Review of Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans (Harper, July 28, 2015)

Crooked Heart is the story of Noel Bostock and Vee Sedge, a couple of misfits in England during World War II. Noel is a 10-year-old orphan boy, living with his eccentric godmother, Mattie, in her rambling old house near Hampstead Heath. Mattie was a suffragette in the '20s and has a disdain for anything conventional, including the evacuation of children at the beginning of the war, keeping a house tidy, finding a new school for Noel when his old one closes, or listening to the local ARP Warden's lectures on air raid precautions.

Mattie decides to educate Noel herself, going on nature field trips to the Heath and setting him essays on subjects like "Would You Rather Be Blind or Deaf?," What is Freedom?" and "Should People Keep Pets?." Noel is happy not to have to go to school with other children, since his experience is that they are usually stupid and like to bully him for his nerdiness. When Noel and Mattie are not in session in their home school, Noel reads detective stories and Mattie sings old protest songs.

Mattie's eccentricity becomes more marked as she falls victim to dementia. At first, it can be amusing, like when she can't remember the last name of the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, though she knows it's a bird's name, like Owl or Ostrich. Noel reminds her that it's Sir Christopher Wren, and she thanks him, but responds "I can't help thinking 'Sir Christopher Ostrich' has a tremendous ring to it." Far too soon, the sad day comes when Noel must be evacuated from London.

In St. Alban's, an odd boy like Noel doesn't find any quick takers, but the promise of government subsidy eventually persuades Vee Sedge to take him in. Vee is middle-aged, the sole support of her dotty mother, who spends her days writing letters to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and her lump of a son, Donald, who uses his heart murmur as an excuse for utter sloth.

Vee is barely scraping by, cleaning houses and doing other odd jobs.The war gives her a chance to make some much-needed money on the fiddle, like so many others. Vee's particular scam is to collect for fake charities. The problem is, she's just not very good at it; too nervous and bad at keeping her stories believable and consistent. Noel, the world's youngest management consultant and business partner, turns Vee's business into a far more successful entrepreneurial effort.

The US cover (top) is fine, but
isn't the UK cover striking?

This is all just the setup of the plot; one of the best setups ever. Once Noel and Vee meet, the plot thickens, with the two discovering other much more serious crimes afoot. This partnership will evolve in ways both comical and heart-warming, and these are a couple of characters who feel so real you'll miss them when you close the covers.

But don't forget, this is an English novel, which means that just as there was very little sugar allowed by a wartime ration book, this is a story that is never overly sweet. It reminded me a bit of John Boorman's wonderful semi-autobiographical memoir of his boyhood in wartime England, the movie Hope & Glory.

Review of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt publishes a book a decade (The Secret History, 1992; The Little Friend, 2002), and it's well worth the wait. The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, 2013) is a story that people will read for many years to come.

Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker lives in a small, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment with his lively, loving mother. His alcoholic gambler father has abandoned them, and they scrape by on Theo's mother's pay from her art publishing job and Theo's scholarship to a tony private school.

When a right-wing terrorist group sets off bombs at the art museum Theo and his mother are visiting, everything is changed. His mother is killed and, as a result of a dreamlike encounter with a mortally wounded old man, Theo stumbles out of the ruins with a small masterpiece painting, Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch, secreted in a bag.

You'll hear a lot of people compare The Goldfinch to a Dickens story, especially Oliver Twist, and it's hard to argue with the comparison. Theo is a Dickensian boy for the 21st century, whom catastrophe forces to live on his wits. Just when it appears Theo will land on his feet and be allowed to live with a school friend's wealthy WASP-y family, up pops his wastrel father and brassy girlfriend Xandra. You just know Pa Decker has some kind of angle here, and when he hustles Theo back to his house in a largely vacant mini-mansion development in Las Vegas, it's only a question of how closely the man's character will be to Dickens's Fagin or Bill Sikes.

More Dickensian characters abound in Theo's life over the next 14 years. Chief among them are Hobie, the kindly furniture restorer who gives Theo a direction in life; Pippa, the fragile object of Theo's yearning; and, best of all, Boris, a modern-day Artful Dodger. I'd give a lot to read a book about Boris, the motherless Ukrainian boy who moves from country to country with his largely absent mining company manager father. Boris is smart, outgoing, bighearted––but also a cheerful thief with a huge appetite for whatever drink, drugs and food he can get his hands on. Theo and Boris in Las Vegas are a couple of wild boys, and when Boris enters Theo's life again, years later, the wilding resumes.

One important difference between Theo and a Dickensian protagonist is that Theo is no pure-hearted young hero, overcoming adversity. Theo has concluded that life is a catastrophe, and he practically wallows in adversity. He courts and embraces misfortune and disaster until you almost want to give him a good slap and tell him to snap out of it.

