All tagged family drama

Wellness

Wellness

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peals the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are crushingly depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago contemporary storyline are a number of backstory character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult

The Covenant of Water

The Covenant of Water

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

The Covenant of Water (2023) by Abraham Verghese well-deserves the title of (my personal) most anticipated book of the year. As soon as I heard that Verghese, author of the beautiful, difficult book Cutting for Stone, had a new book coming out, this one set predominantly in India, I got a little giddy. Verghese’s career as a surgeon (he is faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, after all) blends with his incredibly artful prose to make moving, fascinating reads. Even after many months of anticipation, The Covenant of Water wowed me, moved me, and left me feeling connected to something bigger and more beautiful than any single life.

Barkskins

Barkskins

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are growing among its pages, although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way; trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees.

The Lowering Days

The Lowering Days

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Gregory Brown’s debut novel The Lowering Days (2021) weaves together several families' stories who make their home along the Penobscot River just as the river collects many tributaries before it dumps into the sea. Two families, both alike in dignity, make their homes in the rural woods along the Penobscot near its mouth. One, the Creels, with Lyman and Grace at its head rely on the bounty of the sea. Lyman is a decorated war vet and a lobster man. Grace, like her name, walks a gracious path through marriage and maternity even in the face of unspeakable tragedy. The other, the Ames, is the result of a love union between boat-builder and activist journalist, Arnoux and Falon respectively. These neighbors have a deep and tenuous history, like the main branches of a river where it flows into the sea; The Lowering Days follows these many streams upriver to their sources.

Gilead

Gilead

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Certain novels are slow and contemplative; they paint a portrait of a life or a time using carefully selected shades and hues to capture a mood. There may not be much action beyond that of memory, but it is enough. More than enough even. Marilynne Robinson’s winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead (2004) is one such novel. Contemplative, slow-burn writing like hers gets at the big questions of life with a hefty serving of earnest feeling sprinkled throughout. Written in first-person, Gilead is one man’s reflection upon his life, his family, and the meaning of human goodness.

The Once and Future Witches

The Once and Future Witches

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Chris Mathers Jackson
Reading Fun

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.

Lanny

Lanny

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Max Porter does something both unique and disquieting in his novel Lanny (2019). Set in a sleepy English village (within commuting distance of London) in modern time, Lanny is family drama set amidst the cacophony of villager voices as overheard by mystical, other-worldly Dead Papa Toothwort.