Stephen McCauley writes a gay novel about second chances.

I have read a couple of Stephen McCauley’s novels, and I have always admired them. I was pleased to see that this novel was up to his high standard. A friend recommended it to me, and I am really delighted to have read it.











Insignificant Others

Richard, the middle-aged gay man who is the hero of Stephen McCauley’s Insignificant Others (256 pages, Simon and Schuster, $25), thinks he is happy enough. He is himself in great shape, and his compulsive over-exercising makes certain that he had no middle-aged spread. In fact, he looks just a bit haggard, but he finds that makes him something of a success in the gay world. He has a handsome younger lover, with whom he has lived for some time; and he also has a “friend with benefits,” whom he meets occasionally for talk and sex, “with no strings attached." This is what he calls an "insignificant other." Furthermore, he has a job in a Cambridge high tech company that pays him quite a lot and demands of him very little.

There is trouble in paradise, though, when he discovers that his partner Conrad seems to be having an affair with someone in Cleveland. Richard is immediately offended, even though he is careful to keep his own affair a secret. Benjamin, or Ben, his “friend,” is himself married with two kids, and that suggests to Richard that he is safe from any uncomfortable clinging.

Still, all this starts something like a mid-life crisis for Richard. In the first place, he starts to fall out of love with Conrad. This happens in part by talking to Conrad’s female business partner, who is herself in love with the guy and actually offers Richard some perspective.

Even more helpful is Brandon, a talented young colleague whom Richard is trying to persuade to stay with the company. He is singularly unsuccessful at persuading Brandon to stay, until he realizes that it doesn’t matter. Once he starts congratulating Brandon on his decision to take a chance—Brandon is headed to Las Vegas to make a living golfing and gambling—Brandon starts to wonder whether he is really doing the right thing.

Richard learns a lot from Brandon, though, including how brutally limited his own life is. Suddenly he backs off the exercise a bit—he’s the kind of guy who felt crazy if he didn’t get to at least two gyms a day—and he starts to realize what’s missing from his life. Conrad slips into the background as Richard realizes that he really loves Ben. This is as complicated as it could possibly be. Ben is not anywhere near being able to tell his family or his friends about his secret life, and he has decided that his relationship with Richard is really too much of a threat.

Well, everything comes crashing down around him, and still Richard somehow manages to make the right choice when it does. This is an odd love story, because the hero spends so much time talking himself out of Ben. But as if we were reading a Jane Austen novel, we as readers really know more than the character knows, and when the resolution starts to be clear, we can congratulate ourselves that we saw it coming. I think McCauley wants us to.

This is a wonderfully generous novel, entertaining and engaging from beginning to end. I recommend it enthusiastically.















Stephen McCauley



Insignificant Others available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Julia Glass writes a wonderful tale set in a Massachusetts child care center.

I love Julia Glass’s novels, and this one is as good as any. Set in a prosperous suburb of Boston, it tells about a widower who offers a barn on his property as a child care center. What happens after that is truly remarkable.









The Widower’s Tale

Julia Glass’ most recent novel, The Widower’s Tale (416 pages, Pantheon, $25.95)tells the story of Percy Darling, a 70-year-old retiree who still misses his wife who died tragically many years before. He lives alone, but he remains close to his two daughters, Clover and Trudy, and he is especially close to his grandson, Robert, who is Trudy’s only child. The daughters are very different. The older one, Clover, has a failed marriage and a number of failed attempts at a profession, but she has landed, happily it seems, in this day care center, and she has found friends and a wonderful support group there. Trudy is an accomplished medical doctor, an oncologist who specializes in breast cancer for women. This is an amazingly fraught public position to hold, but she holds it well; and she is a hero to the women with whom she works.

Sometime before the novel begins, Clover has come to Percy and asked him if the child care center, Elves and Fairies, which had to move from another location, could take over the barn on his property. After some hesitation, Percy has said yes, and a famous architect has come in to transform the aging structure into something quite wonderful. Even Percy is impressed.

In the course of his day to day life, Percy meets a middle-aged artist, Sarah, who also has a young son at the day care center. She is some twenty years younger than he, but she clearly finds him attractive, and he is delighted to spend time with her. Imagine his chagrin, then, when he notices a lump in her breast and tries to persuade her to seek medical attention. At first she refuses outright—insists that it is a fibrous growth—but when she finally gives in and goes for a mammogram, it turns out that she has quite advanced cancer, and must immediately begin a course of chemotherapy and radiation. The treatment will also involve a mastectomy. In the course of her treatment, she withdraws from Percy—in an odd but understandable way she blames him for her cancer—and it takes them almost the whole novel to find one another again.