Such a massive, sprawling, coming-of-age story runs the risk of plodding or feeling aimless, but aside from a brief lull in the middle of the book, The Goldfinch is spellbinding. Tartt takes us deeply into Theo's head and heart, his self-destructiveness and inability to overcome the loss of his mother, which is symbolized by his obsessive, guilty hiding of The Goldfinch, with its depiction of a tethered songbird.

I don't mean to imply that The Goldfinch is one of those books where the reader is required to mine through layers of symbolic meaning to discover the novel's essence. Not in the least. Donna Tartt isn't afraid to tell you straight out what the book is about. After taking the reader along on Theo's not-at-all-excellent adventure, and allowing us to live inside his tortured soul, she spends her final pages tackling all that meaning-of-life stuff that most modern books are too cool to talk about so openly. Given Theo's life experiences, a lot of it is pretty dark stuff, but Tartt is such a beautiful writer that she leaves the reader surging on a rising tide of wonder and something that comes close to joy.

A note about the audiobook: David Pittu, the reader, deserves praise for his virtuoso narration of The Goldfinch. Just reading such a long book aloud is an accomplishment, but Pittu also conveys every nuance of Tartt's writing, and his voices for the many different characters always feel true. He even expertly negotiates an Eastern European accent (for Boris), which is a common stumbling block for most narrators, who end up sounding like Rocky & Bullwinkle's Boris Badenov.

Review of John Searles's Help for the Haunted

Help for the Haunted by John Searles

October 31st is next Thursday. Along with stocking up on candy for trick-or-treaters and rustling up a decent costume, you'll want to find a good book. Holding it will keep at least one hand out of the Halloween candy dish while you wait for your doorbell to ring, or you'll want it for relaxing in bed after attending that knock-out costume party. It doesn't need to be a book that leaks blood and gore when opened; there are plenty of books that get you into the spirit of Halloween by only deliciously raising the hair on the back of your neck.

Such a one is John Searles's Help for the Haunted (September 2013, Morrow/HarperCollins).

Its narrator is an intelligent 14-year-old girl named Sylvie Mason, who skillfully ushers us back and forth through time as she investigates family secrets and her parents' deaths. Sylvie was present when Sylvester and Rose Mason were shot inside a dark church during a blizzard nine months earlier; however, the account she gives the Dundalk, Maryland police doesn't hold up, and the suspect in custody may be released. Sylvie is honestly confused about what actually happened, but she also lied to protect her rebellious older sister, Rosie. In addition, Sylvie wasn't entirely forthcoming about what went on at her family's home.

Sylvie's protectiveness and reticence come naturally. She is "the good daughter," the one her parents were proud of and could rely on to do what was needed. Sylvester and Rose were devout Christians who had a national reputation for their work with people "whose souls have been occupied by malevolent spirits, spirits that have no intention of leaving on their own." They lectured on a circuit and responded to requests for help. People were understandably curious about what went on inside their shabby Tudor house at the end of Butter Lane, but their daughters were forbidden to talk about it to anyone—no matter who it was.

The Masons' mysteriousness, renown, and murders lead Sylvie's schoolmates to either shun or harass her, and Rosie, now Sylvie's legal guardian, is antagonistic. Poor, miserable Sylvie has three days before her next interview with Detective Rummel, and she's determined to know the truth of her parents' murders by then. Sylvie's investigation requires her to step out of a bubble and navigate the cross currents in her family's lives.

While Help for the Haunted involves demonology, it's unlike William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist. It's Sylvie's coming-of-age story; an interesting examination of family relationships; and an exploration of the nature of faith, ambition, and love. It explains how the power of belief can create a reality and shape the truth.

I enjoyed Searles's characterization, use of symbolism (e.g., Sylvie's tinnitus and its never-ending "shhhh"), descriptions (a young woman is referred to as a poisonous flower blooming), foreshadowing, and skill in building tension. Very early in the book I began dreading the next mention of the word "basement." The Masons' basement plays a major role in the story's spookiness, and I really liked this touch; a psychiatrist will tell you that fear of a basement is symbolic of a fear of the unconscious. I also liked the varied use of ghosts. Rose Mason, who has translucent skin and a great sense of calmness, is described as an apparition. People are haunted in many ways: by ghosts from the past; by words spoken and unspoken; by motives of vengeance, greed, or the desire for the truth; by their conscience; by evil.

Searles employs many plot elements whose appearance is guaranteed to trigger unease and heighten suspense. There are too many to mention, but a few include a not-overly-bright babysitter; Halloween night; an old dental chair; a hatchet mounted on the wall "the way a fisherman would display a prize catch;" a movie theater gone to seed; and especially, Penny, the Raggedy Ann doll. The book only occasionally dawdles; as a whole, it's very well paced, and I was reading like mad toward the end.

For a great Halloween read, accompany the remarkably eerie Help for the Haunted with a few miniature Snickers.