Lori Eshleman's Blog, page 2

Are Your My Mother, by Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This graphic memoir considers the author’s relationship with her mother through the lens of psychotherapy, humor, and self-doubt. I enjoyed that it sometimes reads like a primer on the therapeutic process, enlightened by Freud, Donald Winnicott, Lacan, Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath and others. Snippets from writings on the transitional object, undoing, mirror-role, compliant behavior, the false self, and detachment are explored through conversations with Bechdel’s therapists, her mother, relationships with girlfriends, dreams, and reflections on the writing process and how much is too much to share about her parents. Her mother, Helen, was a stay-at-home mom who made time for her love of acting – we see her applying makeup, dressed up and transformed into roles in The Miser and A Little Night Music; and alternately in the kitchen in a kerchief and apron washing dishes. She tells her daughter at age 7 that she is too old to kiss goodnight anymore; and confesses that her own mother taught her “That boys are more important than girls” (264). She comes across as a harried, hard-working mother who has a mind and self of her own. The incisively drawn images, speech bubbles, and captions weave together much like jottings in a journal; shunt back and forth through time; and spin out telephone conversations, memories, and anxieties. Bechdel, whether toddler, teen, or successful writer and artist, persistently reflects on herself and her mother through the mirror of her art.



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Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I was drawn in by this futuristic story of an Artificial Friend named Klara, who is chosen as a companion for teenage Josie. Narrated in the first-person by Klara, we see the world through her eyes as she works to make sense of the geometric images, the lights and darks, and the new, often confusing, environment she moves through. Rooms and people divide up into boxes, and images from Klara’s limited past overlay her present sensations. Her relation to her environment is tentative and searching, yet she notices details that are beyond the ken of most humans, like the number of sheep in a field. She approaches Josie with the same searching openness, wanting to understand, yet aware of her machine limitations. Josie and her mother live in a house outside the city in a field near a barn, with one neighbor – Josie’s best friend Rick and his mother. Ishiguro describes the fields and barn and house through Klara’s eyes with simplified geometric precision, like a Grant Wood painting. It becomes clear that Josie is ill--though the cause of her illness isn’t obvious. Devoted Klara takes on a mission to save her through what seem like delusional beliefs about the nourishing qualities of the Sun, whom she imagines sets in the neighboring barn. She often feels like an outsider with people, who treat her variously as if she isn’t there, as if she’s an object, or as if they are angry, annoyed, or kindly-feeling toward her. In other words the way humans treat other humans -- but Klara is more accepting of it than we are. A few other characters come into the mix: Josie’s father, from whom her mother is divorced, who has been removed from his job and lives in a different, less perfected, world than his family; the “portrait man,” Mr. Capaldi, who laboriously creates a mysterious image of Josie in his city studio and is oddly interested in Klara; and Rick, who is “unlifted” in contrast to Josie. The reader receives hints of what it means to be lifted and unlifted through a bureaucratic system that sorts out those destined to be successful – the high-ranking -- and those that are not. Ishiguro allows us careful, fragmented glimpses into this future world, whose systemic divisions echo our own. A few incidents stand out in Klara’s memory: a scene at a waterfall with Josie’s mother, when “the Mother” treats her like a real little girl; the “dark sky morning” when the sunlight floods Josie’s bedroom; the shelves and ceramic coffee cups in the showroom where Klara first waited to be chosen. As these memories replay in Klara’s thoughts, the reader is reminded of the vivid, yet limited, playlist of charged memories in our own lives. Through this tender, haunting novel, we are shown we may have more in common with Klara than we think. The question of human-technology interface is increasingly relevant now – and the question that threads through this novel, of whether there is “something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer” (207). And, if there is…where does it exist?



