BOOK REVIEW: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

When I finished The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields, a novel of the life of Edith Wharton, I knew I’d have to move one of Wharton’s classics to the top of my list. The Age of Innocence has been sitting on my shelf for a good while, but for some reason I felt compelled to re-read the novella Ethan Frome instead. I read it in high school, and while I couldn’t remember it in too much detail, I vaguely remembered the plot. I recalled the impression of it being the bleakest, most depressing novel I’d ever read. Was it really that bad? I had to read it again.

It is a downer. However, since my high school days, I’ve been exposed to a great deal of bleak reading material--not all of it fiction--so Ethan Frome didn’t retain quite the power to depress that it had back then.

Set in a fictional New England town in the dead of winter, an unnamed narrator tells the story of a mysterious local figure, the partially paralyzed, physically arresting Ethan Frome.

The story tells of three people trapped by extreme poverty and by cruel Fate. Ethan Frome, the "hero," married a woman he does not love. He proposed to Zeena, his mother’s caretaker, after the death of his mother, without quite understanding the significance of the commitment he was making. Ethan and Zeena both wanted something other than the poor farming life ahead of them in cold, isolated Starkfield. When it became apparent they were not going to escape, Zeena retreated into the self-absorption of chronic physical ailments, real or imaginary. Ethan, worn down by the demands of the farm and the demands of her illness, tried to turn a deaf ear to her complaints. She grew more and more bitter. He grew more and more withdrawn. And then, Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver entered the picture. A lively, pretty young girl, Mattie’s economic circumstances were even worse than Ethan and Zeena’s. Completely destitute, she was grateful to accept an unpaid position as Zeena’s live-in housekeeper and nurse.

Of course, Ethan and Mattie fall in love. Zeena senses their growing attraction and attempts to banish Mattie. But everyone’s plans go awry and the three are trapped even more cruelly.

The story is told in such a way that everything is seen from Ethan’s perspective. Zeena is a sour, scheming, hypochondriac whose only joy in life seems to be making other people miserable. Mattie is sweet, innocent, and tragically unlucky. And Ethan is stoic and accursed.

However, there is more than one side to every story and this time around I had a bit more sympathy for Zeena’s position. Young Ethan seemed more pitiably weak. And I found Mattie to be a bit stupid. There is plenty of tragedy to go around in Ethan Frome, but I’m not so sure that it is as inevitable a tragedy as I believed it to be the first time I read it. Fate is certainly cruel to Ethan, Zeena and Mattie but their own poor decisions are just as much to blame.

BOOK REVIEW: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars has been on my must read list all year. I took it out of the library just after its release when the first burst of great reviews caught my attention, but I had to return the book before I could read it. Luckily, my son caught the Vlogbrothers bug and announced he wanted to read the novel so I bought it. I hesitated to read a book about kids with cancer just after a book about a woman with chronic renal failure, but I’m glad I decided to go ahead.

The Fault in Our Stars deserves its accolades. Hazel Grace Lancaster is a seventeen-year-old girl dying of metastatic thyroid cancer. Her physicians have put her on an experimental drug that has temporarily arrested the growth of the nodules in her lungs, but everyone knows the reprieve will not last. Her lung capacity is reduced so she needs to use supplemental oxygen during the day and a breathing machine at night. As the book opens, she is depressed and thinking a lot about death. She has very supportive parents but she worries about what will happen to them when she’s gone. In the meantime, she attends community college part-time and reluctantly goes to a weekly cancer support group for teens at her local church.

Then, one night at her support group, she meets Augustus Waters, a cancer survivor. Augustus had "a touch of osteosarcoma." He was treated and now has a prosthetic leg. His survival chances are 85%, so he doesn't really need to be there for himself. He’s attending to support a friend, Isaac, who has a rare eye tumor.

Augustus and Hazel discover that they have a lot more in common than cancer. They are kindred spirits. They think alike, talk alike. They enjoy the same books, music, philosophy. They have the same sense of humor. It is inevitable that they fall in love. But there is an urgency to their relationship because they feel their mortality with a frightening intensity. They want to live life to the fullest. Augustus, in particular, wants to leave his mark. Hazel, on the other hand, wants to do no harm.

This is a beautiful story about intelligent, kind, funny kids coping with pain, loss, and death. It’s realistically sad, without being depressing. It was good to spend time with people who truly appreciate the wonder of life.

