Taft, Ann Patchett

Charles Alston, Family No. 1

(May 27, 2007) Taft was OK – readable, sweet-natured, and with something about it that I’ve liked in all the Patchett books I’ve read, but it’s not a book I could rave about. It was like Magician’s Assistant and Patron Saint of Liars in that way: I liked them enough to finish them, but I didn’t read them avidly nor lament their ending.

This one is about a black man (and told from his point of view) whose jazz-joint life in Memphis is turned completely upside down by two white teenagers from hick-town Tennessee. The notion that such characters would get thrown together and behave in this way is, in itself, a kind of unbelievable premise, and I’m also never convinced that Patchett is presenting me with the consciousness of either a man or a black person. Though, how would I know, lol? Still, there’s a lot that’s familiarly white middle-class about the way the narrator and other characters think and speak.

But everyone’s quite likable, no one’s a strange drifter, and there’s a charm in Patchett’s attention to domestic details that I find engaging in this and all these books. It’s about the only thing that Bel Canto has in common with these other books – except that, in Bel Canto, it is a hundred times more successful: it is totally enthralling for its own sake, not to mention pivotal to the action and characterization. (I’m thinking of the Vice-President’s concern for everyone’s comfort, the terrorists learning to garden, the conceiving of how 120 people would live together in one room for four months.) On top of this, Bel Canto has a riveting premise and characters that are various and unforgettable. Bel Canto is light years ahead of the other three in terms of creating an imaginative reality that is convincing and spellbinding. It’s as though it was written by a completely different writer than the author of The Magician’s Assistant, The Patron Saint of Liars and Taft.

Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

René Magritte, The Son of Man

(May 9) I really enjoyed Atonement and a member of BookCel said that Enduring Love was as good if not better, so I grabbed it while I was waiting for Taft to show up at the library.

It is very good. McEwan is a master at presenting the defining moment of a life-altering event. He dangles it before your eyes in advance, thoroughly details how much it changed everything for the unsuspecting character(s), then slowly, slowly builds up to it, creating, of course, all kinds of suspense, then plays out the moment itself in excruciatingly slow motion. I find it effective, although this is only my second McEwan book... it could wear thin. But I do agree that, in real life, major things happen in minor moments.

Also well done and very clever: you can’t be absolutely sure for the longest time whether the first-person narrator, Joe Rose, is reliable. Is he really being stalked, or did the episode with the hot-air balloon unhinge him?

Unfortunately, McEwan has to compromise the integrity of one of the main characters in order to achieve the ambiguity – Joe’s spouse, Clarissa, has to pooh-pooh Joe’s anxieties right from the beginning in order to prompt the reader’s suspicions, and this just makes her totally unlikable in the end, even though she is painted as a womanly ideal throughout by Joe and everyone she meets. It’s fine that the police don’t believe Joe at first, and that he himself sounds sort of manic at various points in his narrative, but it’s cheating to have the allegedly loving spouse doubt him from the beginning. Why couldn’t she have believed him at first, and become exasperated and skeptical later on?

It’s like Briony in Atonement, who destroys an innocent person’s life for the sake of a naïve notion, and who believes in the end, I think wrongly, that the rest of the activities of her life atoned for the damage she did. These are two instances of deplorable behaviour/ethics in an otherwise sympathetic character. But, of course, that whole story depended on Briony doing what she did. In Enduring Love, in the same way, the drama depends on a woman behaving in an inexplicable way.

It’s a bit unsettling to be asked to overlook vagueness in major characters’ motivations. Still, these were both gripping stories. McEwan can really work it if you’re willing to grant him the premise.

The Patron Saint of Liars, Ann Patchett

Mary Cassatt, Mirror

(May 2) I liked this better than The Magician’s Assistant, in that it had much more of the ambiance of Bel Canto, which I loved, but it is nonetheless much more like The Magician’s Assistant than Bel Canto, alas.

It’s another one of those early-Kingsolver-style sagas about a female loner who abandons her life in one culture to go and live in a completely foreign one (both cultures are American in this case and in The Magician’s Assistant, and in at least two Kingsolvers). What’s worse, the central character is a blank drifter, like the main characters in Housekeeping -- peaceful sociopaths à la Martha Stout. I don’t see the fascination with these characters.

Still, I was surprised to learn afterwards that The Patron Saint of Liars (1992) is actually older than The Magician’s Assistant (1997) -- it had some of the magical atmosphere of Bel Canto (2001), and thus seemed nearer to it chronologically than that ironically unmagical Magician’s Assistant. Also, it was likable for providing some powerful insights into mother-daughter and, really, all female relationships.