What would happen if you couldn't recognize faces?

I had never heard of Bone Gap, Laura Ruby's 2015 novel until a young friend pressed it on me as one of the best books she'd read all year. Shame on me because the book was a National Book Award Finalist, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and wan a number of other Best Book of the Year awards.

Bone Gap is the name of a small Illinois farm town. Eighteen-year-old Finn lives with his EMT older brother Sean on the remains of the family farm. Their father is dead; their mother ran off to Oregon with an orthodontist. Some time before the story begins, a lovely young Polish woman named Roza had shown up in the corn field, fleeing something. She lived (chastely) with Finn and Sean long enough to demonstrate almost supernatural skill at growing vegetables, for Sean to fall in love with her, and because of her beauty and personality to become popular with the townspeople. She's been kidnapped. Finn saw the kidnapper, but he cannot for the life of him describe the man's face to the local cop. That he can not does not endure him to Sean, the cop, or the townspeople.

After a first chapter to introduce Finn and the situation in Bone Gap, Ruby shifts point of view. We are now with Roza in what could be another universe. One without another person with whom she can connect. The only other person is her kidnapper who asks repeatedly:"Are you in love with me yet?" Roza has become Rapunzel locked away in a tower (although at first it seems a suburban American house, but that's only at first).

Part One chapters alternate between Finn's and Roza's point of view as we learn about them and their situations. Finn grows attracted to Priscilla, a beekeeper about his age, who because of her looks has never attracted male attention. In Part Two, Ruby adds chapters from Sean's and Priscilla's point of views to those of Finn and Roza. Part Three resolves the questions the book has provoked.

So Bone Gap is an interesting amalgam of verisimilitude and fantasy, or realism and fairy tale. Ordinarily, I don't care for such a mixture; I like my realism to be realistic, my fantasy to be fantastic. Bone Gap is the exception, perhaps because Ruby has created such interesting characters. The story held my interest and there was not a point where I was jolted out of my willing suspension of my disbelief.

In addition, Ruby writes so well. Here's the first description of Roza's kidnapper: "But he would smile that bland, pleasant smile—the smile of an uncle, a teacher, a clerk, all those men with all those teeth—a smile that made him all the more terrifying." And here's a crowd watching Priscilla retrieve an escaped bee swarm: "Their voices washed over Finn the way they always did. Like a strange sort of choir music, one voice blending into the next, the refrains so familiar that he could have mouthed the words along with them." I also recommend studying her dialogue, which reveals character and advances the story.

For readers who have young friends, I suggest you introduce them to Bone Gap. But you might want to read it yourself first.

What a writer's writer says about writing

James Salter got tagged a "writer's writer," i.e., a writer whose use of language, insights into the human condition, ability to create art but whose books don't become best sellers. Richard Ford, in an introduction to Salter's reissued novel Light Years, wrote: "It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." Salter had been a combat fighter pilot in WWII and in the Korean War, and resigned from the Air Force after eleven years to write full time. He wrote screenplays, short stories, and novels and six months before he died at ninety in 2015 he gave three lectures at the University of Virginia, now published as The Art of Fiction with an introduction by John Casey. The lectures are titled, "The Art of Fiction," "Writing Novels," and "Life into Art."

Salter asks, Why write? For money? Recognition? A sense of importance? As the jacket writer notes, "Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experiences, in a world where anything not written down fades away."

Because Salter is so interesting—far more interesting than a review about him—let me simply quote from the lectures rather than attempt a precis of their contents:

"Over the years I've never found myself truly intimate or comfortable for a long period with people who don't read or have never read. For me, it's an essential. Something is missing in them otherwise, breadth of reference, sense of history, a common chord. Film is too simple . . . "

"I don't know where the urge to write comes from. I don't believe it's inborn, but it comes early. I had no daemon in me, as Faulkner said he had, nor D.H. Lawrence, but there are writers who have no daemon . . . In any case, genius is unto itself . . ."

"Actually, I don't think anyone can teach you how to write a novel, or if they can, not in an hour. It's difficult to write novels. You have to have the idea and the characters, although additional characters may appear to you as you go. You need the story. You need, if I can put it this way, the form . . . "

"I try to write regularly. I have difficulty beginning each day. If I can leave myself a line or a few words to help me take it up again, it goes much better. The day sometimes goes well. More often it doesn't. I'm reconciled to the certainty that I'll be disappointed in what I've written. I write when I don't feel like it, but not when it revulses me . . ."