BOOK REVIEW: The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns by Margaret Dilloway

The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns by Margaret Dilloway is a captivating piece of realistic contemporary fiction. Galilee Garner (Gal) is a thirty-six-year old biology teacher at a small Catholic school. Her life is defined by two things: chronic renal disease and a passion for roses.

Gal lost her kidneys to relux when she was twelve, and two kidney transplants have failed. She has been on dialysis for eight years. Aside from feeling rotten most of the time, and spending half of her life shuttling to the dialysis center to be hooked up to a machine, she knows her days are numbered unless she can get another transplant.

Life is unfair. She pushes ahead nevertheless, but she has little patience for the petty concerns of the healthy. This includes pretty much everyone else: the students who don’t put in the effort to succeed, the head of school who pities her but wants her to cut the students some slack, the parents who think she should coddle their babies, and, most of all, the older sister who threw away her health choosing a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and parties. The irresponsible sister’s worst sin was neglecting a daughter, Riley, who is now fifteen, shunting her between an ex-husband, grandparents, and an unstable household where God-knows-what was taking place.

The one bright spot in Gal’s life is a fascination with breeding roses. She wants to create a new rose that combines beauty, hardiness, and fragrance–one that will win competitions and earn her respect from breeders with greater resources than her small greenhouse and lawn patch. She wants to create a commercially viable rose. She’s an amateur up against the professionals. But it is the one thing that gives her hope and reason to live.

And then, enter Riley. Gal’s sister has a job opportunity that takes her overseas. Presumably to get her life back on track, she dumps her daughter on Gal. The last thing Gal needs is a messed-up teenager to deal with, to care for, to care about.

I had a hard time putting this book down. The details were remarkable and the character development was spot-on. I read the book because I have an interest in kidney disease and this showed the human toll. Gal was "prickly" – the adjective used by a friend in the book. She refused to believe she was ever wrong. She was used to being deferred to. She was manipulative. Her closest friend finally called her on her self-centeredness and Gal was, at first, resistant to admitting it. She’s sick! She could, in fact, be dying. She is entitled to think of herself. But over the course of the book, a change comes over Gal. She opens her eyes to where she has been wrong and this softens her edges to possibilities to other things in life. It’s not a 180 degree change. The book is realistic. But it’s a beautiful story about personal growth under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

The storyline also wraps itself around Gal’s attention to her roses. The metaphor is obviously there, but it works as plot, too, and is interesting in its own right. I never thought I’d find details about flower breeding and flower show/competitions so interesting.

Margaret Dilloway is the author of How to Be an American Housewife, a book I haven’t read but may have to!

ESCAPE TO THE PAST WITH: Wilderness by Lance Weller

Holly at Bippity Boppity Books gave Wilderness by Lance Weller such a strong review that I knew I had to read it. I’ve been trying to use my library more, partly because I tend to READ the books I take out of the library. They have to be returned. When I buy books I tend to toss them onto the pile and who knows when they’ll ever get read. To my delight, I got my hands on a copy of Wilderness fairly quickly.

The book pieces together a narrative from the perspective of several different characters, but the main protagonist is Abel Truman, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Confederacy. He was a New Yorker by birth, but personal tragedy set him to wandering and he happened to be in the south at the time the war broke out. Moreover, he more or less believed in the southern cause. If not that, he believed in his friendships with the men he fought beside.

Thirty-five years later, living a solitary life (solitary except for his well-loved dog) in a shack on the Pacific coast, Abel comes to understand that he is dying from a slowly progressive illness. One morning he decides to return home to die and he begins the long dangerous trek, taking only a few provisions, his rifle, and his dog.

Along the way he runs into two evil men who want to steal his dog and who would have no qualms about killing him to do so. But Abel is a tough old man. And surprisingly lucky. Abel’s path crosses that of the would-be thieves more than once during the course of his journey with increasingly violent results. Other settlers and wanderers are also caught up in the crossfire. As Abel interacts with them, the reader is given deeper and deeper insight into the type of man he is.

Interspersed with the story of Abel’s current day journey are chapters detailing memories of his past–his wartime experiences. The war is what shaped him, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. And then, going even farther back, Abel is forced to dredge up thoughts of the tragic loss that preceded the war.