While they are estranged, Percy finds the company of his nephew consoling. His nephew comes around the day care center to help Ira, one of the teachers, build a tree house for the kids. Ira and Robert become close, and they bond over the construction. Percy thinks of Ira as a kind of pixy, and he is indeed a sweet, young gay man who has found his métier in teaching these young kids. Ira has a boyfriend too. Anthony is a lawyer, and although he supports Ira in his career, he is not sure he wants to socialize with any of his day care friends.

Robert is a student a Harvard, and his roommate, Arturo, has begun to get him involved in some radical activities around issues of global warming and saving the environment. As Robert gets more deeply involved, these start to seem like eco-terrorist activities.

To Robert’s horror, many of the pranks—at first they seem little more than pranks—are executed in the rich suburbs, and it is not too long before he finds himself compromised by activities that hurt the very people he loves.

Glass is wonderful at creating all these different worlds, and each main character is richly rendered and lovingly developed. The novel becomes almost like a thriller at the end; but it is a Julia Glass thriller and therefore it is deeply humane and extraordinarily moving.


















Julia Glass


The Widower's Tale available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Martin Walker’s French village had to confront the 21st century.

I enjoyed the first novel in this Bruno series, and I was pleased to see that Martin returned to the same location for the second.








The Dark Vineyard

The Dark Vineyard (320 pages, Knopf, $23.95) immediately challenges the bright hopefulness and country tranquility of Bruno, Chief of Police with the gloominess of eco-terrorism and the horrors of globalization. Globalization seems horrible to Bruno when a big California wine company seems ready to purchase vast tracks of the Périgord and introduce modern methods of wine production.

Bruno spends his time lamenting the loss of the old methods, represented by wine-making parties where everyone gets in the vat and crushes grapes with his or her feet. Walker presents these traditional events with deep affection; and when they are threatened, Bruno wonders if the life he loves can ever survive.

The wine conglomeration seems to threaten from without, but meanwhile some eco-terrorists are burning crops and threatening the peacefulness of the village in other ways. It seems that some fields, some vast tracts just outside the village, are given over to a government project exploring genetic modification of some crops. This has been a big secret, and even Bruno the Chief of Police did not know about the project. But when those fields are set ablaze, it becomes a reason for national investigators to descend on Bruno’s little town of San Denis.

One of the key suspects, a good looking young man called Max, is a friend of Bruno’s and someone he coached on the local rugby team. Bruno does not want to push the investigation in Max’s direction, but there seems to be little choice as the big guns from Paris are calling the shots.

Imagine Bruno’s chagrin, then, when the young French boy is found dead. His body is discovered, as it turns out, in a vat of fermenting grapes, and we are told that the high carbon dioxide content in such a location can indeed be fatal. But Max also has some gashes on his head that suggest something more is going on. Not only that: an older man, the friend of Max who was making the wine, lies dead at the bottom of a step ladder near the vat, all sorts of complications emerge.

As Bruno goes about his attempts to keep matters local and less lurid than the Parisian journalists would like, he also keeps up with his friends, celebrates local events, and dines on the choicest local fare. His friend from the earlier novel, the English horsewoman Pamela, looms larger here, as a friend and possibly more. And another woman, a Canadian, who seems to have some knowledge of wine herself, has come to town and has become an intriguing presence for everyone. Before his death, Max was dating her, and she also seems involved with the wine entrepreneur who has come to town to buy up vineyards.

All these strands come together in a nicely paced detective narrative. Walker makes it pleasant because of the rich descriptions of the local context and because of his feeling for the way of life that flourishes in this French heartland.

















Martin Walker

The Dark Vineyard is available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Paul Harding digs into New England culture in this stunning debut

I picked this novel up in an airport bookstore. It sounded fascinating, and I was pleased to see that it had won a Pulitzer Prize. The prize was much-deserved!








Tinkers

Tinkers (191 pages, Bellevue Literary Press, $14,95) is Paul Harding’s first novel. It’s poetic presentation of the hard life of a couple of generations of New England men who make a living in an unforgiving land. Eighty-four year old George lies dying among his family and friends. George, slipping in and out of consciousness, fantasizes about what the people around him are thinking, and he thinks back upon a life of tinkering. Gainfully employed for years as a teacher and manager, it is only after his retirement that he found an occupation that he loved: repairing clocks. There is something about the complex inner working of an assortment of timepieces that fascinates George. When there are not a dozen clocks ticking around him, he finds the silence maddening.

Harding takes us into George’s imagination, and before long we are reading about how watches and clocks are put together. Harding’s vivid accounts of the inner workings of a clock, truly wonderful to read, are complemented by an equally intimate account of the landscape of Maine. When I say intimate, I mean that he looks beyond the rocks and trees, into the woods, and even to the piles of leaves on the woodland floor and the mud that creates ruts in the roads and coats everything that it touches.

