A story in a triangle cornered by puzzling mystery, compelling drama blended with a helping of melodrama, and prize winning Canadian literary fiction!A story in a triangle cornered by puzzling mystery, compelling drama blended with a helping of melodrama, and prize winning Canadian literary fiction!
Solace is a typical northern Ontario town. Home base to millions of mosquitoes in countless lakes; a year comprised of two seasons – winter and July; surrounded by marsh, swamp, rivers, and boreal forest with only one road in and one road out – the opposite sides of the same road that eventually wends its way south to Toronto; fun evenings out and dating restricted to watching the hockey games at the local rink, shopping at the Hudson’s Bay Store or asking the waitress at the local café for the daily special with a plate of pie à la mode to close out the evening festivities!
A reader’s natural inclination might be to yawn and wonder what possible stories might be told about such a dreary location. But Mary Lawson has prepared a novel that weaves and braids three first person narratives into perspectives that overlap each other in real time and unfold into an absolutely brilliant, breathtaking, heartwarming and heartbreaking, humorous, evocative and thoroughly compelling tale of down home Canadian drama that never drifts away from credible realism for even an instant. The first narrator is Clara, the youngest daughter in a family and the younger sibling of a missing rebellious teen. The second is a recently divorced man and the new owner of a house gifted to him by a woman who knew and loved him when he was a child. That woman, Elizabeth, is the third narrator, telling her story and her memories of a thirty year old crime from her death bed in a hospital where she knows she will succumb to terminal heart disease much sooner than later.
Covering themes of love, death, chronic infertility, child abduction, teen rebellion and runaways, grief, and remorse, A TOWN CALLED SOLACE was a pleasure to read and is easy to recommend as a 5-star winner and one of my favourites of the year.
“As the World Turns” at One Main Street in 1960s Ballybuckleboo, Ireland
Fans of Patrick Taylor’s magnificent IRISH COUNTRY DOCTOR series certainly won“As the World Turns” at One Main Street in 1960s Ballybuckleboo, Ireland
Fans of Patrick Taylor’s magnificent IRISH COUNTRY DOCTOR series certainly won’t be disappointed with his continuing servings of life, love, medical practice, sickness and worry, joy and merriment, happiness and grief, drama and melodrama, sadness and humor in the 12th in a series that just keeps on giving! The trials, tribulations, and realities of medical practice in mid-20th century Ireland are related in a series of vignettes through the novel. At the same time, the much-loved cast members, old friends and family all (augmented by a new trainee, Dr Connor Nelson) continue to live, love, grow, entertain and enthrall readers.
This is an astonishing series with marathon legs that seem to be giving no indication of weakening or tiring. I’m a confirmed fan and Patrick Taylor may count on me coming back for more. Definitely recommended.
“It was the first time in her life that she had spoken with a woman daring enough to think and act for herself.”
The informative forward in the edi“It was the first time in her life that she had spoken with a woman daring enough to think and act for herself.”
The informative forward in the edition which I read, defined “odd women” as:
“displaced spinsters … the largely middle-class victims of a cruel and restrictive traditional ethic which allowed women no social or economic alternative to marriage. Convinced that the essence of ladylike gentility was never ‘to earn’, and enslaved by the myth that their femininity depended upon qualities of helplessness and passivity, these untrained women workers were forced to compete for the genteel but marginal wages of a governess or companion when family funds expired.”
Written in an era in which societal norms and the constraints of religion and propriety restricted polite female roles to wives and mothers within marriage - itself constrained by a multitude of unwritten rules - THE ODD WOMEN is a courageous, forward-looking story of a handful of ambitious women who dared to break that mold. Modern parlance would accuse Gissing of indulging radical “woke” feminism. Despite the more traditional, indeed misogynistic tones of his earlier works, in THE ODD WOMEN Gissing explored a multitude of themes from a more enlightened perspective – spinsterhood and satisfaction with a lifetime decision to celibacy; career women and career satisfaction in non-traditional professional occupations; marriage for love as opposed to being strictly a decision of economic security; free love relationships and non-traditional common law marriages; divorce and marital separation; the development of a business school for women; a critique of the traditional, intensely male-focused inheritance laws; and more.
