Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler

Some members of our group found the main character of this book, Maggie Moran, irritating. Others found her endearing. Sort of like real life. And that’s the beauty of Anne Tyler’s novels: They are about the lives we actually live—the mundane, the everyday, the irritating, and the endearing.  

I have loved the Maggie character since I first met her when the book came out in 1989. I loved her as played by Joanna Woodward in the Breathing Lessons movie in 1994. And I loved her when I reread this book in 2016.

Yes, Maggie and other characters in Tyler’s books skew toward odd duck territory, but as I lose myself in their stories, I begin thinking they have more of a handle on things than I do.

And then there’s Ira, Maggie’s husband. Some members of our group thought he was a long-suffering saint for putting up with Maggie. I found him passive aggressive and judgy in 1989 and even more so in 2016. His saving grace was that he was played as kind and compassionate by James Garner in the movie, so obviously Garner—and my feller BBBers—saw something I didn't.

Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989, was a finalist for the 1988 National Book Award, and was Time Magazine’s Book of the Year. Two previous books by Anne Tyler were Pulitzer finalists: The Accidental Tourist in 1986 and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983.

Like most Tyler novels, Breathing Lessons is character-driven. It’s one day in the lives of Maggie and Ira, who drive to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband, and then stop to visit their granddaughter, Leroy (pronounced LA roy), who lives with her mother, Fiona, Maggie and Ira’s former daughter-in-law.

It’s one bizarre day, including some laugh-out-loud moments at the funeral, during which friends are asked to sing the love songs they first sung at the dead man’s marriage 28 years ago. Maggie barely remembers the words so she and a friend work out the verses on a coupon Maggie has in her purse. The friend gives the coupon back and, later, Maggie tries to use it when buying groceries, but the clerk reads the love-struck lyrics and, with a red face, hands it back, mortified. There's a hilariously clumsy sex scene, a visit with a waitress at a roadside diner who quickly becomes Maggie's friend, and a vignette with Otis, a man who Maggie and Ira help with a tire problem. But Maggie made up the tire issue to goad Otis because he was driving too slowly, but then she realized he was a sweet and somewhat brittle old man, so she made Ira stop and the tried to help him and ultimately drove him home, and.... Anyway, you get the point about Anne Tyler's characters and the worlds they inhabit.

Through flashbacks and dialogue, we learn about Maggie and Ira’s unlikely and unpromising courtship and Fiona’s marriage to the their son, Jessie, a classic screw-up—just ask his dad. We see Fiona and Maggie bond through childbirth classes, complete with breathing lessons, and we see the young marriage dissolve through immaturity and a series of miscommunications, with all characters playing pivotal roles in the chaos. And we see Fiona flee the family—and the city—multiple times, to try to make some sort of sensible life for herself and her daughter.

This is the story of a marriage, of how people change when they become a couple, about the sacrifices they make for one another and the mixed blessings those sacrifices bring.

Learning how to navigate a marriage, Tyler implies in her title, is like learning to breathe, and every day is a lesson. —Pat Prijatel

The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society, by Annie Barrows & Mary Ann Shaffer

The story and the characters in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society are every bit as intriguing as the book's unusual and quirky-sounding title.

Told entirely in the form of letters to and from its characters, the story begins in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II as Europe is slowly emerging from the horrors of that war.  In London, writer Juliet Ashton is trying to come up with a subject for her next book when she receives a letter complimenting her on her writing from a stranger, Dawsey Adams.  Dawsey is a native of the Island of Guernsey, one of the English Channel Islands near the French coastline.  Guernsey was under Nazis occupation. 

Dawsey's letter sets off an exchange of letters between the two.  Eventually other residents of the small island join the exchange, describing the effects of the occupation on their lives. Through the residents' letters Julia is introduced to the Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society which was initially created as an alibi when the Nazis caught the islanders breaking curfew.  The Society quickly becomes real, banding them together and making them friends as well as survivors.

Some of the residents were not readers, but they came together for companionship and entertain each other with discussions about books.  And they share their letters from Julia, who soon becomes so intrigued with her new friends that she takes up temporary residence on Guernsey so that she can meet them face to face and write a book about their experiences.

Julia learns their very real and painful stories about the effect the Nazi occupation has had on their home and their lives.  Their letters to her are colorful, sad and very descriptive.  We also get to know the Islanders as individuals—courageous, frightened, sometimes funny but always determined to survive. Julia's letters to them are thoughtful and wonderfully funny.

In the years the Nazis occupied Guernsey, they tightly controlled every aspect of islanders' lives. They were cruel conquers, rationing their food and the fuel they needed for heat and cooking, robbing their vegetable gardens and forcing the islanders to live in constant fear.