I have read three novels set in Maine this summer, but this is the one that gets most deeply into the landscape, even as it tells a story about George and his father Howard. Howard drove a mule cart around New England, selling soaps and other household materials to women dotted across the land in isolated farmhouses.

The narrative takes us in and out of George’s story and Howard’s, but before long we realize that this is happening because what George has as his deepest consciousness are these memories of his father. Given to seizures, his father left home as soon as he realized that his wife was ready to put him into a home. He has lived away and had a second family, and only when George is fully grown does his father return to account for the intervening years.

Harding’s feeling for these lives scarped from the land itself is extraordinarily rich, and the language in which he describes this setting is amazingly supple and vivid. The novel is often praised for its style, but the style does not insist on itself or show off with pyrotechnics; instead, Harding writes simply and beautifully about things that are hard, brittle, and even off-putting. In doing so, he makes them irresistible.

Harding tells a very moving story, and I would not want to change a single word.

















Paul Harding

Paul Harding's Tinkers available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Martin Walker digs up forgotten memories in a French village.

I spent some time this past summer in the central French countryside, and this series caught my eye when I saw where it was set. Now that I have read the first of the three Bruno novels, I know I will move on through the series.









Bruno, Chief of Police

Martin Walker, a foreign affairs journalist, is well-published as a non-fiction writer. His first foray into novel-writing is quite impressive, and Bruno, Chief of Police (288 pages, Vintage, $14.95) is a well-written and engaging novel that more than bodes well for the series.

Bruno Courréges, a local policeman in St. Dénis, in the Périgord (Dordogne) region of Southern France, enjoys life thoroughly. Tucked away in his sunny corner of France, he feels devoted to the village, its people, and its struggle to stay true to its ease and openness.

Recent events when the novel opens, especially the ritualistic murder of an elderly Arab-French patriot, exacerbates tensions already high over questions of immigration and the supposed difficulty of accommodating an increasing population of Arabs from North Africa. Bruno prides himself and his village on its even-handedness in these matters—the Arab members of the community are fully accepted—but he worries that the brutal murder—a Nazi swastika was carved into the man’s chest—will end in violence and hatreds.

He does his best to keep a lid on things, even when superiors from Paris come in to run the murder investigation. All the will in the world cannot keep these matters out of the public eye, and television reports fan the flame of racial tension. When two teenagers from the Front National are taken in for questioning, both from prominent local families, the hostilities break through the surface and Bruno has quite a challenge on his hands.

Nevertheless, he takes things coolly, and goes about his business with aplomb. Always ready to take a glass with his friends—like the mayor and colleagues in the police and fire brigade. He also meets some women. There are two fascinating and eccentric English women, who live in the town and run a local guesthouse. They enjoy his company, wine and dine him, and they also aid him with some important research that helps him solve the case. Another woman, Isabelle, one of the representatives of the National Police in charge of the case, turns out to be a good fighter—she saves Bruno when he is about the become the victim of mob violence—and a seductive lover—she makes some of the tensions of the case less harrowing for our hero.

As it turns out, the motivation of the murder is not at all what it had seemed, and the young kids turn out to have nothing to do with it. Instead, the crime takes Bruno and his colleagues back into the dark years of the Second World War. Some of the things that happened to the French resistance during the occupation turn out to have immediate impact on the case in question.

This is an elegant novel, with a surprising twist in the ending. Bruno is a likable character and his friends all have memorable personalities. I look forward to reading about their further exploits.
















Martin Walker

Get a copy of Bruno, Chief of Police at Powell's, Vroman's or Amazon.

Rosecrans Baldwin writes a novel about the disservices of memory.

This novel, set in coastal Maine among medical researchers, intrigued me for many reasons. It is an impressive debut.










You Lost Me There

In Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel, a research scientist who studies Alzheimer’s disease is forced to confront the faultiness of his own memory of his beloved wife and their life together. You Lost Me There (296 pages, Riverhead Books, $25.95) explores the obsessive routines of a research scientist in his late fifties, Dr. Victor Aaron. As he deals with a difficult staff and tries to put together new grant proposals, Victor struggles with memories of his wife Sara, who was killed sometime before in an automobile accident on the isolated Maine island where they lived together. The Soberg Institute is located there, on Mount Desert Island, named for the man who first gave the bequest that made research on the elderly even possible.

Victor had come to the institute, with Sara, after a distinguished career at Harvard, NYU, and elsewhere. With his assistant Lucy, Victor has made real inroads to explain how Alzheimer’s actually attacks the brain. Sara was happy to accompany Victor to Mount Desert Island because she spent much of her childhood there.