Despite being a Victorian novel (written in 1893), THE ODD WOMEN is reasonably modern in its writing. Its narrative tone (unlike what readers of the genre have come to expect in the more flowery, loquacious and verbose prose of Gissing’s 19th century predecessors such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen or the Brönte sisters) is surprisingly straightforward and readable with relative ease.
That said, Gissing, from time to time, lapses into a retro-Gothic style that is as thick as any produced by the aforementioned literary lights. Consider this description of a sleepless episode as Monica, one of THE ODD WOMEN’s heroines, suffers through a deeply troubled self-examination of her thoughts and motives:
“Monica was the first to [yield to exhaustion]; she slept for about an hour, then the pains of a horrid dream disturbed her, and again she took up the burden of thought. Such waking after brief, broken sleep, when mind and body are beset by weariness, yet cannot rest, when night with its awful hush and its mysterious movements makes a strange, dread habitation for the spirit – such waking is a grim trial of human fortitude. The blood flows sluggishly, yet subject to sudden tremors that chill the veins and for an instant choke the heart. Purpose is idle, the will impure; over the past hangs a shadow of remorse, and life that must yet be lived shows lurid, a steep pathway to the hopeless grave. Of this cup Monica drank deeply.”
“The old faiths, never abandoned, though modified by the breath of intellectual freedom that had just touched her, reasserted all their power. She saw herself as a wicked woman, in the eye of truth not less wicked than her husband declared her. A sinner stubborn in impenitence, defending herself by a paltry ambiguity that had all the evil of a direct lie. Her soul trembled in its nakedness.”
“What redemption could there be for her? What path of spiritual health was discoverable?”
Society’s tenacious, unyielding grip on women, their minds, and their behaviour was awesome in its power. THE ODD WOMEN is a classic worthy of the term and needs a wider readership if we are to move forward in the recognition of women’s rights as undeniably human rights. Highly recommended.
“… the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! How often is it misled! Against what a world of fraud it has to contend!
Sept“… the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! How often is it misled! Against what a world of fraud it has to contend!
Septimus Harding is a gentleman – both in the 21st century reader’s “refined, scrupulously behaved Miss Manners” sense as well as in the 19th century “man of financially independent means” sense! Happily living on his 800£ annual sinecure provided through the church as the result of a will written several hundred years earlier, Harding serves the dual roles of precentor of the local cathedral and warden of a local almshouse for elderly men. As political notions of socialism begin to appear in the smoky atmosphere of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, the suitor of Harding’s daughter, Dr John Bold, a zealous hard-nosed reformer with a keen nose for a righteous cause, sees fit to question the fairness and validity of a will that provides an 800£ income to the warden of the almshouse while providing so little, a miserly 12£ per year, for the home’s residents. Indeed, he causes a veritable storm of controversy by launching a legal suit disputing the will and attacking the rights, the ethics, and the wealth of the Church of England and its entitled clergy in the national press.
Without actually taking sides, Trollope has penned a witty, entertaining, and frequently amusing satirical novel that manages to precariously and diplomatically straddle the fence on most of the issues it raises – church wealth; the rights and wrongs of moral crusades; lawsuits and the legal machinations required to settle them; the effect of profound political differences on family relationships; the 19th century version of that most contemporary of issues, partisan “fake news”; right-wing politics of conservative wealth versus left-wing politics of reform; not to mention a reasonably steady stream of jibes at Church politics and its patriarchal misogynistic behaviour scattered at intervals throughout the length of the novel.
Consider, for example, Trollope’s rather forthright description of the apoplectic reaction of Archdeacon Grantly (Harding’s son-in-law) to news of Bold’s lawsuit:
“He would consign to darkness and perdition not only every individual reformer, but every committee and every commission that would even dare to ask a question respecting the appropriateness of church revenues.”
Or to quote the Archdeacon directly when he expressed his ire on the topic to his long-suffering wife:
“… that pestilent, interfering upstart, John Bold – the most vulgar young person I ever met … is meddling with your father’s affairs in a most uncalled for – most – And being at a loss for an epithet sufficiently injurious, he finished his expressions of horror by muttering, ‘Good Heavens!’ in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese.”
If there is a single, overriding moral takeaway from the novel, it might be that reform for its own sake is not always a good thing and, in some cases, will end up as a case of “Be careful what you wish for!” Definitely recommended as a very readable and thoroughly entertaining 19th century classic, that is much lighter and more easy-going than what readers have come to expect from the likes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot or the Brontë sisters.
