Day by Michael Cunningham

Day by Michael Cunningham

288 pages

Published November 2023 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. 

April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company. 

April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.

My Thoughts:

I've waited too long to do this book the justice it deserves, I'm sorry to say. I'm so very far behind on writing reviews so I'm afraid this is going to be short, as well as late in coming. 

Day is not the kind of book that's going to rock the world - it's meditative, intimate, focuses on issues many would rather not think about, often sad and frequently melancholy. It's a slow read, the kind where, even though we are moving forward in time, even though there is action and the pandemic to deal with, it feels much more character than action driven. Which, of course, makes it a novel for a smaller audience. 

It's that intimacy that allows us to really get to know each of the characters in this book, to explore their inner thoughts and emotions. To see them in ways they wouldn't necessarily be able to express for themselves, in ways most of us aren't able to articulate for ourselves. It's that intimacy that pulls us so far in that we have to remind ourselves that Day is touching on universal subjects - love, marriage, parenthood, family, obligations, dreams. 

I'm but one reader, a reader who often feels she's not up to the author's level of story telling, so my opinion won't matter all that much. But for what it's worth, here it is: I liked the writing, I grew attached to the characters, I was a little heartbroken in that last "chapter." But it wasn't a book I couldn't wait to get back to and it's a book that, in sitting down to write this review, I had to remind myself what the story was about; it hasn't stuck with me that way I expected it to stick. I think it has as much to do with the Dan's brother Garth's story taking up more space than I would have liked; Garth and the mother of his son were the two characters in the book that I struggled to care about. That's me, of course. Look at other reviews - anyone who writes them for a living seems to be more impressed overall. 

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

400 pages

Read by Louise Erdrich - 709 minutes

Published November 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers

Publisher's Summary: 

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. 

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

My Thoughts: 

I was gifted this book last year at my book club's annual Christmas party and thought it would make a great choice for my book club for this year. I mean, Louise Erdrich always gives you a lot to think about and talk about, right? Hmmm, not so much for my book club; no one else was all that thrilled with this one. Which made me the odd man out, because I really enjoyed it, despite what I perceived to be its flaws. 

I'd be interested to find out when Erdrich began writing this book because it feels a bit like she might have started it in 2019, intending it to be one book, and then 2020 arrived and the book went an entirely different way. There are, in fact, a lot of different kinds of book within this one. It begins with a kind of tragicomic crime escapade that results in Tookie being incarcerated, sentenced to 60 years. Which, of course, made me immediately think this book had veered into a completely different direction. It did, just not the direction I expected. It's a story of redemption, it's a ghost story, there's a supernatural element, it's an homage to books and reading, it's a love story, and, for a time, there's an element of nonfiction. In lesser hands, this could have been a disastrous mess. Even as skilled as Erdrich is, it sometimes felt a bit disjointed. But I was willing to forgive Erdrich that because I was so invested in these characters. 

As always, Erdrich explores native culture and the Indigerati (her term for urban, intellectual Native Americans). To that end, she talks about the foods (including the commodity foods that the government handed out), traditions, solidarity with black people, and white appropriation (there are two characters who seem unable to understand the boundaries). 

This book touches on so many themes: racism, Erdrich uses the ghost to explore hauntings in all of its forms (personal pasts, colonial haunting and how it has played out): 

"Think how white people believe their houses...are haunted by Indians, when it's really the opposite. We're haunted by settlers and their descendants. We're haunted by the Army Medical Museum and countless natural history museums and small-town museums who still have unclaimed bones in their collections." 

The Sentence is not just the title of this book; it is a running theme. We start with Tookie's sentence to prison ("This light word lay so heavily on me.") then the sentence in language, many of which play an important part in the book. There is the sentence in a book that Tookie believes killed Flora, the sentence that Tookie believes will cause Flora to pass on, the sentence that actually does cause Flora to leave the book store, the sentence that Pollux waits years to hear Tookie say, and the final sentences of the book, "The door is open. Go." Finally, there is the death sentence given to George Floyd and the hundreds of thousands who died of Covid. 

