Category: Reviews by Patricia Prijatel

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

A Thief of Time, by Tony Hillerman

Tony Hillerman creates a sense of place so strong and compelling you forget this is a mystery and just get caught up in the land, its people, and its history. More mystical than mystery, A Thief of Time is named for the criminals who steal Native American artifacts—in this case, Anasazi and Navajo pots—and sell them for exorbitant amounts. Those people, according to Navajo culture, are stealing their ancestors’ history.

In the book, an anthropologist who has found a treasure trove of artifacts disappears, and the Navajo Tribal Police are charged with finding her. It’s a compelling story, largely because of the cast of full-bodied characters, including two tribal policemen, several anthropologists, a random assortment of petty thieves, an influential Mormon leader with a sad secret, a New York museum curator, and a wealthy Manhattan pot collector.

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn leads the search; this theoretically is one of his last cases, having given his notice of resignation after his beloved wife Emma died. The young Jim Chee joins him, trying to balance his police work with his unsuccessful attempts to become a Navajo shaman. Both are beautifully crafted characters whose frustration with one another is matched with a common love for their religion and traditions.

As well-woven as a Navajo rug, the story centers on the remarkable Chaco Canyon and the surrounding area of New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. It won the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel (1989) and was a nominee for the Anthony Award for Best Novel (1989) and the Edgar Award for Best Novel (1989).

It’s the eighth of 18 books Hillerman created featuring Leaphorn and Chee. His daughter Anne completed an additional two. PBS produced TV movies of three of them—A Thief of Time, Skinwalkers, and Coyote Flats—that are available through PBS or on Netflix.

—Pat Prijatel

The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

Many of Erik Larson’s books explore the intersection of technological brilliance and human evil. In The Devil in the White City, he recreates the Chicago of 1893, where the nation’s foremost architects build the Chicago World’s Fair on Lake Michigan while a serial killer creates his own grotesque haven just blocks away.

It’s a city teeming with creativity, filth, growth, and chaos, which Larson captures so thoroughly that I could almost smell the stockyards and see the muck oozing down the Chicago River.

With meticulous attention to detail and storytelling prowess, Larson introduces us to chief architect Daniel Burnham, his partner John Root, and his talented team, including Louis Sullivan, with whom Burnham most often clashed; Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscaping plans caused him nearly as much grief as his aching teeth; and Sophia Hayden Bennett, the lone woman, who was just 21 when she designed the Women’s Building.

And then there was H.H. Holmes, aka Herman Webster Mudgett, who built the horrifying World’s Fair Hotel, complete with a gas chamber and chute to smoothly dispose of bodies, which included those of three wives and one fiancée. He even sold a good many of their skeletons to a scientist who cleaned them and used them for research, conveniently expressing little curiosity as to their origins.

Larson intersperses the drama and delight of the fair with the horror of Holmes’ Murder Castle, both being built walking distance away from one another. The book’s tagline: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

The fair, also called the World’s Columbian Exposition, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the United States, needed a show-stopper, a feature to compete with the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris.  Planners rejected several brilliant ideas, including an 8,000-foot elevator that would take riders to a toboggan run from which they would slide all the way to Boston (details to come later). After months of stressful searching, they finally found the solution: the first Ferris Wheel. This behemoth was 254-feet tall, with a capacity of 2,160 riders at a time. Riders were enclosed in 36 wooden cars the size of boxcars, which could hold up to 60 persons and included their own restaurants and bars. (The latter would probably come in handy for some riders.)

And to make the structures and landscaping work together, designers painted all buildings white, creating a magical city in the purest of colors, another contrast to the darkness blocks away in Holmes’ evil world.

It’s a wonder the fair opened at all, with constant squabbling between its architects, plus the unreceptive Chicago weather and boggy location in Jackson Park, which was largely a swamp before Burnham and Olmsted visited and saw the possibility of a lakeside wonder.  And it’s a wonder Holmes was ever caught, given the ineptitude of local police, the lack of any national data collection of missing women, and Holmes ability to lie brilliantly.

Most structures of the fair were covered essentially with papier-mache, so they were destroyed after the fair. Today’s Museum of Science and Industry is the only major building remaining; it had been the Palace of Fine Arts. Pat Prijatel

To see how the fair might have looked, check out this three-dimensional recreation.