Lots of love to go around in the chilly 1967 winter weather of Ballybucklebo, Ireland
Fans of Patrick Taylor’s IRISH COUNTRY novels who have been readiLots of love to go around in the chilly 1967 winter weather of Ballybucklebo, Ireland
Fans of Patrick Taylor’s IRISH COUNTRY novels who have been reading the series in order will recall recently having their hearts both broken and warmed with the romantic and gut-wrenching tale of the death of the eponymous doctor’s wife in the war and, many years later, his subsequent courtship and marriage to his first love, Kitty O’Hallorhan. So I expect that those fans, myself included of course, might be forgiven for imagining that AN IRISH COUNTRY LOVE STORY will continue in that vein with the story of the heated romance between O’Reilly’s assistant, Barry Laverty, and his fiancée, Sue Nolan. And it certainly does … but it’s also much, much more.
Love in Ballybucklebo comes in many forms, in many places, and in many people.
There’s the continuing romantic love we would expect between O’Reilly and his newly re-discovered first love; between Laverty and the fiancée he misses so desperately as she continues her studies in France; between Kinky Kincaid and her new husband, Archie Auchinleck; and the most recent case of questionable, unrequited love between O’Reilly’s brother, Lars, (a commoner by any British or Irish standards), and a lady of distinctly upper class nobility, Myrna Ferguson, the marquis’s widowed sister.
But AN IRISH COUNTRY LOVE STORY is also a story of non-romantic love, affection, respect and compassion – animal owners and their pets; landowners and homeowners and their homes and their property; citizens of a town and their desire for tradition; the grief of a young woman over her father who suffers a heart attack; hard-working professional colleagues’ willingness to make difficult sacrifices for one another; and the willingness of an entire community to stand up for one of their own who is under threat.
Entertaining and heartwarming from first page to last, I’ll put my reading money on AN IRISH COUNTRY LOVE STORY as arguably being the finest in a series that is already top-flight. Patrick Taylor and the IRISH COUNTRY DOCTOR series are Canadian national literary treasures. I’ll caution potential readers once again that there is definitely a continuing story line in the series and AN IRISH COUNTRY LOVE STORY would be decidedly difficult to decipher without the knowledge of its characters’ back stories.
Paul Weiss
P.S. If you want an idea of the nature of the story-telling and the characters in this series, think of James Herriot's ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL. Northern Ireland, instead of Yorkshire, and human patients, instead of farm animals. But the flavour is very, very similar....more
Delia Hopkins’ life in blissful, rural New Hampshire seems on a continuing fast track to happiness – a mar“Please, Daddy … don’t take me home yet”
Delia Hopkins’ life in blissful, rural New Hampshire seems on a continuing fast track to happiness – a marriage date set with a handsome well-grounded fiancé; a solid reputation as a law-enforcement search and rescue resource with a never-say-die talented bloodhound; a young daughter who seems almost uncannily mature and wise beyond her years; and a loving widowed father who seems to dote on the entire family. Her idyllic life is shattered on the day a policeman knocks on the door with a warrant to arrest her father for the kidnapping of his daughter in Arizona almost twenty-five years earlier. When her father fails to deny the charge, explains to Delia that her name was in fact “Bethany Matthews” and appears fixed in his wish to plead guilty and almost certainly spend the remainder of his life in prison, Delia begs her husband, a lawyer with a pathetically small amount of experience in criminal defense, to serve as her father’s attorney.
Like her better known runaway successes NINETEEN MINUTES and MY SISTER’S KEEPER, VANISHING ACTS focuses more on issues and digs deeply into the vast areas of gray that separate the moral blacks and whites, the yes’s and no’s, the guilty’s and innocent’s that we are so wont to focus on. And Ms Picoult didn’t stint when it came to supplying those issues for our consideration – parental kidnapping; alcoholism and its effects on family, friends, and coworkers; recovered memory and its value and validity in court testimony; pedophilia and child abuse; drugs, gangs, and prison life; adultery; and more.
VANISHING ACTS is a decent read that doesn’t come anywhere near the level of compelling and certainly suffers by comparison with Picoult’s best work. And even if I had been inclined to award a 4-star rating for being consistently thought-provoking and interesting, the section in which Delia’s father is held without bail in prison prior to his trial for parental kidnapping is too long, too violent and, frankly, too tedious. Indeed, it came very close to prompting me to set the novel aside.