Islanders shared rations and helped each other in every possible way with medical aid and whatever else they needed to survive—including their sense of humor.  Together they

lived through the ever-present cold, dampness, relentless hunger and very real fear of the Nazis.  And a gentle love story quietly develops.

With little notice, Guernsey's children were rounded up and shipped to England.  Having their children sent to another country, frightened and alone, to unknown caregivers and for an indefinite length of time was a terrible heartbreak for the Islander, who could only hope that at least their children would be safer.

The book gives us an all too realistic picture of the Nazi occupation of Guernsey.  But we learn even more about courage, strong friendships and the importance of both.  And the story is told with warmth and humor.   The letter-writing format is a clever, surprisingly effective and believable way to get to know the courageous, creative, sometimes quirky residents of Guernsey and to see how they struggled to survive and were effected by the Nazi occupation of their island. —Gail Stilwill

NOTE:  The original author, Mary Ann Shaffer, died before she was able to complete the book, after spending years researching material.  Her niece, Annie Barrows, was able to pick up where Shaffer left off and compete the book. It was well worth the efforts of both writers.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

This book is an important, but tough, read.  Important because we need to know the extent of our massive prison population and how it got that way.  Important because we need to understand that mass incarceration, in the name of the war on drugs and “law and order,” has been applied discriminatorily against our black and brown youth, particularly boys and young men.  Important because mass incarceration is the new face of a very, very old attempt to keep black and brown people from being full members of society.  Important because those of us who are part of the white majority need to see the face of our society from the perspective of those who are not white.

The book is tough because the conclusions are inescapable.  It’s tough because well-meaning Christian white Americans have let this happen under our eyes.  It’s tough because our response, if it is to combat this problem at its root, must be far more than simply revising our mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Michelle Alexander brings incredible research to these points, carefully laying out facts and figures from her experiences as the director of ACLU’s Racial Justice Project inNorthern California and as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun and as a professor of law at Ohio State University.

She argues that, contrary to what most of us want to believe, “colorblindness” is part of the problem and not part of the solution.  In her final chapter, entitled “The Fire This Time,” she challenges us to rethink denial, to talk openly about race, and to adopt an “all of us or none” attitude toward justice.

Like most of our societal problems today, this one is complex.  Solutions will not be based on 30-second sound bites, but on systemic work to rid ourselves and our institutions of implicit bias.

Not an easy read.  Yes, a tough one.  But one that’s necessary.—Jeanie Smith

South of Broad, by Pat Conroy

The saga takes place in the wealthy and prestigious neighborhood called South of Broad, in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. The main character, Leopold Bloom King is 18, awkward, painfully shy, friendless and finally beginning to recover from the traumatic suicide of his older brother and hero. 

Leopold's (Leo's) recovery is especially challenging since Leopold found his brother's body—and since their mother continues to be furious and verbally abusive to Leo because his brother, and clearly her favorite son, died instead of him.

After years of counseling and a stay in a mental health institute being treated for depression, Leo is lonely and adrift, but he also is friendly, out-going and more than ready to make friends.  He finds them in a tightly-knit group of high school misfits: his new neighbors - the exotically beautiful, talented and troubled twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe;  Ike Johnson, the son of Leo's new African American football coach (a first in the recently desegregated south);   Niles and Starla Whitehead, a teenage brother and sister, recently arrived in town and already in trouble with the law; and three South of Broad Blueblood teens, Chad and Fraser Rutledge and Molly Huger.  Surprisingly (strangely perhaps) Leo meets and becomes friends with all of them in one, very eventful, day.

South Carolina's legacy of racism and class divisions are the background of the story, which weaves its way through two decades of the friendship that binds them together through good and bad marriages, hard-won successes and devastating problems.  Finally their friendship is tested in an unimaginable set of circumstances. Then, with no warning at all, right out of the blue, comes the twisted ending.  For me, this was the final piece of a story that already become over-the-top unbelievable.

-----------

Full disclosure:  I was part of a very small minority of my fellow Books, Brew and Banter club members who did not particularly like this book.  For me, the story became a soap opera, overdone from the plot, to the dialogue, to the over-the-top writing. 

I know that Conroy is an award-winning, respected author of long-standing.  A number of reviewers said this book was not one of Conroy's best.  I'll take them, and my fellow Book Club members, at their word and try another of his books.—Gail Stilwill

THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS, by David McCullough

At the outset, I have to admit that I’m biased, as McCullough is probably my favorite author, and I recommended reading the book to our Books, Brew and Banter Club.  That said, The Path Between the Seas won the National Book Award and several other awards, so I feel confident that it would be next to impossible for me to oversell his work.

