durban, where she becomes a nurse in an AIDS ward. The middle daughter, Astrid, makes two unhappy marriages. This is a troubled family, the center cannot hold. Meanwhile, the sprawling farmhouse becomes neglected, surrounded by multiple security fences and gates, as black South Africans contest the property after the end of apartheid. Galgut evokes the desolate terrain and sudden storms with rich prose: “There’s a hot wind gusting now, and black clouds rolling in from the east. Thunder gargling away in the back throat of the sky” (265). He uses a shifting narrative perspective that moves suddenly from an individual to a group and back, all in the same paragraph. Collective experience invades the intimate perspective of individuals, letting us know more than one person would know, even down to the authorial voice: “Be on your way, Amor, that lightening is coming back for you. Unfinished business, best left that way” (266). I found this multi-valent narrative to be strangely freeing and true. Our life experiences are not felt in isolation or on a linear path, but abruptly interrupted by people, animals, environment, inner thoughts and sensations, and outer words. Powerful and moving, this novel captures a rich weft of experience, trauma, and change.



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