Recommended, but feel free to skim the prison section. It doesn’t add anything to the plot or to the issues under consideration.
“Her father did not know – she held to it from that time – how much she loved him”
There really can be no other suitable word. DOMBEY AND SON is, “Her father did not know – she held to it from that time – how much she loved him”
There really can be no other suitable word. DOMBEY AND SON is, in many respects, a stereotypical Dickensian tale. It’s dense, it’s long, it’s hilarious, it’s heartwarming, it’s heartbreaking, it’s shocking, it’s complex, it’s multi-thematic, it’s plot-driven, it’s character driven, it’s forward thinking and generally left-wing – in short, it’s Dickensian. And, despite the fact that if general readers, or even confirmed Dickens fans, are asked to name a Dickens title, few will think to mention DOMBEY AND SON, I think it’s one of his best.
Consumed with the desire and the need to see his family name, his wealth, and his business success continued through his only son, Dombey ignores, and indeed comes to bitterly hate, his dedicated, loving daughter who blames herself for her father’s failure to love her. The themes that Dickens tosses into the DOMBEY AND SON kettle are legion – parental, filial, and romantic love; friendship and loyalty; patriarchy and misogyny; evil, theft, and embezzlement; feminism; family; wealth versus poverty; marriage, divorce, and the societal expectations and laws that govern them; and much more.
I can only ask, as a confirmed Dickens fan, what was I thinking of waiting so long to pull this one off my shelf. Definitely recommended.
“Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half-awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla.”
It would seem to be an ugly reality that dealing with tragedy“Six crows sit in our greengage tree. Half-awake, I hear them speak to me in Haisla.”
It would seem to be an ugly reality that dealing with tragedy is the default state of aboriginal communities in Canada’s north – death by disease, residential schools, alcoholism, drug abuse, murder and rape of aboriginal women, racism and xenophobia, inadequate infrastructure, the list seems interminable. Lisamarie Hill’s seventeen year old brother Jimmy, an Olympic hopeful for Team Canada’s swimming team, has mysteriously vanished at sea. MONKEY BEACH, ostensibly the location of Jimmy’s drowning and the site of multiple sasquatch sightings, is the story of Lisamarie’s troubled coming of age, her loss of innocence, her journey through the mysticism and mythology of her Haisla lore, and her attempt to deal with that loss, among others.
Eden Robinson’s portrayal of Lisamarie’s young years - her adolescence, her relationships with her parents, her grandmother, her uncle and her brother, and her learning to deal with her gift of “the sight” – is a piece of masterful writing laced with poignant beauty and emotional impact ranging from humour to gut-wrenching pathos. I couldn’t begin to tell you why but I was particularly taken with this brief passage, for example, detailing her grandmother’s preparation of a salmonberry dessert stew:
“After picking out the bugs, leaves and twigs, Ma-ma-oo would transfer all the berries to a clean bowl and mulch them all together. She added a few tablespoons of oolichan grease, stirring all the time, then added a sprinkling of sugar. She’d leave the bowl in the fridge for another hour to let the flavours meld and we’d watch some more TV until the salmonberry stew was ready, then we’d go into the kitchen and Ma-ma-oo would give me a little dessert bowl. We’d eat in respectful silence, Ma-ma-oo closing her eyes in ecstasy as she ate. The grease makes the berries sinfully rich, as thick as cheesecake. We’d split the stew, and I’d take my half home, so full I felt sleepy.”
For those readers not familiar with west coast aboriginal cuisine, by the way, oolichan is a smelt-like fish that is so greasy that it can be made to burn like a candle. It is well deserving of the name “candlefish”.
But the plot … well, that’s a problem, I’d say! When I reviewed another Eden Robinson offering, SON OF A TRICKSTER, I put forward the unquestionably harsh opinion,
“But this thing is an incomprehensible hot mess … Maclean’s magazine commented, “Robinson has a gift for making disparate elements come together into a convincing narrative, …” Well, I’ll agree the story elements were certainly disparate. But, as far as I could see, they started disparate and remained that way. The plot was muddy, confusing, and impossible to track. Indeed, to this reader, plot was all but non-existent.”
