An evocation of a certain upper class Indian life

Although Mr. Niyogi’s Last Audit is set in Bengaluru, a large city in southern India, there is nothing particularly “Indian” about the story other than the names: Kiran Singh, Mr. Niyogi’s associate; Archana, his daughter; Ramani, his wife; Mr. Saran, the chairman of Saran Airlines, his former employer, and more. With small tweaks it could have been set in New York, London, or Tokyo.

Mr. Niyogi, now retired and plagued by Parkinson’s disease, had grown elderly as Saran Airlines had grown into an international travel conglomerate where Mr. Niyogi was the lead  accountant. Archana learns that a friend’s son has been stranded with 200 other miners on a tiny island in the Maldives when their employer went bankrupt. Can Mr. Niyogi do something?

It seems unlikely. Author S.N. Rao describes the effects of Parkinson’s, which cannot be cured. Palliative measures can give some brief relief, and the author describes these—twice. It’s an ugly, mortifying way to die.

Mr. Niyogi. troubled by a mysterious voice begging him for help escaping the island, comes up with a plan. I was troubled by this supernatural voice and think the author missed an opportunity to make more of it and its effect on Mr. Niyogi.

I was also troubled by Mr. Niyogi’s decision to hide his plan from his loving wife. It requires his daughter’s collusion, and he tells her, her mother “is already under a lot of stress worrying about my health. I don’t want to put her under more stress. As much as I want to do this, I don’t know if I will have the courage if your Mom is completely against it.” This may be an Indian thing, but I don’t think so.

Finally, a small thing. I bumped on the written formality when people talk. ““I did not [rather than ‘didn’t’] want to trouble you any more than I already have, and that is [that’s] why I kept it hidden from you too all this time. But now I need your help, and there is [there’s] no one else I can ask.” Perhaps this is the way an elderly Indian man would talk to his daughter, but it runs through the book and sounds stiff and unnatural.

Nevertheless Mr. Niyogi’s Last Audit is an interesting evocation of a certain upper class Indian life. 

Okay, why should I write a novel?

While most of the 18 essays in The Next Draft are interesting, I thought Suzanne Berne's superior: "Why Write a Novel? Why Read a Novel? And Why Now?"

Edited by Brenda Miller, the book is subtitled "Inspiring Craft Talks from the Rainier Writing Workshop." The workshop is the the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. The MFA is a three-year, four-residency program with emphasis in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Students participate in a 10-day summer residency on campus, and work remotely one-on-one with a faculty member during the year. Every day during the residency begins with a teacher's "Morning Talk"—one of these essays.

I probably responded to Berne's essay so strongly because I'm writing my sixth novel, and it's a question that has nagged me. Dozens of answers to why write a novel come immediately to mind: To make money. (Ha!) To dramatize a point of view. To impress mother/father/significant other. To fill time. To obtain a degree. To add to the culture. (Ha!) To say something that can't be said any other way.

Why read a novel? For diversion. To occupy time. To experience different lives, different cultures. To learn how the world reality works—or doesn't work. To become a more empathetic human being. 

Clearly there's no one reason to write or read a novel and Berne doesn't try. "My aim in part [in this essay] is to try to describe what it's like to write a novel—or what it can be like—and why I think that experience and novels themselves matter."

One answer to why spend years writing a novel, especially knowing it may not be published or, if self-published, may sink without a ripple, is that it "allows for something rare these days: the suspension of judgment." Writing a novel leaves room "for indecision. Even for disorientation. Not the kind of disorientation that makes you disbelieve what's right in front of you . . . but the kind that makes you suspect it may take a while to understand what is right in front of you."

Writing and reading a novel says Berne tends to be—or can be—or should be—a defamiliarizing process that requires "a lot of stumbling and searching, chiefly  basking a series of questions that lead mostly to other questions. Writing a novel offers an extended experience of not getting the point. So does reading one."

The essay quotes Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, E.M. Forster (is it possible to write about the novel without mentioning Aspects of the Novel?), Henry James, Georges Simenon, James Wood, and Virginia Woolf. It is thought-provoking and, for someone like myself, reassuring. It's all right to digress in your novel. Everyone does it. 

It's an essay I'll probably reread every year or so. Or when, unsure of what comes next or a work is rejected one more time, I'll read it to convince myself that the current work in progress is not a complete waste of time.

