Category: Fiction Reviews

Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler

Some members of our group found the main character of this book, Maggie Moran, irritating. Others found her endearing. Sort of like real life. And that’s the beauty of Anne Tyler’s novels: They are about the lives we actually live—the mundane, the everyday, the irritating, and the endearing.  

I have loved the Maggie character since I first met her when the book came out in 1989. I loved her as played by Joanna Woodward in the Breathing Lessons movie in 1994. And I loved her when I reread this book in 2016.

Yes, Maggie and other characters in Tyler’s books skew toward odd duck territory, but as I lose myself in their stories, I begin thinking they have more of a handle on things than I do.

And then there’s Ira, Maggie’s husband. Some members of our group thought he was a long-suffering saint for putting up with Maggie. I found him passive aggressive and judgy in 1989 and even more so in 2016. His saving grace was that he was played as kind and compassionate by James Garner in the movie, so obviously Garner—and my feller BBBers—saw something I didn\’t.

Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989, was a finalist for the 1988 National Book Award, and was Time Magazine’s Book of the Year. Two previous books by Anne Tyler were Pulitzer finalists: The Accidental Tourist in 1986 and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983.

Like most Tyler novels, Breathing Lessons is character-driven. It’s one day in the lives of Maggie and Ira, who drive to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband, and then stop to visit their granddaughter, Leroy (pronounced LA roy), who lives with her mother, Fiona, Maggie and Ira’s former daughter-in-law.

It’s one bizarre day, including some laugh-out-loud moments at the funeral, during which friends are asked to sing the love songs they first sung at the dead man’s marriage 28 years ago. Maggie barely remembers the words so she and a friend work out the verses on a coupon Maggie has in her purse. The friend gives the coupon back and, later, Maggie tries to use it when buying groceries, but the clerk reads the love-struck lyrics and, with a red face, hands it back, mortified. There\’s a hilariously clumsy sex scene, a visit with a waitress at a roadside diner who quickly becomes Maggie\’s friend, and a vignette with Otis, a man who Maggie and Ira help with a tire problem. But Maggie made up the tire issue to goad Otis because he was driving too slowly, but then she realized he was a sweet and somewhat brittle old man, so she made Ira stop and the tried to help him and ultimately drove him home, and…. Anyway, you get the point about Anne Tyler\’s characters and the worlds they inhabit.

Through flashbacks and dialogue, we learn about Maggie and Ira’s unlikely and unpromising courtship and Fiona’s marriage to the their son, Jessie, a classic screw-up—just ask his dad. We see Fiona and Maggie bond through childbirth classes, complete with breathing lessons, and we see the young marriage dissolve through immaturity and a series of miscommunications, with all characters playing pivotal roles in the chaos. And we see Fiona flee the family—and the city—multiple times, to try to make some sort of sensible life for herself and her daughter.

This is the story of a marriage, of how people change when they become a couple, about the sacrifices they make for one another and the mixed blessings those sacrifices bring.

Learning how to navigate a marriage, Tyler implies in her title, is like learning to breathe, and every day is a lesson. —Pat Prijatel

The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie Society, by Annie Barrows & Mary Ann Shaffer

