Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

“Prodigal” is from the Latin prodigus – meaning “lavish.” Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer is a lavish story. The characters, in their slightly over-the-top ways, are lavish. Even the cover design is lavish.

The novel cycles through three stories, all set in fictional Zebulon County, near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. There’s the story of Deanna Wolfe and Eddie Bondo and their passion for each other–their relationship stressed by her resolve to save the coyotes and his quest to kill them. There’s the story of Lusa and Cole Widener–their relationship strained by opposite views of how to husband the land. And there’s the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley–he a conservative curmudgeon who would like to deny feelings, she a happy and generous soul who welcomes change.

Each of the three stories has a distinct narrative voice. For fun, I randomly opened the book to sample each one.

From Deanna’s story: She went to bed with Eddie Bondo all over her mind and got up with a government-issue pistol tucked in her belt.

From Lusa’s story: . . . when she married Cole and moved her life into this house, the inhalations of Zebulon Mountain touched her face all morning, and finally she understood. She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a lover’s sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck.

From Garnett’s story: In a springtime as rainy as this one, snapping turtles strayed from their home ponds into wet ditches, looking for new places to find their hideous mates and breed their hideous children. Of course there would be one waiting for him in that weedy ditch under all those briars – that swamp that had been created by Nannie Rawley – and if he happened to have a turtle on his foot now, it was entirely her fault.

Kingsolver creates discrete syntax, vocabulary, and tone for each of the three narrators so that their voices reveal their characters: Deanna’s voice is terse, literal, and solitary. Lusa’s emotional, romantic, and sensual. Garnett’s pessimistic and lonely.

The couples are contradictions, which Kingsolver connects with and instead of the customary but. Deanna wants to live alone with nature, and she’s sexually drawn to a coyote hunter. Lusa wants to cherish and preserve nature, and she’s sexually drawn to a conventional tobacco farmer. Garnett wants to be dismissive of all Nannie’s hippie ways, and he wants to slay her scarecrow to protect her.

The characters of Prodigal Summer will stay in my mind for a long time because they are lavishly made and lavishly thrown together. I find myself wondering how Deanna’s baby is being loved in Nannie’s patch of paradise, if Garnett has loosened up a little, where Lusa will get her next bright idea for making the Weidener farm profitable.

The last narrator in the novel is a coyote, meditating on the foolishness of people. Solitude is a human presumption. Every step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen. —Sharelle Moranville

The Color of Water, by James McBride

The Color of Water is a success story, a testament to one woman’s true heart, solid values, and indomitable will.  The story is told in two voices which alternate throughout the book. In telling his mother’s story, along with his, James McBride addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It is, in a word, inspiring.  

McBride, a journalist and musician, explores his mother’s past, recreating her remarkable story, as well as his own upbringing and heritage in a poignant and powerful debut novel. He skillfully relates his life story and his coming to terms with his mixed ethnic and religious heritage, with chapters conveying his mother’s travails and development into a fervent Baptist.

His mother, born Rachel Shilsky, who changed her name to Ruth to be more American, is a story of a woman whose parents fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of Central Europe and landed in a Suffolk, Virginia, a violently racist small southern town, there to be faced by new anti-Semitism and racial prejudices and develop a few of their own.  Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers, and ultimately abandoned his wife.

However, her grim upbringing is left behind when she moves to Harlem, marries Dennis, a black minister, fervently adopts Christianity, and raises eight children. When she fell in love with Dennis, she said “He came from a home where kindness was a way of life.  I wanted to be in this kind of family.  I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.” However, they experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial marriage.  They opened the New Brown Memorial Church together.  Then Dennis fell ill with lung cancer and died just before James was born.

Widowed, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family. Then she remarried to Andrew McBride, another black man, and raised four more children before he also died.

James reports that he grew up in “orchestrated chaos”, with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him.  She was white, and she kept secrets. It is her voice, unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic, that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.

In the answer that gives the book’s its title, she says “God’s not black. He’s not white.  God is the color of water.  Water doesn’t have a color.” She schemed shrewdly to have all her children buses to schools predominately in Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there.  James was pleasantly surprised when he learned during his senior year in high school that he had been admitted to Oberlin College.  He and his eleven siblings all completed college and led successful careers.

The triumph of the book is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories of family love, the sheer force of a mother’s will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church, a respect for education and religion. Issues of race and identity took secondary importance to her beliefs.

At 65, Ruth went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.  She remains in close contact with her children, holding holiday gatherings where everyone sleeps on the floor or rugs in shifts, double or triple in bed – just like the old times.