Not quite a walk in the park

The subtitle of Kevin Fedarko's A Walk in the Park is somewhat misleading: "The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon."

True, Fedarko and his good friend Pete McBride were badly—almost fatally—unprepared to walk the length of the Grand Canyon, all 277 miles. They had to be extracted from the canyon twice because to continue further probably would have killed them. Only because they were helped by kind and generous—and experienced (don't forget experienced)—hikers did they survive.

The canyon is laced with trails that Native Americas made hundreds, a thousand years ago or more. Indeed, only when John Wesley Powell spotted a trail leading from the river to the rim in 1876 on the first white person's running of the Colorado River through the canyon did he realize it was not an untouched wilderness. There is however no trail that you can walk from end of the Canyon to the other.

A Walk in the Park is a delightful book, "part memoir, part travelogue, part extended essay on the profound meanings of wilderness." The writing is marvelous and it provoked strong writing from readers on Amazon: "Fedarko combines deep history, personal story, friendship, family, sacrifice, sensitivity to Indigenous rights, understanding of recent history, environmental observation with an adventure that belies belief. The writing is perfect, with moments of sheer lyricism on top of sheer terror." I couldn't have said it better.

Although the Grand Canyon has several dozen recognized (by the National Park Service) trails, there is no path from one end of the Canyon to the other. Fedarko and McBride did manage to walk the entire length of the Canyon, from Lee's Ferry virtually to Lake Mead without one but with considerable help. They did walk in heat and they walked in snow. They rappeled down slot canyon walls and climbed cliffs. It took them a year to complete the trip with periods of recovery between stretches in the Canyon. 

A dip in Havasu Creek near its
confluence with the Colorado

A dozen years ago I went down the river on a raft. A friend won the lottery for a permit and organized a trip for sixteen friends and friends of friends who could take sixteen days to camp along the river. (The NPS has only 482 permits for non-commercial trips down the river in 2025.) Because ours was a private trip, we were free from any commercial restraints, but we had to do everything ourselves. I'd been told it would be the trip of a lifetime and it was.

And having spent sixteen days at the bottom of the canyon and hiked into side canyons (I almost lost a river sandal at the confluence of the Little Colorado where Powell spotted the trail to the rim), I am in awe of Fedarko's and McBride's accomplishment. They were not the first, as Fedarko acknowledges, but more people have walked on the moon than have walked the length of the Grand Canyon.

But you do not have to have gone down the Colorado to appreciate and enjoy the book. Again, another reader says it best: "You will discover a radiantly written, compelling story of a nearly 800 mile plunge into and hike through the intricacies of the Grand Canyon. You will join an astounding odyssey through one of earth’s holy and sacred wonders." If you can't go down the river or visit the Canyon, A Walk in the Park is the next best thing.

An engaging evocation of Jordanian life

A perfectly accurate if totally inadequate description of Dima Bader’s debut novel Dance Around the Dandelion would be something like: “Nuha, a middle-age, married Jordanian woman, has a steamy affair with a much younger man.”

Accurate but insufficient to convey the depth and richness of Nuha’s life and family and contemporary society in Amman, Jordan, where the novel is set. The family is affluent enough they can send Nuha’s half-sister to Houston for cancer treatments. Ultimately the cancer returns, and the girl dies. The parents divorce, the mother returns to Kuwait City, and remarries. The father, Sameer, remarries and fathers Nuha and a son. 

Bader covers this history in the novel’s first section, which she tells in the third person. The adult Nuha narrates the rest of the book, broken up by brief—and ultimately poignant— diary entries by own 8-year-old daughter.

For much of the book, indeed until Nuha falls passionately, overwhelmingly, and unexpectedly in love with a darkly handsome young man who manages his family’s furniture store, she is going through the motions of life. Somehow (and I’d like to know how she does it) Bader is able to hold the reader’s interest while a depressed Nuha walks through her days. We learn about her extended family and life in her grandmother’s Big House, her marriage to Khaled, and her life as part owner of a bookstore in Amman’s Old Town.

