Night.Sleep.Death.The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates

An 800 page book doesn't scare me. Some of my favorite books are whoppers.

The number of pages are irrelevant when one becomes immersed in detailed characters, propelled by foreshadowing through their actions and weaknesses, touched by universal truths of human nature.

Oates latest novel explores the impact of death on a family.
I was sucked into the story, eagerly looking forward to reading and learning more about these characters. To discover if I was right about what would come.

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. begins with the sudden death of a family patriarch. Whitey stopped to investigate what appeared, and was, a case of police profiling and brutality. He was their next victim. He did not survive.

Whitey was 67---my age. He was his wife Jessalyn's reason for existence, her lodestone; he defined her. In deep shock, she plummets into a private despair hidden behind her self-effacing thoughtfulness for others.

The children, as children do, decide what must be done, how their mother should 'be', and when her actions do not conform with expectations, they reel off into obsessions and fears and anger.

The family balance is thrown off. The children carry their individual burdens. Some believed they were 'favorite' sons or daughters, while others strove to gain their father's approval. One had given up trying.

After many months, a man enters Jessalyn's life who takes her under his care. She rejects his attentions in horror, but allows him to slowly change her, alter her, and bring her back into the land of the living.

The children are incensed, complain to each other, demand someone do something. Mom has been acting incorrectly. Mom has chosen the wrong man. Mom has a feral cat in the house.

Oh, I have seen this! The children who resent the second spouse. I myself scared off a woman who had set her sights on my newly widowed father! Yes, I did!

I was increasingly horrified as the novel got darker and darker, delving into the black hearts of these children. They are murderers and self-abusers and suicidal misfits and long-suffering, angry wives.

Each sibling must find their way out of their despair and illness. I expected Jessalyn to change into a 'modern heroine', evolving into her own woman. To leave passivity behind. She finds happiness, but not growth.

This story disturbed my sleep. It was an emotional journey.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.
by Joyce Carol Oates
HarperCollins Publishers/ Ecco
Publication Date June, 9 2020 
ISBN: 9780062797582
hardcover $35.00 (USD)

from the publisher: 

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers.

Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. 

Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

I was very pleased to have listened to the audio book of George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo. 

I read that Saunders was inspired, in part, by Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. Which play always leaves me in tears. This novel lends itself extremely well to being read as a play. 

The plot, in short: President Lincoln's dear son Willie has died. The Civil War has been going on for a year and 3,000 young men have just lost their lives in a Union defeat. On the day of the funeral, the President returns to the crypt to hold his son once again. Willie cannot leave his father but remains with other shades in the limbo of the graveyard.

The story of Willie's death on the day of a magnificent party at the president's mansion and the day of his funeral is told through snippets of historical writings that link into a loose narrative, sometimes contradicting each other.

The denizens of the Bardo are rooted to their old lives, wrapped up in self-centered concerns. They include all kind of folk from various times past, class, and race. Some are unable to accept they are dead. Some are vulgar, some giving over to sin. There is a clergyman who fled from the judgment place in fear. Into this motley crew comes this blessed, innocent, boy. Several shades make it their concern to help the child move on.

I was so moved by the scene where the shades enter President Lincoln to inspire him to tell his son to leave this place for the home of glory Lincoln imagines for him. And in this community of shades and living man they feel each other's pain and understand each other's burdens. They realize that Lincoln is president and filled with doubt, staggering under the immense weight of a nation and all the deaths of war, other families also grieving over sons.

Willie realizes his truth and in excitement and understanding, shouts out his readiness to move on. The shades begin to understand, and forgetting their worldly concerns, let go and move on to the afterlife.

Now I want to read the book again, pencil in hand to mark it up and note the passages that move me and make me sigh. This novel of grief is also a celebration of life.

I thank the public library for the audio book through Overdrive.

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts by Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie's ten stories in To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts are heartfelt revelations into the universal experience of loss and grief. Told in the first person, each story offers a fully rounded and complex character caught in crisis. The stories are set in the upper Midwest where people 'grew up cold'.
The writing is lovely and evocative, transporting us into another's life and world.