The Color of Water will make you proud to be a member of the human race. This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths.  The two stories, son’s and mother’s, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note, particularly at this current time of racial polarization.—Kenneth N. Johnson

Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf was a gentle, tranquil writer, and his voice is solid in this bittersweet story of last love.

Addie and Louis have lived near one another in Holt, Colorado—on the eastern plains—for years. They have never been close friends, but they have followed each other’s lives peripherally. Both widowed, they’ve lived parallel, but not intersected lives.

Now, Addie, 70, is tired of being alone, especially at night, and she approaches Louis with an offer: that they spend the nights together. This isn’t about sex or romance; it’s about companionship, about being with another person in the night and waking up together. At first, Louis is wary, but then he realizes he, too, needs more human contact.

They talk into the night, wiping away their loneliness, and shrug off any opposition. And from this, a sweet end-of-life love develops.

As the bond between the two grows, Addie’s son and Louis’s daughter are unsure what to make of the relationship and the rest of the town reacts with various levels of acceptance.

Reading Haruf feels like a hug. Here’s Louis talking:

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

Adding to the sweet sorrow of the book is the fact that Haruf wrote it while he knew he was dying—the book was published after his death from lung cancer at 71, around the age of his characters. He knew how it felt to face death close up.

The book is also a Netflix movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, filmed last year in Colorado Springs and Florence, Colorado, where Haruf spent his final years. He was born in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado and was my age, so we probably met in the maternity ward.—Pat Prijatel

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

Novels have an architecture readers expect. The arc. A beginning, a middle of rising action, a climax of peak intensity, and action falling to a satisfying end.

Many short stories have that same architecture, but Munro’s don’t. Her architecture is like a chocolate covered cherry (messy to eat, rich, with a lingering aftertaste. Not to be eaten by the handful).

Think of the chocolate shell as the narration that swirls around, accessing the thoughts of multiple characters in a single story, and folding back and forth from past to present to past. Think of the creamy cordial inside as the life of southwestern Ontario where Munro lives – forests and lakes, farms, small towns, distances covered by trains, cities. Characters she knew or imagined. Think of the cherry as the treasure – the Ah ha! moment, cradled gently by the cordial and given shape by the chocolate shell.

The Ah ha! moment happens to the reader as it happens to the character. For example, in “Corrie,” the main character, wealthy Corrie Carlton, attends the funeral of a woman, Lillian Wolfe, who worked in the village years ago. Indeed, she worked briefly in the Carlton household and subsequently found a way to blackmail Corrie and her married lover. When Corrie gets trapped into attending Lillian’s funeral reception, she is unsettled by the universal affection in which Lillian is held. The next morning, Corrie wakes up recognizing she has been ensnared for years in the most outrageous lie. As this awful moment of awareness comes to Corrie, a gut feeling of recognition and identification also comes to the reader. (“There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone. She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.”) And the reader has bitten into the cherry.

Likewise, at the end of “Gravel”, neither the genderless narrator nor the reader knows what really took place that dreadful day when Caro and Blitzee drowned. But Munro has stroked the universal cloudiness of early childhood memories and stirred unease and guilt in the reader.

In these rich, evocative, stories that are as packed with meaning as a novel, Munro revels in the ordinary: her own time and place. She writes about soldiers returning home after World War II (“Train”). She writes about the closing of factories and shifts in the class system (“Pride). She shows us the perfect post-war wife – rigid in housekeeping, wanton in bed (“Haven”). She writes about the sexual revolution and its effect on children (“To Reach Japan”). She writes about drugs, divorce, the fragility of the family, and growing old.

Munro’s characters are never totally worthy. Some are selfish (the mothers in “To Reach Japan” and “Gravel”). Some are exploitative (the gigolo in “Corrie”). Some can’t bond (the narrator in “Train”). Some are irresponsible (Neal in “Gravel”). Munro seems to understand the condition of being broken, and the need to forgive. Even ourselves.

At the end of the last not-quite story, “Dear Life,” Munro confesses guilt for not returning home for her mother’s last illness or funeral. She writes, “We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

These are the closing words in the closing book of a long, distinguished, Nobel Prize winning career. The ten stories and four almost-stories are told as only Munro could tell them. They are a celebration of dear life and an affirmation of our common humanity.   SBM

DEAD WAKE, by Erik Larson

Few tales in history are more haunting or more fraught with secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, which resulted in one of the most colossal tragedies of maritime history.  Author Erik Larsen ushers us aboard the Lusitania, the fastest ship of its day, on its way from America to England, when on May 7, 1915, it was torpedoed by a German submarine 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.  It sank in 18 minutes, 1,198 passengers and crew perished.  Only six of the 22 lifeboats were launched, and many passengers drowned because they donned their life-jackets incorrectly.