Like most families, Nuha’s has secrets. I wouldn’t call Nuha an unreliable narrator, but even as she seems forthcoming the author reveals information carefully, naturally, and when it will have the most effect. And again, somehow the story—Naha’s history—grows in depth and richness as we learn more and more about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dance Around the Dandelion for the craft and for the story. Bader includes just enough Arabic (with translations) to let us know these characters are not speaking English. I would not have included the footnotes to explain Jordanian dishes because they tend to throw the reader out of the story. Nor would I have included the italic sections, but that may be a personal preference. Neither of these quibbles diminish the book’s undeniable and pleasant effect.

The Thursday Murder Club strikes again

 Richard Osman says idea to set his Thursday Murder Club mysteries in a retirement village caught off guard as it came to him on a what he thought would be a perfectly pleasant but uneventful lunch visiting to a friend of his mother in one such community. (He also denies that the character Joyce is modeled on his mother.)

"The setting felt familiar because you're in beautiful countryside, but I was surprised because it was really busy with people everywhere. Then, when you start talking to them, 70 and above, you think, 'My god, there's some talent, wit, wisdom and sense of mischief in this generation, everything is there'. I thought this would be a great setting for a murder story. Let's throw the worst at them and see how they deal with it." 

He says seniors make good detectives because younger people tend to ignore them or not take them seriously. They have a wealth of experience to draw on; they’ve seen everything and done everything at least once if not more. So he created four feisty seniors who, to entertain themselves, begin to look into local cold cases and become entangled in current murders.

The four main characters he’s created have different backgrounds, personalities, and abilities and their skills compliment one another. Joyce is a former nurse. Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist. Elizabeth was an agent in England’s intelligence service. And Ron is a former labor organizer. During their working lives they would not have become friends. Finding themselves together in a senior development they have become close. 

Osman has now written four mysteries involving the four, each mystery giving one of the four a leading role. I reviewed the first in December 2021. All have been best sellers in the UK and the US, and a movie starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Kingsley is in the works.

Osman began his career working as executive producer on British game shows, including Deal or No Deal. He was the creative director at TV company Endemol UK, pitching the idea for Pointless to the BBC. In 1999, created and wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Boyz Unlimited with David Williams and Matt Lucas. In 2005, he co-created and co-wrote the animated Channel 4 sitcom Bromwell High. In 2013, he created the short-lived ITV gameshow Prize Island

While you do not have to read the four books in order to enjoy them, and while one might argue that the first in the series, The Thursday Murder Club, is a little clunky as Osman was getting his bearings, they are all thoroughly entertaining.

The short stories of a writer's writer

Because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed James Salter’s novels, I snapped up a copy of Last Night, his 2005 collection of ten short stories in a library book sale.

I’ve read that Salter is known as a writer’s writer, which I take to mean that his sentences, his paragraphs, his stories are, at the craft level, exquisite.

That may be, but Salter's writing is not so carefully crafted that it calls attention to itself. You don’t stop in a Salter story—I don’t stop—to admire a perfectly turned phrase, a beautiful description. You often do finish one of his stories struck by the impact and wondering how he does it.

He manages to evoke people at their most profound and significant moments: A book dealer faces the truth about his life, as it is and as it will never be again, when he is visited by his brash former girlfriend.

A lonely married woman, after a disturbing encounter with a drunken poet at a dinner party, finds herself irresistibly drawn to his animal surrogate, a huge tawny-eyed dog.

A lover of poetry must come to terms with his wife’s request to give up what may be his treasured relationship.

Salter, who died in 2015, was extraordinary in his ability to evoke a place, a person, and a plausible situation in a few pages. I don’t know if he was a writer’s writer, but I do know that his best stories are worth studying to see how he created characters and suggested entire lives.

What happened to Caitlin on that Colorado mountain?

When I told a writer acquaintance that the novel I'm currently drafting is set in Colorado, she told me one of her favorite books, Descent by Tim Johnston, is set largely in Colorado. With a recommendation like that I checked it out an scarfed it down.

The Courtlands are a Wisconsin family—Grant and Angela and their daughter Caitlin, 18, and son, Sean, 16—vacationing in Colorado. Caitlin, a runner, goes for an early morning run in the mountain high above the resort town in which they're staying. Sean follows on his mountain bike. High and alone on the mountain, Sean hit and badly hurt by a truck. The driver offers to take Caitlin down the mountain to a level at which her phone will find a signal. The next thing the parents know is that Sean is in the hospital and Caitlin has vanished.

