Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

This book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is exactly that, a memoir.  Hard to think of a memoir written by someone who was only 31 years old when he wrote it! Vance himself confesses the absurdity of this in his introduction where he writes, “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary.  I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.  You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

And so Vance begins to tell his story. What makes this story compelling is that, while it tells of all the ways in which the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States has left people behind, he is unflinchingly honest about the ways in which many of his people, whom he calls “hillbillies,” have brought about their own demise and their own lack of hope – their lack of care for their children, their sinking into the drug culture, their laziness and lack of any self-awareness.

Vance’s own family has had its difficulties.  As he writes, “I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life.”  He himself came close to flunking out of high school: “Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.  That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.  I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it.  I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.  I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it.  I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels.  And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.” 

Vance clearly has a great love for the people about whom he writes, particularly his crazy grandmother and grandfather – and “crazy” is his word, not mine.  This love comes shining through the book even when he sees clearly how the ways in which they act have negative effects on everyone around them. — Jeanie Smith

Run, by Ann Patchett

When I first read Run, I dismissed it as being mediocre, especially by Ann Patchett's standards. But then I kept thinking about it. About the scenes Patchett builds and the characters she creates. When our book club decided to read it, we found much to love about it, much to question, and much to learn. Patchett's standards are, after all, pretty high.

This is a book about how families work and how they don't, about whether we love biological children more or less than adopted. It's about family deception: It starts with a story about a statue of the Virgin Mary that was carved to look like Bernadette's Irish grandmother. It is a flat-out lie—the statue was stolen by her grandfather during a drunken night out—but the family chooses to believe the lie even though they fully know the the truth. The lie, of course, is much lovelier. The mysterious mother figure, Tennessee, is not entirely who she says she is. Father Sullivan is not a saint, and his nephew Sullivan's recent past is a little more murky than he suggests. Doyle tries to manipulate them all and Tip and Teddy do their best to become who they want to be, more or less, although their father's shadow is large and controlling.

Patchett has been criticized for implicit racism in the book—the white family is the ideal, the Black is flawed, and all Black people can run fast. But Kenya is a delightfully authentic little girl and she would clearly choose to be with her mother, in her dark little apartment, surrounded by the love she has always known rather than in the bright and airy Doyle home. Ultimately, she has no choice, and she becomes the family heiress, who inherits the magic statue. The fact that she looks nothing like that version of the Blessed Virgin doesn't even enter into Bernard's decision. So I see a lot of color blindness here, but I can see how that in itself presents a rosy happy-ever-after ending that shrugs off the harsh realities of living with a skin tone a tad too dark to be Irish. — Pat Prijatel

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

(Warning: contains spoilers)

Anthony Doerr’s 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See is a story of survival, courage, sacrifice, suffering, family, friendship, love, and hope. It’s set in France and Germany during WW II.

How many thousands of novels does that thumbnail description fit? (Jaded publishers and others in the business are starting to think of such novels as just another WW II book, which might account for some of the tepid reviews the novel got before it circulated through the wider reading community.)

All the Light We Cannot See is one of the richest, most readable, discussable, and likeable WW II novels ever. Yes. Likeable. A narrative of war and suffering and death becomes a hopeful hymn about family, kindness, potential, magic, love, and mystery.

Doerr brilliantly shows us the specifics in the general: the character so unique and real that the reader can become the character. And thus we can truly cloak ourselves in the potential for individual goodness in the storm of a world gone mad. We learn and are comforted by how we might behave in a similar situation.

In the final analysis, the story belongs to Marie-Laure, the little blind girl with the father who keeps thousands of keys for the National Museum of Natural History and is a gifted woodcarver. In both Paris and Saint-Malo he carves tiny, clever models of their neighborhoods, which Marie-Laure must memorize with her fingertips. Then by counting grates, benches, streets, and tapping her other senses for cues, she must show him she can navigate their neighborhood. He also teaches her to use her cleverness to unlock tiny objects to find the treasures inside. To this reviewer, those incredible miniatures, made in such a rush by a father for his vulnerable six-year old girl as the Germans draw near, are the most unforgettable takeaways of the novel. And as her world is going up in conflagration, Marie-Laure’s fingertips race across the braille dots to open another world, the world of Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea, which she broadcasts as the bombs fall. Marie-Laure, with her blindness, has a huge capacity for the world and human experience.

Then there is Werner, a German boy, whose snowy white hair is almost as much a character marker as Marie-Laure’s blindness. He is an undersized orphan trying to look after his sister and others in the industrial area of Zollverein, Germany. Werner has a preternatural gift for mathematics and radios and, as a result, is spared going into the mines, but is scooped up into the German army where he becomes a radio operator.

Marie-Laure and Werner cross paths when the Allies begin bombing the holdout of Saint-Malo in early August, 1944. During the most intense part of the circular, reiterative narrative, Werner is trapped in the basement of the Hotel of Bees because of a bomb hit. Marie-Laure is trapped not far away in the attic of her uncle’s house with the cursed jewel, The Sea of Flames, in her possession. A mad, dying Nazi stalks the downstairs desperate to get at the jewel, which he believes will save his life.

Thankfully, Doerr lets a long, comforting resolution play out as we see what happens to the survivors of the bombing of Saint-Malo. We see the survivors intermittently as they go about life-after-the-war until 2014 (the novel’s pub date). So vicariously was I participating in this novel, if I should go to Paris this year (fat chance), I would keep an eye out for an elderly blind lady who seems to know where she is going. And I do believe some evil potential, buffeted and stained to look like ordinary sea rock, is always being swished around on the ocean floor waiting to be found and polished.

Doerr expands the literal plot line (this-happens-then-this-happens-then-this-happens) with a richness of inversions, paradoxes, oxymorons, juxtapositions, repetitions, symbols, and motifs that invite the reader to go beyond the storyline. For example:

·      Clearly, a mollusk is not just a mollusk. And what’s with all those birds?
 ·      Before two of the most heart-breaking events of the narrative (the rape and Werner’s death), why are there quasi-Eucharistic events?
 ·      Why is the fabulous diamond, The Sea of Flames, given such an oxymoronic name?
 ·      How can we not see light?
 ·      Why is Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea the message of comfort to all who hear Marie-Laure’s last broadcast? (On the surface, it would seem to be an inversion of the usual message of hope.)
 ·      Why can the story be read pretty effectively backwards?

Doerr’s story has become an earwig. Certain images, characters, events, and themes will always remain in my head. More than any novel I’ve read in years, I felt that I was buried with Werner below the Hotel of Bees. I was in the cold orphanage attic with him when, as a boy, he listened to a faraway voice talking about the nature of light on the radio. I was as hungry as Marie-Laure contemplating opening the last unlabeled can of food in the attic.

As an adult who has read a gazillion novels, I’ve largely lost my childhood ability to be carried away into another world by a story. So thank you, Anthony Doerr, for letting me do that again. —Sharelle Moranville

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