Once again, Larson demonstrates his expert researching skills and writing abilities -- switching between the hunter and the hunted, his detailed forensic and utterly engrossing account of the Lusitania’s last voyage, highlights that unpredictable shifts in weather, the many small decisions made by the captains of both the luxury liner and U-Boat, a chance fog, the slowing down to get mail, and numerous other circumstances, all converged to placing the liner in precisely the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

In Dead Wake, Larson brings to life a cast of evocative characters on board the Lusitania, including the famed Boston bookseller Charles Luriat who come on board with a priceless copy of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, pioneering female architect Theodate Pope, millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, and art collector Hugh Lane, who carried sealed tubes containing paintings by Rembrandt and Monet. Apart from the Lusitania, Larson also explores that part of the life of President Woodrow Wilson, who was grieving about the death of his wife, but smitten and captivated by the prospect of new love with Edith Galt, and Winston Churchill, then the first Lord of the Admiralty, who hoped to bring America into the war, and whose ultra-secret spy group failed to convey intelligence that might have saved the liner.

This book is excellent when describing the lethal new technology of early submarine warfare, life inside the U-boats, its cramped quarters, “the reek of three dozen men who never bathed”, and the omnipresent danger. Following his government’s new policy of unrestricted warfare, Captain Schweiger fired a single torpedo into the Lusitania’s hull, blowing a hole the size of a house beneath the liner’s waterline.  Less than a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from deep within the bowels of the Lusitania, and she listed precariously and began to sink immediately. 

Unsettling questions clung to the case in the years that followed. Was the ship somehow allowed to sail into a trap? Why had the British Admiralty failed to provide a military escort? What was the cause of the second explosion? Why did Germany then decide to attack civilian shipping? There remains a mystique about the disaster, with questions that remain unresolved, and may never be.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama of the disaster.  Put in context of World War 1, the sinking of the Lusitania altered the course of history by ultimately dragging the U.S. into the conflict, although it was two years later.  I agree with one reviewer who suggested that Larson’s book “practically begs Hollywood blockbuster treatment." — Ken Johnson

p.s. After reading Dead Wake, I mistakenly assumed that the U-Boats were the first submarines.  But, with a little research, I found that the first submarine known to have attacked an enemy ship was the Turtle, piloted by Ezra Lee of the American Continental Army.  He piloted the Turtle under a British flagship, attempting to attach an explosive charge to the bottom of the ship.  He was unable to successfully attach it, so was forced to give up the attempt.  But George Washington personally congratulated Lee on his survival and gave him a job in the secret service.

There were a number of other experiments over the next 80+ years, but during the Civil War, submarine development got kicked up a notch. The most well-known Union sub was the USS Alligator, designed by a Frenchman named Brutus de Villeroi, who listed his occupation as “natural genius”.  The Alligator was lost during a storm, before attacking the Confederates.

But the most famous Civil War sub was built by a Horace Hunley, who egotistically named his boat the Hunley. During a test, however, the Confederate sub flooded and five crew members were drowned. It was salvaged though, and on its second attempt, Hunley failed to pull out of a dive and the sub became stuck in the sea floor.  The crew were unable to open the hatches, and Hunley and all his crew perished. Again, it was salvaged and took its first action against the Union, ramming the USS Housatonic with a torpedo protruding from the front of the sub.  After backing away from the Housatonic, the torpedo was charged, sinking the ship within five minutes.  Thus, the Hunley was the first sub ever to sink an enemy ship, securing its place in naval history. —KJ

Last Bus to Wisdom, by Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig’s last book, appropriately titled Last Bus to Wisdom, is an unpredictable and boisterous road novel.  It brought back many memories of my childhood in western Kansas in the same era.

Donal Cameron is a 11-year old being raised by his grandmother on a Montana Ranch in 1951. But when Gram has to have serious surgery, she decides to ship him off to her sister Kate in Manitowoc, Wisconsin for the summer.

On his way to Wisconsin, Donal first rides the Dog Bus, as he calls the Greyhound, wearing his best rodeo shirt. Along the way, he engages with everyone he sits next to, soliciting literary gems for his cherished autograph book, which he carries everywhere. He has a $5 dollar bill in his pocket and three $10 dollar bills pinned to the inside of his shirt, along with two changes of clothes in a battered wicker suitcase.