Descent is Johnston's first adult novel. He had previously published a YA novel and a story collection. He was a professor of creative writing at the University of Memphis.  A native of Iowa City he worked for 25 years as a carpenter.

After the opening chapter, Descent follows Grant, Angela, and Sean as they live on without Caitlin and do what they can to survive with the mystery of her loss. Sean, badly hurt on the mountain, is unable to help the sheriff and his deputy with any useful information about the villain.

Stop reading now if you are going to be bothered by spoilers, although I'll try not to give everything away. We eventually learn (in short chapters of the italic type that I dislike) that Caitlin is chained up in a remote, isolated mountain cabin actually not far from the initiating accident. We never learn much about the villain. He is malevolent and relentless and responsible for the murder of at least two or three other young women. That we don't learn much about the personality of the villain doesn't matter of course. It's enough that we see he's cruel and pitiless and that because nature, the universe, reality are entirely unfeeling, humanity doesn't have to be.

What matters is how Caitlin is able to survive. Obviously the Courtlands are limited. At the beginning of the book they are tourists. What do they know about law enforcement in the Colorado mountains? (Not much.) One of the pleasures of Descent is seeing how plausibly Johnston is able to solve the problem he has set himself.

Another pleasure is the writing. An example chosen at random: "Around noon, with the sun roaring down, he walked to the hand pump near the smaller house, the casita, and struggled with it until at last the water retched up and ran in a cold stream that tasted of stones and iron." Descent skates right on the edge of being too well-written. A couple of times I was bounced out of the story by the beauty, the aptness of an observation or a sentence.  

But because Johnston writes so well, he is, I think, able to carry the reader along on the flow of words until the last fifty pages when the tension becomes almost unbearable. I can understand how Descent could become one of another writer's favorite books.

Pretty baubles, but not much else

 As a lifetime member of the Clean Plate Club, it bothers me to leave a book unfinished but I'm afraid that despite John Gardner's interesting introduction I am abandoning Kikuo Itaya's Tengu Child.

Kikuo Itaya (1898-1978) was the son of a nationally famous Japanese ceramicist, and although was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, he entered Waseda University to study Japanese literature. On graduation in 1923 he was hired to teach at Kaisei Gakuen, one of Tokyo's most prestigious private schools for boys. He taught there until he retired in 1977. The story collection Tangu Child is his only book.

John Gardner (1933-1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He's best know for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view. Gardner and Nokuko Tsukui are credited with translating the stories in Tengu Child.

Gardner's introduction argues that much fiction, Western and Japanese, "claims to show us, more clearly than life ordinarily does, how and why things happen: shows us how a chain of events takes shape, the motives and values of the characters involved, the effects of physical inertia when characters seek to impose their will on the world—in short, it helps us to understand reality-as-process."

In contrast, "a Buddhist writer like Kikuo Itaya . . . tends to use storytelling as a facade: the deeper impulse of the fiction is what I shall called meditational . . . .  As we muse on the stories of Kikuo Itaya, lured in by the graceful surface—the apparently coherent but sometimes puzzling line of action—we gradually realized that here . . . nearly everything is symbolic."

And that, I think, is my problem with the stories. While I believe a fictional character may be both convincingly realistic and symbolic (think Leopold Bloom in Ulysses), Itaya's characters feel entirely symbolic. In the stories I read, the action takes place pre-1600, i.e. before the shogunate. Setting the action in the remote past does not for me make it more persuasive or engaging. 

Prince Genji and the other characters in The Tale of Genji are very different in their lives, goals, and motivations from anyone I've ever met. Nonetheless, I'm willing to believe that Murasaki was trying to evoke plausible characters. Exceptional perhaps, but plausible. She was not trying to create symbols on which the reader is to meditate.

If I cannot enjoy or understand a character's thoughts and actions as at least remotely credible, it's unlikely I will make the effort to probe for a, or the, the deeper meaning. I found the handful of stories I read in Tengu Child to be lovely objects, but they told me nothing about life, reality, or Japanese culture.

Confronting life, death, and one of God's messengers

Nick Farlowe, who narrates his story in P.J. Murphy’s novel Yesterday’s Shadow, is sixteen years old in 1999. He lives in Cambridge, England, with his father, a fork-lift operator, and his mother, who commutes to London for her office job. He’s a high school student, does his homework faithfully, reads science fiction, plays war games with his buddies, and often cowers in his bed at night listening to his father punch out his mother. Until the night in Chapter 1 when Nick comes downstairs and gets into it. His father knocks him down, splitting his lip. That’s finally enough for his mother. She files for divorce and Nick’s father disappears.