• A girl whose father is a WWII pilot the admits that the war's generals were spoken of as if her family knew them personally. "I knew these men better than my father." 
• A woman's sister dies in a car crash. Their mother had died choking on a peanut butter sandwich. (This is not a joke. I was barely twenty when I met a man whose sister chocked to death on a peanut butter sandwich. I worry about this every time I have a PB sandwich.) The woman misses being close to her brother. She drinks too much. 
• I related to a woman who lasted only six months in New York City, lacking inner city street smarts and an understanding of the rules. My husband and I lived in the inner city for a year and a half before leaving. 
• The fierce need for independence drives a paraplegic to the family's deep woods cabin after his divorce. His brother fears for his safety living alone and pressures him to return.
• A woman visits her grandmother in the nursing home. She is desperately curious about her grandmother's sister, who no one speaks of. Yet that sister's name is embroidered on the family patchwork quilt. The woman asks her mother about this missing family member and is told that the grandmother asked her not to talk about it, "not to carry that particular ghost through the generations." The woman presses for information, battling over who would control the past.
• A man who grew up on a farm grapples with his son's wanting a different life for himself. The son fears his newborn son will never understand who he is without understanding the farm. 
• The death of a grandfather brings division between sisters, one who attended him in his illness and death while the other stayed away. Their own needs drive them apart as they try to find reconciliation.
• A single mother watches her only child, a daughter, leave for college. She had gone to California instead of taking a college scholarship, returning home pregnant. Now she is a mother, learning how to let go.
• An elderly man is bedridden in his son's house, his memory teeming with ghosts. He knows his son and daughter-in-law are getting weary while he lingers on. I was reminded of my grandfather Milo, my grandmother's second husband. He lived to be over 101, outlasting two wives and a daughter and three step-children. He wondered why God did not take him. He was unable to walk and was blind, living in my aunt's home. To have one's mind and a failing body is a horrible fate.
• After a miscarriage, a wife takes a break, leaving her husband to struggle on his own for a few days. He is comforted by a neighbor's dog who has adopted him as a surrogate owner. The neighbors are friendly but keep to themselves. The man realizes he did not even know his own wife's heart. He contemplates loss and grief and how we are all separate and alone in grief.

I purchased this as an ebook and read the stories over several weeks. I love these short stories; they are like a concentrated laser light into the human soul.

Owner of Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, promotion for books, authors, publishers, and literary organizations, Caitlin has represented several books I have reviewed, The Velveteen Daughter by Laurel Davis Huber, This Is How it Begins by Joan Dempsey, and Wild Mountain by Nancy Hayes Kilgore. Read an interview with Caitlin about her personal library at David Abram's blog The Quivering Pen.

Grief Cottage by Gail Godwin

Character's inner ruins lay concealed, their grief diverted by obsessions and addictions, in Gail Godwin's novel Grief Cottage.

After the death of his single mother, eleven-year-old Marcus's only living family member, his Aunt Charlotte, becomes his guardian. While his depressed aunt spends her days in her art studio, painting and sipping bottles of red wine, Marcus uses his honed homemaking skills to keep the beach front cottage spic and span, making himself useful, as he did for his working mom. Marcus is also an expert caretaker, responsible and useful; his own needs are shunt aside, his own grief and doubt internalized.

The rest of his day Marcus walks the South Carolina beach to visit the deserted house locals call Grief Cottage. Marcus is obsessed to know more about the tragedy that took place there. A family vacationing at the cottage disappeared in the 1954 hurricane, the parents searching for their missing son. How could no one have recorded the family's name? Marcus visits the empty shell of a house daily, 'courting' the ghost of the boy who appears to him.

"Marcus feels the pain of others," said Aunt Charlotte, "even when they're dead and gone."

Charlotte's cottage is filled with grief. Charlotte tries to escape the memory of her 'devil' father who at age five began to 'poison' her. It is 'the good old family horror story', Greek or Shakespearian in nature. Marcus is burdened by his lonely childhood, shamed when his one friend discovered he shared a bed with his mother. In a rage, Marcus beat the boy up. He underwent counseling and then his mother left her job and they moved-- to worse conditions--then his mother was killed in a car accident.

In the galley reader's note, Godwin writes that she was inspired by stories of ghosts whose arrival coincides with a mental crisis, tales grounded in 'daily life,' but which  'leaves a window for the possibility of a reality we haven't discovered yet."