The story and the characters in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society are every bit as intriguing as the book\’s unusual and quirky-sounding title.
Told entirely in the form of letters to and from its characters, the story begins in 1946, shortly after the end of World War II as Europe is slowly emerging from the horrors of that war.  In London, writer Juliet Ashton is trying to come up with a subject for her next book when she receives a letter complimenting her on her writing from a stranger, Dawsey Adams.  Dawsey is a native of the Island of Guernsey, one of the English Channel Islands near the French coastline.  Guernsey was under Nazis occupation. 
Dawsey\’s letter sets off an exchange of letters between the two.  Eventually other residents of the small island join the exchange, describing the effects of the occupation on their lives. Through the residents\’ letters Julia is introduced to the Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society which was initially created as an alibi when the Nazis caught the islanders breaking curfew.  The Societyquickly becomes real, banding them together and making them friends as well as survivors.
Some of the residents were not readers, but they came together for companionship and entertain each other with discussions about books.  And they share their letters from Julia, who soon becomes so intrigued with her new friends that she takes up temporary residence on Guernsey so that she can meet them face to face and write a book about their experiences.
Julia learns their very real and painful stories about the effect the Nazi occupation has had on their home and their lives.  Their letters to her are colorful, sad and very descriptive.  We also get to know the Islanders as individuals—courageous, frightened, sometimes funny but always determined to survive. Julia\’s letters to them are thoughtful and wonderfully funny.
In the years the Nazis occupied Guernsey, they tightly controlled every aspect of islanders\’ lives. They were cruel conquers, rationing their food and the fuel they needed for heat and cooking, robbing their vegetable gardens and forcing the islanders to live in constant fear.
Islanders shared rations and helped each other in every possible way with medical aid and whatever else they needed to survive—including their sense of humor.  Together they
lived through the ever-present cold, dampness, relentless hunger and very real fear of the Nazis.  And a gentle love story quietly develops.
With little notice, Guernsey\’s children were rounded up and shipped to England.  Having their children sent to another country, frightened and alone, to unknown caregivers and for an indefinite length of time was a terrible heartbreak for the Islander, who could only hope that at least their children would be safer.
The book gives us an all too realistic picture of the Nazi occupation of Guernsey.  But we learn even more about courage, strong friendships and the importance of both.  And the story is told with warmth and humor.   The letter-writing format is a clever, surprisingly effective and believable way to get to know the courageous, creative, sometimes quirky residents of Guernsey and to see how they struggled to survive and were effected by the Nazi occupation of their island. —Gail Stilwill
NOTE:  The original author, Mary Ann Shaffer, died before she was able to complete the book, after spending years researching material.  Her niece, Annie Barrows, was able to pick up where Shaffer left off and compete the book. It was well worth the efforts of both writers.

South of Broad, by Pat Conroy

The saga takes place in the wealthy and prestigious neighborhood called South of Broad, in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. The main character, Leopold Bloom King is 18, awkward, painfully shy, friendless and finally beginning to recover from the traumatic suicide of his older brother and hero.

Leopold’s (Leo’s) recovery is especially challenging since Leopold found his brother’s body—and since their mother continues to be furious and verbally abusive to Leo because his brother, and clearly her favorite son, died instead of him.

After years of counseling and a stay in a mental health institute being treated for depression, Leo is lonely and adrift, but he also is friendly, out-going and more than ready to make friends. He finds them in a tightly-knit group of high school misfits: his new neighbors – the exotically beautiful, talented and troubled twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe;  Ike Johnson, the son of Leo’s new African American football coach (a first in the recently desegregated south); Niles and Starla Whitehead, a teenage brother and sister, recently arrived in town and already in trouble with the law; and three South of Broad Blueblood teens, Chad and Fraser Rutledge and Molly Huger.  Surprisingly (strangely perhaps) Leo meets and becomes friends with all of them in one, very eventful, day.

South Carolina’s legacy of racism and class divisions are the background of the story, which weaves its way through two decades of the friendship that binds them together through good and bad marriages, hard-won successes and devastating problems. Finally their friendship is tested in an unimaginable set of circumstances. Then, with no warning at all, right out of the blue, comes the twisted ending.  For me, this was the final piece of a story that already become over-the-top unbelievable.

———–

Full disclosure: I was part of a very small minority of my fellow Books, Brew and Banter club members who did not particularly like this book. For me, the story became a soap opera, overdone from the plot, to the dialogue, to the over-the-top writing.

I know that Conroy is an award-winning, respected author of long-standing.  A number of reviewers said this book was not one of Conroy’s best.  I’ll take them, and my fellow Book Club members, at their word and try another of his books.

—Gail Stilwill