The book is a first-rate drama of the bold engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph.  It is the story of the men who fought against all odds to fulfill a four-century dream of constructing a passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which includes astonishing engineering undertakings, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, tragic failures and heroic successes.

When Europeans first started to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the oceans, cutting off the long and dangerous journey round the southern tip of South America at Cape Horn, Panama was a remote part of Columbia. That changed when, in 1848, prospectors struck gold in California, creating an urgent need for quicker passage for California-bound ships. Thus, the United States built the Panama Railroad to serve that traffic and soon became the highest-priced stock on the New York Exchange.

Initially, building the canal appeared to be an easy matter, but the construction project eventually came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations, taking over four decades to complete.

In the beginning, French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, secured capital to begin work on the canal, based on his recent success in constructing the Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. However, at the time, he had not set foot in Panama and had only a vague idea of the topographical setting, nor did he believe that the heat, humidity, insects, and snakes were a large problem.  In less than a decade, however, the scheme had collapsed, and his company went into receivership with only a third of the canal having been excavated.  Over 25,000 people died, including 5,000 Frenchmen, mostly succumbing to malaria, yellow fever, poisonous snakes and industrial accidents.

After a quarter century, President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign of intervention, and negotiated a treaty to access to the Isthmus of Panama, allowing the US to buy-out the French interests. However, the Americans led a bloodless revolt after Columbia objected to the treaty, allowing for the creation of the Republic of Panama. Americans then set work along the French route using their equipment and the Panama Railroad, before shipping in more modern equipment to move billions of cubic yards of dirt and rock, to harness savage rivers, and to initiate an unprecedented lock system, that has lasted over a century, only recently being remodeled and opened again to larger ships.

Aside from President Roosevelt, two other Americans were heroes in this process.  Dr. William Gorgas found that mosquitos were the carrier of malaria and yellow fever and led efforts to destroy their breeding grounds, substantially reducing deaths from disease. Engineer John Stevens took charge of the canal project and quickly understood the French inability to remove rock and dirt was not a problem with digging, but transportation. So he led efforts to rebuild the Panama Railroad to transport not only people, but equipment and materials, and recruited the greatest engineering minds of the period to tackle the tremendous challenges.

Completing the canal was an impressive trial, but it got done. Eventually, the canal opened to traffic ahead of schedule and under budget, and became the useful waterway of commerce envisioned for centuries.

This comprehensive and captivating story is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of engineering technology, international intrigue, advance of medicine and human drama. Clearly, McCullough wrote a story you won’t want to put down.—Ken Johnson

Room, by Emma Donoghue

Best-selling, award-winning novel and motion picture,

 nominated for four Academy Awards

Room is a good story from start to finish.  But what makes it so effective and so captivating is that it is told in its entirely by one of its main characters, Jack, in his five-year-old voice.

Jack has lived his entire life in an 11x11 foot, windowless room.  He was born there.  He and his "Ma" eat, sleep, play and live there, intentionally hidden from the outside world.  At night Ma shuts Jack into the wardrobe, safe and hopefully asleep when "Old Nick" chooses to visit.

But while "Room" is home to Jack, to Ma it is the prison where she has been held captive for seven years, since she was kidnapped when she was 19.  She is repeatedly raped by Old Nick who enters Room any night he pleases.  Jack is the result of one of those rapes.

Jack's observations are bright, often insightful and reflect the good education his mother has managed to give him despite very limited tools.  She teaches him to read, to think and to question.  She makes up creative games to increase his vocabulary and give him a love for books, hoping to prepare him somewhat for the outside world.  Together they create "word sandwiches"—if something is both cool and scary is is "coolary."  Jack's observations when he finally is able to see the outside world through a window are all his own. He calls the sun "God's face.”                   

While Ma is depressed and fiercely determined to escape, she is loves her young son and creates the best life and most loving environment she can for him,

But Jack's curiosity and her own desperation are building and she knows she must find a way for them to escape from Room.  They make a harrowing escape into the "Outside."  But now they must make huge and very different adjustments—Jack into a world full of people, sunshine, wind, buildings, cars and loud unfamiliar sounds everywhere.  And Ma now finds herself in a familiar but very changed world.  While her family and friends hoped and prayed she was still alive they could have had no idea what her life had become: motherhood, repeated rapes, imprisonment in a small room with no windows, completely cut off from the outside world. 

Ma and Jack are frightened, but of different things and for different reasons.  We watch them both in their separate struggles, hear Jack describe his new world, his fear, awe, and his worry about his Ma and her own very different struggle to adjust.

The continuing thread is the unconquerable love and determination Jack and his Ma share—the diamond-hard love between a mother and her child. — Gail Stilwill