You can read The Art of Fiction in an hour or so, but it is the distillation of a writer's life experiences. It is a book every writer of fiction should read, think about, look up the writers Salter admires, read them, reread Salter, and think about one's writing. And then reread Salter once again.

A perfectly adquate puzzle box

I've just read A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch, his first mystery published in 2007, a perfectly adequate puzzle box that many people enjoyed and sold well enough that Finch has been able to publish ten more mysteries in the series.

It is set in London in the winter 1865 and is told from the point of view of Charles Lenox, "a man of perhaps forty," a wealthy, aristocratic bachelor who has, we learn, assisted the newly-established Metropolitan Police in their inquiries in the past. That Lenox has solved their cases has not endured him to the Yard's Sergeant Exeter.

The blue death is that of Prudence Smith, an apparent suicide. She had been a maid in the household of  Lady Jane Grey, "a childless widow of just past thirty," Lenox's Mayfair neighbor, and good friend. Lady Jane asks Lenox to look into the death which had occurred in the home George Bernard, the director of the Royal Mint. Lenox and his friend Thomas McConnell, a doctor and amateur scientist, go to Bernard's London mansion and establish almost immediately that Prudence was murdered by drinking a rare, and expensive poison. The game's afoot.

By the time Lenox has untangled all the clues and followed all the threads, a story so complex that the author has to explain it twice, justice has been done. In the course of it, Lenox enlists his butler Graham in quiet investigation below the stairs in Bernard's house, tries unsuccessfully to keep Lady Jane out of it, works McConnell and with his older brother Edmund an MP and around Exeter (shades of Watson, Mycroft Holmes, and Lestrade).

Because the book has been so popular (it's still in print), I have been thinking about why I found it so unsatisfactory. First, I think, because as I intimated above, it is Sherlock Holmes lite. Second, because the 1865 London setting sounds as if it's based on a carefully study of "Upstairs Downstairs" rather than on lived experience. Third, because the author did not convince me that the murderer's motivation was convincing, let alone the elaborate plot behind the murder.

I have also been considering why so many readers find it satisfactory. Perhaps they like for the reasons I'm dissatisfied: Lenox is a more engaging character than Sherlock Holmes; they are persuaded by the historic setting; and they enjoy a puzzle's tangles. If you are a reader who enjoys historical mysteries and is not troubled by anachronisms, A Beautiful Blue Death may be for you.

Can the old man stay hidden?

Thomas Perry has written a wonderful series of thrillers featuring Jane Whitefield, a woman who helps people who need to disappear disappear. In Perry's new stand-alone thriller, The Old Man, Dan Chase made himself disappear thirty years before the story begins. He's sixty years old, a widower, father of an adult daughter, living a quiet life in a Vermont town on the New Hampshire border.

After his wife died, Chase's daughter suggested he get a dog and he found two at the pound. When his daughter next visits, she says, "Oh, Jesus. That's not the kind of dog I meant. Look at their feet. They're going to grow up big."

"I like big dogs," he said. "They're calmer and quieter. It's scared dogs that bite."

"I don't know," she said. "You really want to have two animals that could kill you? You're—"

"An old man. A stiff breeze could kill me."

"You know what I mean."

"I do," he said. "It's just another reason to make sure they never want to."

This exchange on page 3 is the first dialogue in the book and it accomplishes a lot: Introduces the dogs, says something about Chase, about his daughter, and about their relationship, and introduces the thought that something (someone?) might kill him.

By the end of Chapter 1, two hired assassins have tried to kill him and it's clear he will have to disappear again.

What makes Perry such a satisfying writer is that every major character has a very clear 'I want'. Chase wants to survive. The people chasing him want to kill him. The character he has to kidnap midway through the book has a solid reason not to escape from Chase when given the chance.

The other satisfying element is the information Perry provides. We learn the mechanics of dumping a hot car, of creating an alternate identity (it'll take time if you want to try it), of blending in, of destroying your trail, of where to hide out.

Chase's challenge to stay alive is complicated by the fact that an element of the US Government (the CIA? NSA? the Defense Intelligence Agency?) are cooperating with a middle-Eastern political figure who has good reasons for wanting Chase dead. The spooks are helping because they believe Chase as an agent stole $20 million thirty years earlier. So another one of the questions Perry answers is: How do you hide $20 million in cash without drawing attention to yourself? (Good to know.)