In the day to day life we witness, Victor is compulsive and overbearing in off-putting ways. He works long hours, swims for exercise, and occasionally spends intimate time with another researcher, a graduate student called Regina. She is something of a femme fatale, and she has been intrigued by this dapper and distracted older gentleman. As she gets to know him, however, she is frightened at how little he is able to commit to their relationship.

It is no wonder that Victor is distracted. He thinks all the time about his dead wife, and, even worse, he has discovered a sheaf of index cards on which she had written about key moments in their relationship for a marriage counselor that she had begun to see before her death. It turns out that Sara was a desperately unhappy woman, and she was unhappy especially because of the way she was treated by her husband.

What he saw as his quiet and helpful support as she tried to put together some kind of career as a writer, she saw as abandonment—would he ever be home from the lab?—and various forms of torment while he thought he'd actually tried to help her and give her his full attention. Sara, who comes vividly alive in her little index card insertions, is struggling to be herself, and Victor, as distant and overbearing as he is, has only ever hindered her progress. Moreover, she feels, when she finally had her big success, he undermined it all by treating it as a fluke and nothing very special.

Victor, who is still in the habit of staying at the lab till after midnight and slipping out to swim just as the sun comes up, sees things very differently. He cannot imagine that Sara took things the ways she did. In some ways, he wonders whether she is even remembering things correctly. But the more he wonders about it, the more he thinks that maybe it is his memory that is all screwed up. This of course brings on a moment of crisis for this research scientist who studies memory; and when it comes, it isn’t pretty.

Rosecrans Baldwin has written about this middle-aged crisis well, and he has depicted the failure of marriage with aplomb. This is a strong start for a novelist, and I look forward to whatever he takes on next.















Rosecrans Baldwin

You Lost Me There available at Powell's, Vroman's and Amazon.

Maggie Pouncey tells the story of a girl who has to deal with her father’s literary remains.

Maggie Pouncey’s novel is about picking up after a literary scholar, the president of a small college in New England, after he dies suddenly. This sounded like an intriguing topic to me.








Perfect Reader

Maggie Pouncey’s debut novel Perfect Reader (269 pages, Pantheon, $24.95) concerns a young woman’s attempt to come to terms with her father’s naming her his literary executor. Lewis Dempsey has died suddenly, and his daughter Flora has returned to the New England college town where he worked. She is surprised to find a cache of poetry that she is supposed to decide about publishing. At first, she can hardly begin to read the poems, much less decide about publishing them.

She takes up residence in her father’s house, and she also deals with many issues of her own past. She of course spent her girlhood in this town, first in her father’s presidential abode, and later in the house with her mother where the two females moved after her parents' divorce. Flora feels odd living in her father’s house, and she feels odd to be back in Darwin, the town. She functions a bit as an automaton at first, both because of her grief for her dad and because she can’t quite deal with herself in this context.

As she settles in, she meets two key people. The first, Cynthia Reynolds, was her father’s girlfriend at the time of his death. She is devoted to his memory, and she would love to be friends with Flora too. As it turns out, she is the only other person to have seen Lewis’ late poems. No one besides these two women really knows that he wrote any poetry at all. As a literary critic, he always wrote about poetry, but he didn’t write the poetry itself. Now, however, it seems as if he has. Flora doesn’t yet know what to think about the poems, but Cynthia has decided a) they are great, and b) they should be published.

When Flora looks into the poems and sees that many of them are about Cynthia, she feels both hurt that her father didn’t write about her some more and suspicious of Cynthia’s desire to publish. The tension between these two women builds over the course of the novel. They cannot quite settle into friendship, and they seem to be working at cross purposes a lot of the time.

Flora also meets and takes up sexually, if not romantically, with Paul, her father’s attorney. Paul helps her with a few of her responsibilities as literary executor, and he also challenges her about the poems and what she plans to do with them.

The last important character as Flora tries to deal with the memory of her father is, of course, her mother. A truly wonderful creation, Flora’s mother weighs in with judgments and advice that are usually unwanted. But in the end, she is the person who helps Flora deal with the firestorm that erupts on the internet once it is known that she is sitting on these poems of her famous father.

Ultimately, Flora does decide to publish, but it is watching her get to that point that is really interesting. She is an irritating character in a lot of ways: oddly passive in pressing situations; vague to the point of aggressiveness at times; impulsive in her actions at the best of times. But still, she is a rich character, and the crisis in which she finds herself is surely intriguing.

I think Pouncey has done a good job in this, her first novel. There are some wonderful moments in this work, and they bode well for whatever other projects Pouncey may be planning.

















Maggie Pouncey

Get a copy of Perfect Reader at Powell's, Vroman's or Amazon.