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Hamnet, by Maggie Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This fictional rendering of the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes (Anne) Hathaway in Stratford, centers on the death of their son, Hamnet, in 1596. In the novel Agnes is a kind of wild-child who gathers herbs in the wood, heals the sick, and has second sight, which allows her to see people’s character and fate. When she meets a young Latin tutor at her family home, she is strangely drawn to him, seeing something special in him unlike anyone else she has met. Young Will is also drawn to her, although he is younger and dependent on his father’s glove-making business. The novel alternates between the story of Agnes and Will’s love affair, marriage and children – and desperate scenes of young Hamnet and his twin sister Judith’s sudden sickening with the plague. The alternating chapters help build suspense. Woven into the story are Will’s long absences as he builds a successful career in play-writing and theater in London. Beyond the fact that Will is seen scribbling in the attic, his play-writing is little visible in the novel until the end, when his play Hamlet becomes an event of urgent interest to Agnes, named as it is after their son. The novel reaches a climax as Agnes races to London for the first time, to see the play, accompanied by her brother. While at times the characters’ emotions seem overwrought, details of 16th century life in England add interest to the narrative. One of my favorite chapters involved the travels of a plague-carrying flea from Alexandria to Stratford. A particularly visceral chapter details the preparation of the body of Hamnet for burial by the women of the family. If you are a fan of Shakespeare, this novel makes for interesting historical speculation – but don’t expect to learn a lot about Shakespeare’s vocation.



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Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A teenage girl and her parents participate in a historical reenactment of Iron Age life in northern England, led by a professor and his students. Seventeen-year-old Silvie chafes at the rough tunic and thin leather moccasins, the damp sleeping hut, and the labor of cooking for the encampment done mostly by her mum. But her dad, a bus driver, is an ancient history buff who has planned their summer vacation around this Iron Age adventure. Besides daily activities of foraging for food, hunting and skinning rabbits, cooking over a fire, and exploring the surrounding bog and heath, Moss entertains us with bits of history about the Roman Wall, pre-Roman Britain, and Iron Age basket-making. More ominously, we learn about the bog people who were sacrificed by the ancient Britons and preserved for 2000 years, surfacing in today’s museums. Oddly enough, Silvie’s father named her after Sulevia, the “Northumbrian goddess of spring and pools” (18.) As the novel unfolds, so too do the relationships between the mismatched academics and the working-class family. Silvie sneaks off with the students to swim in the sea and sneak candy and ice cream from a shop in a nearby village. Watching Molly, the free-spirited archaeology student, embrace her own sensuality awakens something in Silvie, which draws her father’s ire. Dad is the type of man who orders women around and resents immigrants. His love of Iron Age Britain is a seeking after a more “authentic” Britain, where he imagines he would be in charge. He and the professor hit it off, just as Silvie and Molly’s connection deepens. Gradually the reenactment becomes more daring and sinister as the men build a palisade topped with animal skulls, modeled after the ancient British “ghost wall” -- and begin to drum back the past. Drawn to the nighttime drumming almost despite herself, Silvie seems a willing participant, and the reenactment unwinds toward a frightening climax. By turns tender, pastoral, and savage, this novel is a haunting reflection on life, death, history, and family ties.





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Summerwater, by Sarah Moss

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set at a summer resort in Scotland, this short novel exposes the inner thoughts of the guests in the course of one rain-drenched day. These are the kind of thoughts most people have, but don’t share. The under-belly of relationships between children and parents, lovers, and siblings. Trapped in aging log cabins in the incessant rain, this is no-one’s ideal vacation. An agoraphobic woman stays in the cabin, unable to savor her hour of freedom, while her husband takes the kids to play along the water. A woman goes jogging in the rain to escape her husband and children. A teen kayaks across the loch in a strong wind and turbulent waves. A pair of siblings torment a foreign child on a swing by the water. A young couple make love all day, each with a sense of unmet expectations. A teenage girl is forced to wash the dishes, and channels every ounce of hate into scrubbing a flaking, greasy, non-stick pan; while she plots to visit a silent veteran who camps in the woods. Each of the characters tempts fate in their own way. And the sense that something bad will happen grows. Someone will die -- of murder, drowning, heart attack, suicide…something awful is coming to these log cabins along the loch. Moss carefully crafts our sense of dread; until unexpectedly, near the end of the novel, she gives a twist of hope – things will be alright,…won’t they? But like the twist of a knife, some things can’t be undone.