I hope the snippet of dialogue I quoted above suggests Perry's craft. Indeed, I believe that anyone who aspires to write a thriller could profitably study The Old Man to take it apart scene by scene to see how Perry reveals character, builds tension, paces developments. For everyone else, the craft—in the description, action, dialogue, plot, and exposition—is on the page to enjoy.

Inspector Montalbano between Scylla and Charybdis

Andrea Camilleri's A Voice in the Night is, by my count, the twentieth Inspector Montalbano mystery. Because the translation is copyrighted 2016, I believe it is the most recent. I have not read every one of the first nineteen in the series, and a reader who starts with this one may wonder about the relationship between Montalbano and Livia, his main squeeze, who appears in this book only on the telephone, and his relations with other reappearing characters.

Montalbano in this book is 58-years-old. He's an experienced Sicilian homicide detective who has to—you will excuse the reference—thread his way between the Scylla of the local mafia and the Charybdis of a corrupt political system. Montalbano may be able to solve the crime, but there's no guarantee that justice will be done.

This tension, between a (relatively) honest police detective and forces well beyond any individual's control is one of the things that makes the Montalbano mysteries interesting. They are also interesting puzzles, and Camilleri does not, for the most part, cheat the reader. (He will, as we're coming down to the denouement, not reveal exactly what Montalbano has planned, only that he has plans.) And the books are, for me at least, convincing pictures of what a certain slice of contemporary Sicilian life is like.

Montalbano has to solve two crimes in A Voice in the Night: A routine supermarket burglary turns unroutine when the store manager is found hanging in his office—and forensic evidence suggests he was murdered. Almost simultaneously a lovely young woman is found brutally slaughtered in the apartment of one Giovanni Stranglo. Stranglo has a solid alibi, but, as it happens, his father is the president of the province. Traveling with Montalbano as he works with his staff to solve the two cases (we never leave the inspector's point of view; my preference in a mystery), we watch him uncover clues and red herrings and—surprise!—solve the crimes.

The book is not perfect. In an attempt, I suspect, to suggest the Sicilian dialect, the translator has one of the thankfully minor characters talk like this: "My virry best wishes wit' all my 'eart for a rilly, rilly long life an' alla 'appiness an' 'ealthiness inna world, Chief!" I find a little of this goes a long, long way. Also Camilleri wrote the book when Silvio Berlusconi was Italy's prime minister, so there are a few topical references that are outdated.

Nevertheless, for readers who have been following Inspector Montalbano's career, A Voice in the Night is a creditable entry in the series. And for mystery lovers who do not know the detective, it's time to make his acquaintance.

How to write and publish a mystery

I will be presenting a program on How to Write and Publish a Mystery at the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, CT, on Saturday, January 21, at 2:00. Hope to see friends and new faces there.

What do we really know about our parents?

I requested a review copy of Alexandra Burt's novel The Good Daughter because the premise is interesting: What do we really know about our parents? "Dahlia Waller remembers an early childhood filled with stuffy cars, seedy motels, and traveling the country under assumed names before mysteriously settling in Aurora, TX. But as an adult, having distanced herself from her mother, she has so many questions." The novel slowly, slowly, slowly answers those many questions.

When the book opens, Dahlia is in her early 30s having returned to Aurora after fifteen years away. She and Memphis, her mother, had settled in Aurora when Dahlia was about twelve after a childhood on the road, home schooled, and regularly taking off in the middle of night for another town, another state. Her mother would not enroll her in public school because officials wanted "paperwork" and Memphis had no paperwork, wanted to answer no questions.

In chapter one, Dahlia goes jogging in the woods near their rented house and comes across a beaten and partially buried young woman and is apparently attacked herself. The young woman is in a coma for most of the book, and whenever the action flags, we're reminded that she's in the hospital waiting to awaken and reveal who she is and what happened to her.

Dahlia narrates her own story throughout the book, but Quinn's story is told in the third person. While Burt is coy about revealing Quinn's relationship to Dahlia, most readers will have twigged to it long before they're told. We read about Quinn's sexual initiation in a loving, blissful scene in the woods with a Hispanic boy who eventually becomes Aurora's sheriff. The boy leaves 17-year-old Quinn in post-coital languor, and three violent, filthy, brutal hunters find her, beat, and gang rape her. One consequence is that Quinn becomes infertile.