During the ride, he lives on a steady diet of Mounds candy bars, receives his first real kiss from a good-natured waitress named Letty, and meets Harv, her boyfriend who is on his way back to jail, handcuffed and accompanied by his stepbrother, a mean-spirited sheriff. Other fellow travelers, who he easily interacts with, include young soldiers off to the Korean War, some nuns, a group of obnoxious boys on their way to summer camp who sang “great, green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts”, a song I haven’t heard since I was a kid.

With his shock of red hair, freckles and gift of gab, Donal carries an arrowhead for luck. But, he just escapes being robbed, and missed his transfer in the Twin Cities. With luck from his Arrowhead, however, he was transported by a good Samaritan who drove him to the next bus stop so he could continue on to Wisconsin.

Upon arriving at Aunt Kate’s, he’s let down when he realizes she is not the famous singer Kate Smith, his bedroom is in the attic, she feeds him soggy cereal, and his main entertainment is playing canasta with his aunt’s friends. She is a manipulative presence who abuses her ‘husband’ Herman and condemns Donal to jigsaw puzzles for recreation. Shortly after arriving his loses his pocket money and feels doomed to a summer of endless boredom.

But Donal hits it off with Uncle Herman, a one-eyed German, who is hen-pecked by Kate. Herman routinely escapes to his greenhouse where he reads novels of the old west. During World War II, Herman was an opponent of Hitler, stowed away on a ship to the US, and lived for decades with Kate as an undocumented alien.

After only a month into Donal’s stay, aunt Kate decides to ship him back to Montana, and an uncertain fate awaits him.  But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo – Herman has decided to fly the coop, cashes his disability check and joins him on the bus, heading for all manners of adventures. Donal asks him where they will go, and Herman says “Anywhere’s." Just so it is “that away," pointing toward the West.

Wearing new cowboy hats they lope all over, getting into scrapes in Yellowstone National Park, seeing pow-wows and rodeos, getting Jack Kerouac’s signature in the autograph book, encountering swindlers, and evading the law. But as posters start to appear announcing that Herman is an enemy alien wanted by the FBI, the pair find themselves on the run. 

After their money is stolen (again), Donal talks a doctor into providing bus fare to Wisdom, Montana.

The story picks up steam in the final pages, where the unlikely pair bunk with hobos arriving for the hay harvest.  Soon, they are adopted into the itinerant clan and obtain haying jobs.  Fortunately, their travails lead to a happy ending.

Doig does a superb job of bringing this bygone era alive for the reader. His richly drawn characters that move the story at a rollicking pace. I truly enjoyed this memorable book.— Ken Johnson

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

As I write, Arkansas is trying to execute eight men on a calendar of two a day, every other day, for over a week, beginning next Monday, April 17. The state “needs” to kill the men before the medications used in the lethal injections expire. Most of these men have been on death row for over twenty years, and now they are rushed to death because of an expiration date on a drug.

I can hardly bear to think, talk, or read about capital punishment because it feels so fundamentally wrong. So I’m amazed at how Bryan Stevenson could turn a book about death row into truly A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Stevenson is a wonderful storyteller, spotlighting individuals whom he has helped, or tried to help, since he founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend those often wrongly condemned and trapped in the criminal justice system.

Stevenson gives horrifying numbers for what has happened in that system, to whom it has happened (mainly poor and/or dark skinned people), why it has happened, what it costs – both in terms of dollars and suffering.

He explains where we go wrong when we (with good intentions) personalize victims such as seven year-old Megan Kanka, for whom Megan’s Law is named. He explains the profit motive in incarceration. 

But mainly he shows us people like ourselves, but without affluent white privilege: Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to die for a murder he patently did not commit; Herbert Richardson, a traumatized young veteran who only meant to scare a pretty young nurse into his arms with a homemade bomb, but killed a child instead; Marsha Colbey, a mother who suffered the sadness of a stillborn child, but was demonized as a murderous parent because she was very poor; and more.

What most impresses me (and puzzled me a little at first) is Stevenson’s calm, steady perseverance: every day he walks into prisons and courthouses where the people in power are not glad to see him. They are not willing to listen, or reconsider, or admit a centimeter of error even in the face of plain and undeniable facts.

How does he keep doing such work day after day, year after year, understaffed and beleaguered by people desperate for his help?

I think his superpower comes from an amazing lack of ego. He never lets the challenges become about him. He kept his focus on others, on their needs. He admits his own brokenness – indeed, he recognizes it as a gateway to grace. And that grace, mingled with intelligence and training, keep him going. 

It sounds so simple, but seems so hard. I’m inspired and instructed and humbled. Just Mercy was a perfect choice for a Lenten read.— Sharelle Moranville