I loved that books saved Tookie in prison, that they became so important during 2020 that bookstores were considered essential, that a book plays such an important role in this novel, and that the book store is a central fixture of the novel. The books in the novel forge relationships, unveil history, bring hope. 

An interesting bit in this book is that the bookstore Tookie works in is Birchbark Books, owned by a woman named Louise. Yes indeed, Erdrich owns a bookstore of that name in Minneapolis. This was a listen/read combo for me and I don't think you could go wrong either way. If you listen, try to find the book list that Erdrich includes at the end of the book. My to-be-read list exploded! 

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

309 pages

Published August 2023 by HarperCollins Publishers

Publisher's Summary: 

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. 

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

My Thoughts:

Peter Duke has died. Emily, Maisie, and Nell know that their mother once knew him. In fact, for a period of time in her teens, Emily was angrily certain that Duke was her father. But they have never heard the full story of how her mother met him, how she fell in love with him, and how he disappeared from her life. Until the summer of 2020, when they are all stuck together on the family cherry farm and they demand to be told the full story. They will get the story, but it won't be the full story. Only Lara will ever know the full story. Still, as the days of harvesting go on, Lara will begin telling her daughters the story of how she came to be an actress, how she went to Hollywood and made a movie, how she ended up at Tom Lake doing summer stock, and how Peter Duke became her boyfriend. And then how he broke her heart, how she stopped acting, and how she came to marry their father. Along the way, details will come out that the girls never knew before (that Lara had once, for two weeks, wanted to be a vet, that her name was spelled Laura for the first sixteen years of her life, that she took up smoking at Tom Lake) that help them better understand the person she was before she was their mother. 

I was just 30 pages into this book when I began telling people that this book would end up on my favorite books of the year list, barring a complete letdown. Not only was I never let down, the book just kept getting better and better for me. To say I was surprised to see on Goodreads that there were reviewers who gave the book 1 or 2 stars, who called it boring, who complained that it romanticizes being quarantined during CoVid is an understatement. Did they read the same book? Yes, we are hitting the point where books set during the pandemic are hitting the book stands en masse. Yes, there is a lot of talk about the play "Our Town." No, this family is not dysfunctional. 

Regarding the pandemic? It was clear that the family experiences difficulties because of the pandemic, that Nell, in particular, felt trapped by it. But Lara is willing to admit, as many people do, that there were parts of the world being shut down that appealed to her. That being stuck with people she loved wasn't the worst thing that could happen to her. I could relate to that, to an extent (although I'd have been happier if all of my children had been with us, as Lara's were). Regarding the play? Yes, there is a lot of talk about the play and I can, honestly, see where it might have been too much for some people. But it was used to teach us so much about these characters that it never felt like too much to me. Regarding the family not being dysfunctional? Thank god! There are more than enough dysfunctional families in literature. It was a pleasure to read about a "normal" family, a family that loves each other at their core, a married couple who, after many years of marriage, still love each other and have no regrets about their pasts. 

This is my seventh book by Patchett. My first of her books was The Magician's Assistant, a book I honestly can't remember all that much about, other than that I knew I would read Patchett again. After I read Bel Canto, I wasn't sure I ever could. Not because I didn't like it but because I liked it so much that I felt certain nothing she wrote could ever live up to it. To be honest, I'm not sure any of her books have ever had the impact on me that Bel Canto did, but Patchett has absolutely lived up to my very high expectations. Tom Lake is no exception. It was a pleasure to slide into a novel that spanned decades in only 300 pages without ever feeling rushed, a pleasure to read a book, at last, that I enjoyed so much that I couldn't put it down, but, at the same time, didn't want it to end. The characters are marvelously fully drawn, Patchett covers the gamut of emotions, all with a deft touch, the settings are so evocative, and Patchett even manages to throw in a few surprises. 

The audio version of this book is read by Meryl Streep. I didn't know that when I requested this book from the library or I almost certainly would have requested the audiobook. But I could get it in print much sooner and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Maybe if I ever reread this one, I'll get the audiobook; but as great as I'm sure it is, I can't say that I'm sorry to have read this one in print. Patchett's writing is so marvelous that I hear it in my head and it feels like I'm hearing it in Patchett's voice.