I feel constrained to offer a similar but perhaps slightly mitigated opinion with respect to MONKEY BEACH. Although the story is narrated in first person format by Lisamarie, it is absolutely impossible to pull apart the threads and distinguish between flashbacks, her guesses or predictions for her future, mystical dreams, fantastical imaginations and voyages through the power of her “sight” to aboriginal places of mythology, or, of course, simple narration of present day events. In short, as in SON OF A TRICKSTER, the plot of MONKEY BEACH remained impenetrable but its overall literary value, unlike that of SON OF A TRICKSTER, was rescued by its convincing, enjoyable and moving emotional impact.
Recommended but be warned. MONKEY BEACH is not a quick or easy read. I dare say that, even if you keep your mind focused on the story every second the book is in your hand, you will still encounter difficulties and feel more than a bit muddled as you make your way through it.
I get it! You're gay, you're indigenous, LGBT two-spirit! But surely there must be more to your li"I figured out that I was gay when I was eight."
I get it! You're gay, you're indigenous, LGBT two-spirit! But surely there must be more to your life than raw, graphic sex. I bailed after only a few chapters and decided that, awards and commendations notwithstanding, this one just wasn't my cup of tea....more
“Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships …”
Bigger Thomas was not a nice man by any standar“Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships …”
Bigger Thomas was not a nice man by any standards. Any reader, man or woman, regardless of their skin colour – black, white, red, yellow – would encounter significant difficulty thinking of Thomas in more charitable terms than the description penned by the “editor of the Jackson Daily Star, regarding Bigger Thomas’ boyhood there.” He wrote, ”Thomas comes of a poor [ ] family of a shiftless and immoral variety. He was raised here and is known to local residents as an irreformable sneak thief and liar. We were unable to send him to the chain gang because of his extreme youth.” A childhood criminal, in other words, who followed his destiny to a court trial facing charges as a sociopathic and unrepentant adult multiple murderer and rapist.
No reader will shed a tear over Bigger Thomas. How could they? No reader will have a moment’s sympathy for Mr Thomas. Nor will any reader empathize in any way with his plight. But, make no mistake. This is entirely as Richard Wright wanted it to be. When NATIVE SON readers turn the final page, it was always Richard Wright’s hope that any disgust, any dismay, any heartbreak, any sorrow, any embarrassment, any shock, any anger, any emotion at all that a reader might experience, would arise out of his portrayal and scathing indictment of 1930s white American culture. It was not intended to generate pious pity for the black people who were forced to endure that culture. Indeed, the wealth of the white Dalton family and their use of it in ostensibly helping the local black population in Chicago, which THEY saw as pitiable, was demonstrated to be nothing more than ostentatious, sanctimonious and self-serving. The metaphorical equivalent, if you will, of donating a few scraps of fish from time to time for a meager meal, while refusing to allow a black man the right to fish, denying him the ability to learn to fish, refusing to give him the right to own the equipment necessary to go fishing for himself, and forbidding him any access to the water in which the fish lived.
Wright’s portrayal of the nature, the depth, and the completeness of the racism systemic to white American Jim Crow culture in the early 20th century will assuredly take any reader’s breath away. But that hatred was not the only target at which he aimed his talent.
The anti-Semitism that some might have considered to be endemic in North American white Christian culture at the time demonstrated that Hitler’s WW II final solution and attempted genocide in the Holocaust did not happen in a global vacuum.
Fear of Stalin’s Russia and his brand of Communism led to the labeling of any variation of left-wing social thinking in America as Communism. Even those progressive thinkers who advocated for such things as minimum wages, de-segregation, or fair housing bought into the belief that they were espousing Communism. They willingly (and fearfully, I dare say) proclaimed themselves to be members of a North American version of the Communist Party. The continuing propensity of the hard-core right-wing in the USA to label the likes of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as misguided, anti-American Commies did not happen overnight!
NATIVE SON is not an entertaining novel for even a single paragraph. NATIVE SON is a bleak and discouraging novel to read from start to finish. But it is instructive and informative, evocative and thought-provoking. The closing address to the jury by Jewish Lawyer, Boris Max, in which he pleads for mercy for his client and advocates for life imprisonment over execution is positively riveting. Whether it will be persuasive for any dedicated members of the modern right community who persist in their belief that blacks are a sub-standard variation of humankind is an open question.