Nevertheless, Quinn marries, Nolan, the dissolute son of a decayed Texas family who wants nothing more than a son and heir. They live together for ten years in the family farmhouse a ways outside of Aurora and Quinn apparently never tells her husband she cannot conceive. One evening in the middle of a hurricane, a feeble-minded and pregnant young girl, Tain Fish, shows up at the farm. Quinn takes the girl in, and buries the stillborn fetus not far from the farmhouse in which she and Nolan live.

Now living on this isolated farm: Quinn, ten-year married who cannot have a baby; Nolan, soured on his marriage but wants nothing but a baby; and Tain, a simple, compliant young girl who has demonstrated her fertility. What do you think happens?

I do not what to give away much more of the story. Perhaps other readers will be enchanted by the improbabilities, coincidences, and cliches that fill The Good Daughter. For example, if the mother had a loving sexual experience with the sheriff as a boy, wouldn't you expect the daughter to have a loving sexual relationship with the sheriff's son, now a cop? I would and she did.

I had no problem with the switch in point of view from Dahlia's first person to Quinn's third person. I did have a problem late in the book when Quinn is abruptly telling her own story. I do not understand the function of Aella, a conjure woman who lives alone in the woods, tells fortunes, and concocts herbal potions and creams. I found her unnecessary to the story and a distraction. I also had a problem with the last fifty or sixty pages of a very long—368 pages—book by which time I had figured out Quinn's story but which she tells Dahlia in dribs and drabs and teases the reader. On page 282: "She has been holding on to it [the story] for many years, and now it is her obligation to release it from her memory." But she doesn't for another fifty pages or so.

I'm afraid that after the first couple chapters, I found neither the characters nor the situation plausible. I did read The Good Daughter to the bittersweet end, but I also found it easy to put down. But that just may be me; other readers may find Dahlia, Memphis, Tain and the rest of the cast both believable and engaging.

It's like reading a novel in short takes

I looked up Paula Whyman's collection of linked short stories, You May See a Stranger, because she was featured in a Poets & Writers magazine article, "5 Over 50." These short sketches introduce five authors older than fifty who published their first book in the past year. The implied message: You're not too old to be published. That's good news for some of us.

While the book was published in 2016, it appears the individual stories were written and published over a period of time. Eight of the ten were originally published in eight different literary magazines, but there is no indication of when. Some of us would like to know, although it would not change the pleasure that You May See a Stranger offers.

And the book does offer a variety of pleasures. All of the stories have the same protagonist, Miranda Weber, and they cover incidents in Miranda's life from adolescence to middle age. Miranda tells her own story in eight of the ten stories (the other two are told in the third person), and she is funny, sometimes self-destructive, and human, all too human.

Another pleasure is Whyman's use of language and ability to convey information. Here is the third paragraph of the title story:

"Pogo has wads of cash in his pockets. I have a small square of paper in my purse. It's proof of something that I don't quite believe. When the doctor said it, I thought of an incubator and chicks, my body as a holding area, warm, but like everything else, temporary. Pogo will eventually show everyone the case. I don't plan to show anyone the paper. This is Pogo's big night, no mine. One big night at a time seems like a good philosophy."

What do you think the paper shows? And who do you think is the father? And how do you think Miranda will deal with Pogo's big night?

Many of the pleasures are in Whyman's observations: "Entering the restaurant was like entering a Middle Eastern version of Brigadoon. We sat on cushions on the floor among tasseled pillows that were embedded with rows of thumbnail-size mirrors. You didn't recline on them so much as gaze at your broken self."

And while it's tempting to pull one plum paragraph after another out of this collection, I'll stop with one more. Miranda has just admitted a fence salesman into the house so he can write up an estimate. (This story takes place during the time when a sniper was killing random pedestrians in Washington, D.C., so there's an undercurrent of anxiety running through it.) Miranda excuses a pile of blankets in the living room as, "Kids, making forts!" Then she asks herself, "Why say anything? I always feel that I owe an explanation. Why? Once I begin to explain, the other party decides that in fact I do need to explain—and by "other party" I mean "husband"—and that my explanation is insufficient. And then we argue. This happens all the time. That's just what marriage is, at least what it is now, after ten years, a constant stream of insufficient explaining. . ."

The book rewards the reader for the language, for the detail, for the characterizations and for the way the stories resonate with one another. Each story can stand alone, but reading the sequence through is like reading a novel in short bursts—although few novels are as rewarding as You May See a Stranger.

Why Michael Connelly is so great (again)

Harry Bosch is back and he's still detecting in The Wrong Side of Goodbye.