That and a school fight are the most dramatic incidents in Yesterday’s Shadow. The novel is a well-written and interesting account of this pivotal year in Nick’s life. I found the evocation of white, middle-class, teen-age angst in England at the end of the century mostly convincing. Nick and his three buddies, however, seem to spend much less time obsessing over girls than my friends and I did at that age.

Nick does think about religion. His mother is a tepid Church of England adherent, and one senses that Nick wants to believe in something greater than what he knows. He connects with an old man, Peter, who is a Christian zealot. Readers who are believing Christians (as opposed to social Christians) will find Peter’s efforts to influence Nick’s belief’s positive.

Readers who are neither Christian nor believers will find Peter’s views extreme. For example, he preaches that “leading a good life is not enough. We will [all] be condemned as sinners on the Day of Judgement.” Nick at sixteen is not sophisticated enough to see the flaw in thinking that “If someone believed in something that strongly, it had to have some truth to it.” 

Yesterday’s Shadow is thought-provoking and well-written. Anyone who has been sixteen and struggled with the big questions—Why am I here? What is true? What is real?—will sympathize with, and possibly identify with, Nick’s journey. 

An interesting push to the mystery envelope

Roughly half the members of my library mystery book club hated The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentile. The others either liked it a lot or they thought it is an interesting exercise. I didn't care for the mystery, which I thought was absurd, but thought the book’s structure was imaginative.

The book starts with a letter to "Hannah Tigone," a mystery writer, from "Leo," a fan of Hannah's and another writer who offers to be a sounding board "if you require one" as Hannah drafts her new novel. It's not clear that they have ever met, but he know her work and has corresponded with her in the past.  

The next chapter, told in the first person, takes place in the reading room of the Boston Public Library where the narrator, Winifred (Freddie), another writer, is at a table with three young people (under 30): Cain, Whit, and Marigold. There is a scream and ultimately someone finds the body of a young woman in a nearby room. 

In subsequent chapters we learn about Freddie, Cain, Whit, and Marigold, their relationships and connections to one another and to others in the story and something about the dead girl. Every chapter os followed by Leo's comment on and critique of the developing story. In other words, The Woman in the Library operates and two levels simultaneously: the creation of a mystery story and commentary on the story and the characters in it. Adding to the complexity, Gentile names another character, an acquaintance of Freddie's, "Leo." This Leo is not the Leo writing letters to "Hannah," about her new mystery in which the character Freddie is narrating the story. All clear?

Gentile is an Australian writer who had published ten mysteries featuring an artist and gentleman of leisure and set in 1930s Australia. She says that in thanks to her American readers for their support she wanted to set a book in the States but had a problem. She hadn't been to America in years and never been to Boston. However, she had a friend in Boston and he was writing his own novel. She wrote him to ask, "Can I pick your brain while you're there so that I can get the elements of place right for this novel?" Important because as she says, "crime fiction traditionally has a very strong sense of place."

The friend sent her maps, menus, photographs, weather reports, and when there was a a murder two blocks from where he was living, he sent her detailed information about the crime with pictures of the scene.

It was not a giant leap therefore to start the book with the (fictional) author’s friend sending her a letter offering to help her with the new mystery she plans to write. Gentill says, “I love traditional mystery. I love the conversations I can have about politics, and race, and prejudice within the framework of a traditional murder mystery. Part of that is because people know what to expect with the way the plot goes. You can actually load them up with other themes and other ideas, because it doesn't take a lot of effort to follow the plot.

“But after several years of writing in that genre, I feel the need to push the envelope and to write something that's truly novel. I suppose that's where . . .  The Woman in the Library came from. It's my need to actually do something in a way that nobody else has done before. Now, you can't be sure that that is that nobody else has ever written a book like this before, but I haven't read them. 

“I did want to actually twist not just the plot, but the structure of the novel itself. I also quite love removing that fourth wall and talking directly to the reader. So what metafiction is is the ability to say to the reader, ‘Let's talk about the fact that this is a story.’” Let's.