“It seems wrong for beauty to still exist in the world, doesn’t it?”
When the curtain rises on THE SHAPE OF FAMILY, Keith Olander, a successful and“It seems wrong for beauty to still exist in the world, doesn’t it?”
When the curtain rises on THE SHAPE OF FAMILY, Keith Olander, a successful and wealthy investment banker, and his Indian wife, Prem, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, a dancer, and a foreign policy analyst, are living the life of a happily married couple. One might be forgiven for characterizing them as typical young California professionals living a typical privileged suburbanite life. They have two children, also typical in all of the obvious ways. Karina is a steady, serious, intelligent, well-motivated young teenage girl with a typical dose of angst and unresolved rebellion. Her younger brother Prem, simply put, is an effervescent, unstoppable, bouncy bundle of joy. Like any pair of siblings, Karina and Prem have their moments and their tiffs but it is clear that they are happy kids and love one another dearly.
If THE SHAPE OF FAMILY were a stage play, the curtain would fall on the introduction of the family in Act I on a tragic cliff-hanger, young Prem’s accidental death by drowning in the family pool with Karina nominally in charge before their parents had returned home from work. Acts II and III portray the subsequent break-up and demise of the family, following the individual self-destructive decisions of Keith, Jaya and Karina as they fail to come to grips with their grief over Prem’s untimely death. Karina moves on to center stage as she sacrifices her dreams and goals, drops out of school, effectively cuts off contact with her family and former friends, and moves into a commune ultimately revealed as a cult led by a self-serving evil fraud who will remind readers of the likes of Jim Jones or Charles Manson.
But I think more analytical readers will take home a deeper message (view spoiler)[from the posthumous musings of the spirit of young Prem, that cults capable of destroying lives come in different shapes and forms. In the case of THE SHAPE OF FAMILY, Ms Gowda opined that those cults might include slavery to job, work, money, ego and power, or even simply organized religion, its demanding and overwhelming beliefs and dogma, and its insistence on faith and the rejection of critical thought and rational analysis.
“There are so many ways to die without actually leaving the world: You can cut off a piece of yourself, or your feelings. You can stop doing the things you love, or lose sight of your dreams and goals. You can separate yourself from those who love you, or you can never be willing to find love at all. You can withdraw from the world, … These may look like ways of living, but they’re not. They’re ways of dying.” (hide spoiler)]
THE SHAPE OF FAMILY is a powerful novel (certainly based on Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s previous works SECRET DAUGHTER and THE GOLDEN SON, I had expected nothing less) when read purely as a gripping family drama. But it also provides evocative, eyebrow lifting food for thought that will bounce around in your consciousness for a good long while after you turn that final page.
“Did you know there are two hundred and sixteen single stitches in a Major League baseball?”
The line is obvious but it must be said. Stephen Roth “Did you know there are two hundred and sixteen single stitches in a Major League baseball?”
The line is obvious but it must be said. Stephen Roth hit this one right out of the ball park! THE PERFECT SEASON is a brilliantly crafted, positively delicious literary cocktail that will defy genre classification.
As you sip, slurp, slug, or splash your way through Roth’s savory creation, (trust me on this!) you’re going to wonder what Roth was smoking when he sought to juxtapose such a wild concatenation of bizarre ingredients – a high-functioning autistic savant with a baseball IQ that’s in the stratosphere; a budding black female soccer star fleeing murderous persecution by the French majority against an uprising of English nationals in Cameroons; the science of sliders and curve balls and the finely tuned mechanics of the art of hitting and fielding in professional baseball; racism; bullying; young love; friendship; parenting; genetics, cancer, death, and dying; the struggle of a budding young scientist to decide between atheism and the belief in a god that appears heartless, capricious, and cruel; peaceful protests, boycotting, and human rights; adoption and privacy legislation; the smell of freshly cut grass (the word is “novertdortis” … bet you didn’t know that!); and obesity. There’s more but I think you get the idea!
Then having wondered why Roth would juxtapose this wild list of topics and themes, you’ll almost certainly go on to wonder how in the world he crafted a sensible path through a story that connected this list. All I can tell you is that the answer has to come down to the simple notion of creativity and artistic genius. THE PERFECT SEASON was far more than a mere pleasure to read. It was a rare privilege.
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