Wilderness is a moving story. Abel’s life is portrayed with sensitivity and depth. He’s a good man but flawed, and journeying with him is time well spent.

This is a debut novel by an author who has previously published award-winning short stories. So read it with the expectation of literary historical fiction. At times, I found the writing style overwhelmed the story–as if the point had drifted away from what was being said to how prettily it was being said, and I found myself skimming ahead to where it would get back on track again. But most of the time there is a good balance between fine writing and a compelling story-line. I had to keep reading to see where Abel was going.

BACK TO THE CLASSICS CHALLENGE: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t complete the Back-to-the-Classics Challenge this year. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is my choice for a classic set in a country that I will not realistically visit during my lifetime. The book has been on my bookshelf for many years (along with War and Peace) and I’ve always intended to read it, but I’ve been procrastinating. Not only is it long, but I’ve been afraid that it would be a slow read. To be honest, I was daunted by its Russian-ness.

Still, a challenge is a challenge. I finally picked it up and got started. And guess what? My fears were totally unfounded. The book sucked me in right from the start.

The book opens with one unhappy married couple, Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky and his wife, Dolly. Dolly has just discovered her husband’s adultery and is devastated. She doesn’t believe she can go on with her life as it is but doesn’t know how to change things either. Stepan is miserable to have been caught but doesn’t feel any actual remorse for his affair. Hoping to patch things up, he has sent for his sister, Anna Karenina, to speak with Dolly.

At the same time, another relationship is in the works. Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, is being courted by two men, Count Vronsky and Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin. Vronsky is a handsome young rake, a military man of sorts, considered a good catch by all the enamored women. Levin is an older, steady man. Kitty has known him for many years and is fond of him, but he’s rather dull in comparison. Vronsky flirts but has no intention of marrying. Levin is utterly devoted.

The stage is set. Anna is a beautiful, lively, married young woman who does manage to reconcile her brother and his wife. She also meets Kitty, who adores her. They all go to a ball (supposed to have been Kitty’s triumph, but that was before Anna showed up.) Anna and Vronsky (who have briefly met at the train station) meet again at the ball and all is lost. Vronsky determines to pursue her and Anna, who previously was known to all as morally upstanding, decides to fall.

Anticipating a proposal from Vronsky, Kitty refuses an offer from Levin, who then leaves town to return to his country home/farm in despair. When Vronsky leaves town soon after in pursuit of Anna, Kitty falls ill with shame and wretchedness, realizing her mistake.

The book follows these people (and others related to them) as they live their lives. It is remarkably detailed in describing the every-day events but even more so in showing the inner thoughts of the characters. Everything is analyzed. The reader is right inside their heads. And even though its nineteenth century Russia, what Anna, Kitty, Vronsky, Levin, etc. think and feel could easily be put in the heads of contemporary characters. Their angst has a universal, timeless quality. Societal shunning of an adulterous woman might not be as complete or leave a woman with the limited options that Anna faced, but a lot of the psychological pain of the breaking up of the family is likely the same. The people, the situations– everything seemed very real. It is not entirely, or even mostly Anna’s story. Levin and Kitty get equal attention as foils to Anna and Vronsky, and the beauty of their relationship provides a lovely contrast without being too frightfully preachy.

All in all, Anna Karenina is an engrossing novel, a surprisingly quick read. I think I’m going to have to try tackling War and Peace!

GIVEAWAY WINNER

The winner of my Blogoversary gift card winner is:

MEG

 

I've sent Meg an email. Thanks to all who entered and left encouraging comments!

Six Word Saturday

 

 

 

Sending Prayers to Friends Back East

 

 

I love Halloween. It's right up there with my favorite holidays. But this year it sounds too scary with this storm blowing in on the East Coast. I know the media overhypes weather, and I really hope it turns out to be a simple snowstorm without the fearsome impact that's being predicted. Still, I'm nervous for friends and family - and even more so for those who are more likely to be in the storm's path with fewer resources for riding it out.

 

 

What is Six Word Saturday?  Want to play along? All that's necessary to participate is to describe your life (or something) in a phrase using just six words. For more information, try clicking here. Feel free to explain or not explain. Add an image, a video, a song, nothing.  If you play along in your blog, please add a link to the Mr. Linky at Show My Face. (see details there and links to other participating blogs there.)