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A Crooked Tree, by Una Mannion

A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Set in a rural area on Valley Forge Mountain in Pennsylvania in the 1980’s, this is a coming of age story of a 15-year-old girl. Libby lives with her siblings and divorced mother in a wooded area, after the death of her Irish-born father whom she adored. The novel starts with a jolt when her unpredictable mother leaves her younger sister Ellen by the side of a road 5 miles from home after an argument. From that moment the book doesn’t let the reader go. Mannion immerses us in the teen culture of the 1980’s – the music, the clothes, the teens hanging out drinking and smoking weed on the mountain, the slights and paybacks between schoolmates. Libby is on the cusp of adulthood, and still feels like the mountain is her special place – the paths so familiar she can walk them in the dark; the destinations like Washington’s Headquarters, the two towers, and her hiding place called the Kingdom, located near a crooked tree. She studies trees, while her brother Thomas scans the stars and 12-year-old Ellen draws amazing sketches. Little Beatrice, her mother’s favorite, has a different father they have never met. Their oldest sister, Marie, turned 18 and about to move to Philadelphia, is the closest thing they have to stability. Then there is the mysterious motor-cycle-riding bad-boy, Wilson McVay, who is rumored to deal drugs and have committed robbery. In the unfolding sequence of events when Ellen doesn’t immediately return home, Wilson becomes the family’s unlikely protector. In typical teen fashion, the siblings keep a disturbing secret about Ellen from their mother and other adults. As it turns out, the adults keep secrets, too. Mixed in with ordinary events like baby-sitting a neighbor’s little boys, mowing the lawn, making costumes for a small-town parade and shopping at the mall, a stranger comes to the mountain seeking retribution – and the novel crescendos into a tangle of violence, with the police one step behind. In the course of that evening, Libby steps up to protect those she loves, the secrets spill out -- and she and her family are forever changed. Although I grew up in the 50’s I loved this novel, which catapulted me back to my own teenage years, with its similar mix of secrets, tensions, and things not understood.



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The Lucky Ones, by Rachel Cusk

The Lucky Ones by Rachel Cusk

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The ambiguities of parenthood, marriage, and relationships across the spectrum of gender and class are explored in this novel comprised of loosely interrelated stories. The novel opens with a very pregnant woman in prison, whose only friend is her cellmate, and whose only hope is a lawyer who believes she was wrongfully convicted. She is not one of “the lucky ones.” Cusk’s description of her situation is unflinching and visceral. The second story shifts to a privileged group of friends on a ski trip in the French Alps. Martin, a man who has fled his nursing wife and newborn child, finds a reckless kind of freedom on the icy slopes. In “The Sacrifices,” an unnamed woman returns to her childhood home and reflects on her mother’s relentless withholding of love, and her own uneasy relationship to her stepson. The final two stories are set in a village in South England. We meet Mrs. Daley, an aging and manipulative mother who plays games with her daughter Josephine on the phone: games that involve inducing guilt or self-doubt in her daughter. Josephine ultimately returns home with her newborn child, in the grips of post-partum depression, where her father offers her the compassion and caring that Mrs. Daley is unable to give either of them. The closing story, “Matters of Life and Death,” was my favorite. The glittering snowy world of this story carried me away from my desert environment in Arizona, my breath taken away in the cold. Vanessa is a wife and mother who is entirely absorbed in the labor of caretaking her two small boys, as she and her husband Colin pull apart in growing alienation, each caught in rigid gender roles. Their unfolding break-up lurches with a sense of catastrophe toward Mrs. Daley’s annual holiday party. But the catastrophe, when it comes, is oddly life-renewing. At times, I found the characters in this novel hard to like, and the stories difficult to interrelate – I found myself going back to check a name here and there and try to put together the pieces. But the psychological honesty and deromanticized view of the complex intermeshing of parent and child, husband and wife, body and soul, are refreshing -- and typical of Cusk’s work.