Bosch, as mystery lovers know, is the Los Angeles-based police detective created by Michael Connelly. I've written about Connelly in the past and what I admire about his novels, so in this review I may repeat myself. Very well. I repeat myself.

First, Connelly is able to stay within the point of view of Bosch throughout the book. We readers see and hear what Harry sees and hears. We don't jump into the heads, or points of view, of other characters, most notably the villain's.

Connelly convinces me that the places he describes are as he describes them. The streets are real, the neighborhoods look as he says, the public buildings are just as he writes.

In the course of an investigation, Bosch by necessity meets and works with a couple dozen other characters. Connelly is able somehow (magically?) to make each of those characters individual. I am tempted to re-read the book with a highlighter to try to spot the sentences, the dialogue, the actions that bring all those characters alive on the page.

Finally, the mechanics of the investigation seem to me to be exactly right. Some leads work, some are dead ends or brick walls. Bosch is able to bring memory and experience to what he learns and thereby to put new information into a context. For example, as a Vietnam vet himself, Bosch is able to understand what civilian clothes in a dead Vietnam vet's effects implies.

This last point is important to me because I believe that a Connelly novel actually teaches me something about the world and the way real people live in it. This is what a police detective is able to do, is not able to do, and is able to do but, if he does it, will have consequences.

I haven't said anything about The Wrong Side of Goodbye, so here it is: Bosch, having been removed from the LAPD for cause (and the action in an earlier novel), is working as an unpaid investigator for a small, independent police department that has been hit with budget cutbacks and has a pile of cold cases that need work. Bosch is glad to have a badge and something to do and is working on serial rape case.

But the book's inciting incident is a $10,000 invitation to visit a reclusive, elderly billionaire who wants Bosch to discover whether he has an heir. The money is to induce Bosch to visit the estate and hear the man's story. Bosch takes the challenge.

So, The Wrong Side of Goodbye tells two stories simultaneously, the rape investigation and the hunt for a possible heir. I suspect a less skillful writer, in an effort to be clever, would at the book's end reveal how the one investigation connects with the other. Connelly doesn't do that. The only connection between the stories is Bosch, so the reader gets two intriguing stories for the price of one in another exceptionally satisfying mystery.

What's grit and how can you get some?

"Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success," says a blurb on the front cover of my copy of Grit, "but Duckworth is the one who found it."

Angela Duckworth, PhD., is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow and a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, her first book, is a deservedly best seller. I suspect it has done well because the text includes Duckworth's research, her interviews with interesting and gritty people, with personal stories from her life. And it's easy to read.

Basically,  to be successful you need a combination of passion and perseverance—that is, grit. You can be talented. You can be intelligent. You can be charming, well-educated, and ambitious. But without grit, your ability to push on, your success will be limited.

Why? Because, based on Duckworth's research, talented and intelligent people without grit tend to give up when things get tough. They drop out of West Point. They quit practicing. They lose interest. They get bored. They decide they can't do it so they quit. In contrast, mature paragons of grit have four psychological assets:

1. They have interest. "Every gritty person I've studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don't enjoy at all. Nevertheless they are captivated by the endeavor as a whole."

2. They practice. They work, and work, and work on their weaknesses to become better, more skillful, more proficient.

3. They have purpose. They are convinced that their work matters. They believe that their work is "personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others."

4. They have hope. "Hope," she writes, "is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance."

Once she explains what grit is and why it matters, Duckworth writes about ways readers can improve their own Grit score on a brief quiz she includes and ways parents and teachers can grow grittiness in offspring and students. And while I believe almost anyone—even the gritty—can read the book with profit (one reason it's a best seller), I was particularly interested in her John Irving (The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, etc.) example.

Irving earned C— in high school English. He needed to stay in high school an extra year to have enough credits to graduate. His SAT verbal score was 475 out of 800. His teachers thought he was both "lazy" and "stupid." Because reading and writing did not come easily, "I learned that I just had to pay twice as much attention," he wrote. "I came to appreciate that in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural became almost second nature. You learn that you have the capacity for that, and that it doesn't come overnight."

Irving said, "One reason I have confidence in writing the kind of novels I write is that I have confidence in my stamina to go over something again and again no matter how difficult it it. Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or a screenplay than I take to write the first draft."

In commenting on his inability to read and write as fluently as others, Irving believes, "It's become an advantage. In writing a novel, it doesn't hurt anybody to have to go slowly. It doesn't hurt anyone as a writer to have to go over something again and again." Words to live by.