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.

For an introduction to James McBride, try this

James McBride is the National Book Award-winning author of The Good Lord Bird and the current best-selling novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

Five-Carat Soul is a collection of seven stories, two of them long enough and complex enough to be divided into chapters. The subjects range from what sound like lightly fictionalized memoir (The Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band in which the narrator is a young teen) to fantasy (Mr. P & the Wind, in which the narrator is an elderly lion in a zoo).

McBride who is Black writes convincingly from the point of view of a white, Jewish toy dealer; a lion; a teen-age boy; and an unidentified observer of President Lincoln's "long, solitary walks to the War Department in the dead of night," one of two stories set during the Civil War.

I have the impression that one of McBride's interests is to dramatize history from a Black point of view. "The Good Lord Bird" tells the story of John Brown's last years and ill-fated raid on Harper's Ferry from the POV of a young Black boy who is impressed into Brown's band and plans. 

Perhaps the most powerful story in "Five-Caret Soul"—the one I found most moving—is The Christmas Dance, which hinges on an all-Black infantry division, the 92nd, fighting in Italy in WWII. The history is actual, the characters believable, the story structure fascinating. 

The stories make a neat introduction to McBride's writing.