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Review of Florida, by Lauren Groff

Florida by Lauren Groff

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This short story collection focuses on people on the edge, especially women on the edge – whether emotionally, psychologically, or financially – caught in an intense sense of peril, for themselves and others. In muscular, evocative prose, Groff pulls us into the life of a man whose father studied and collected snakes and how he comes to terms with his own life in a terrifying moment on a paddleless boat in an alligator-infested lake. And into recurring stories of a mother who walks restlessly through the nights while her husband and children wait at home; who becomes trapped by a prowling panther in a summer cabin in the Florida scrub with her children -- after the mother falls and hits her head, it becomes unclear whether the panther is without or within. In another story she takes her children to southern France to research the life of Guy de Maupassant. In this culminating story, the mother sees ominous signs in the seagulls at her window, the man who rents them an apartment in Yport, and even the glass bottles that reappear on her doorstep. Taking her children across a high and windy bridge by the sea, she has “visions of their shirts filling with wind, pushing them up and into the air like kites, their little faces first dazzled and delighted and then the slow dawn of dread as they begin to blow away. She would tether them here, to the earth, with her body” (240). While the characters in these stories seek shelter and fiercely protect their children, their efforts are continually undone, often at their own hand, by intense fears, delusional thinking, and precarious circumstances – all intensified by the alien flora and fauna of Florida. “She is no longer frightened of reptiles, she who is frightened of everything…She is frightened of climate change, this summer the hottest on record, plants dying all around…She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but no longer than they do” (161). For readers seeking shelter from the turbulence of our times, there is no shelter here; but rather insights into our fears and vulnerabilities.



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Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A short, magical novel, set in a country villa in Southern France, where a renowned British poet, Joe Jacobs, is summering with his wife Isabel, a war correspondent who is often absent; their teenage daughter, Nina; and two friends. What should be a peaceful retreat is interrupted by a beautiful young woman first seen swimming in the villa’s pool. Kitty Finch is birdlike in her movements, and as likely to appear unclothed as clothed. Supposedly a botanist, she is also a poet who is obsessed with Joe and has brought a poem for him to read. It is soon evident that her mind is as untethered as her clothing, and yet she has a propensity to charm some, like Joe and Nina, while repelling others. Isabel allows her to stay with them, even though her husband is notably unfaithful. Kitty flits in and out of their lives, visiting the beach in Nice with 14-year-old Nina, lunching in town with Joe, and startling one of the guests in the kitchen in the middle of the night, where she nibbles on a piece of chocolate stolen from his rat-trap. The guest, Mitchell, abhors Kitty, as does the elderly neighbor who watches them from her balcony. Mice (including a blue sugar mouse), rats, ants, a centipede, and pebbles with holes in them all suggest the gnawing, eroding, contingent quality of life. At the center of the novel is the swimming pool, which is ominously cut from stone and which Joe compares to a coffin. There is also a vertiginous and repeated scene of Kitty driving Joe in the dark up a winding mountain road. Like the car, the characters seem about to veer off the road. The ties of marriage and fidelity and filial love are too fraught to bind them. And the enigmatic Kitty becomes a vehicle for disruption and self-discovery. As she tells Joe, “I know what you’re thinking. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all” (146). I especially like this line, which so aptly sums up our own hopes and uncertainties.



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The List of Things That Will Not Change, by Rebecca Stead

The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One of my favorite books over the holidays, this work of children’s fiction took me back to what it feels like to be ten years old and entangled in family changes and school conflicts. I followed young Bea’s struggle to adapt to her parent’s divorce and her father’s upcoming marriage to his boyfriend, Jesse, with a mix of smiles, trepidation, and sympathy. On the surface, Bea has a great relationship with the two men and her mother, but is prone to outbursts of anger and rash actions. Her therapist, Miriam, helps her find words and images for her feelings, with the aid of a jar of gummi bears. Bea hopes her desire to have a sister will be fulfilled in the person of Jesse’s daughter, Sonia. But there are a few bumps in the road to their new sisterhood. And of course there is an annoying lunch-mate at school; a cousin, Angelica, who ignores her for new friends on the family vacation; and a troublesome relative who rejects her dad and Jesse’s relationship. School activities loom large in Bea’s daily life, with the usual small shames and victories, such as Bea’s struggle to make butter for the “colonial breakfast,” and the bucket of oysters Jesse obligingly brings to class, which the students at first refuse to eat. While at times her young friends come across as older than their years, I loved Bea’s whole-hearted embrace of life – and the healing moments of forgiveness and reconciliation in her narrative.



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