"People see what they want to see. Or imagine they saw. "

For a lonely eleven-year-old child in a new place, deep in grief, imagining a ghostly friend is not a far stretch. I had Homer the Ghost to keep me company when we moved the year I turned eleven. I knew he was imaginary. Marcus has to work to keep his 'realities' separate, the duties he owed to his aunt and to the ghost boy, to keep his sanity. It makes him feel even more isolated, for who would understand?

I was compelled by this story to read far into the night. Even the supporting characters are sympathetic, full and real. There is a climatic revelation, and life goes on as it had, Marcus and his aunt supporting each other. And at the very end, a moment of grace returns Marcus something he had lost and gives him something he had long searched for.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Grief Cottage
Gail Godwin
Bloomsbury
Publication Date June 6, 2017
$27 hardcover
ISBN: 9781632867049

"Nora Webster" by Colm Toibin, A Novel About Grief and Self Discovery

Nora Webster has lost her husband of 21 years. Maurice had been a beloved school teacher in a small Irish village. She had stayed at his side watching him die, their children sent off with relatives for four months. The Catholic doctors withheld the morphine that would have eased his pain, for it would also have caused his death. Now she must face life alone without the love of her life.

Intelligent, independent, and strong willed, Nora is disconnected to her family and neighbors. Her sisters talk behind her back of how difficult she was before marriage. Her children confide to her sisters and aunt, and Nora hears second hand of their inner life. After months of being an object of pity Nora can barely stand to let her well meaning neighbors in the house.

Nora has an inner strength and one admires how she stands up for herself. She is offered work by her employer before marriage. Her nemesis from her teen years is her manager and makes her life miserable, and her co-worker, the boss's daughter, is vacuous and self-absorbed. When the workers gather to unionize she joins them, alienating the boss and his family.

Her children grieve in isolation. Nora alone understands the myth of children's resilience, remembering how she never recovered from the loss of her parents. The Troubles in Northern Ireland dominates the news and draws her eldest daughter into Irish protest groups. The younger daughter is away at school, and her eldest son become obsessed with photography and the Space Race. Her youngest son developed a stutter during his four months apart and is a source of concern for Nora.

Nora's decisions make her stand out in the village. She colors her hair, buys new clothes, redecorates. People invite her to a gramophone society, take her on as a singing student. Late in life she learns the confidence that comes from making decisions for oneself.

The book has a quietness about it, a solemnity. The narrative is straight forward, even in mystical scenes when Nora senses Maurice's presence. There is a sense of majesty, that this particular life illuminates universal experiences.

Nora's grief recall to mind memories of my own. When my mother had terminal cancer she asked for morphine even when the nurse warned her she would not wake up. She did not want any more pain, a lifetime of Psoriatic arthritis had been pain enough. I saw my dad flounder after her death before building a new life without her. He had to make decisions about things that Mom had always handled. When my father was dying  I was at the hospital every day for two months. Yes, death is the only universal experience. We don't recall our birth, we don't all procreate, but we all lose loved ones.

This is not a depressing book. It is an intimate tale of how one woman grieves and rebuilds. Her new life offers Nora something she never had before: the opportunity for self discovery, to test her wings, to become something more. Her life is not perfect, for this is a novel of realism; instead she achieves something better: a growth into a wholeness she had never before enjoyed.

Nora will quietly wait in the back of your mind long after you have finished the novel.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
Scribner
ISBN: 9781439138335  
Publication date: October 7, 2014
$27.00

Survival Mode in Michigan: The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison

The Banks of Certain Rivers by Jon Harrison is set in the fictional resort town of Port Manitou, on the Jib River feeding into Lake Michigan. Neil Kazanzakis is a popular Physics teacher and running coach. His son is a senior weighing his future, Western Michigan University or culinary arts school. Neil cares for his wife's aging mother, and for his wife who is in a vegetative state after a swiming accident.

Neil has fallen in love with his mother-in-law's nurse, but has not told his son about their relationship, believing he is protecting his son.

When a student You Tube prank video goes viral, Neil faces the loss of his job, his girlfriend, and the love of his son.

I requested this book from NetGalley because it was set in Michigan, and in the kind of small Lake Michigan resort town I have lived in: four hours from Lansing, with a marina. It also had very good reviews from the hardbound publication.

The story is told in Neil's voice. I connected to the character right away. I was impelled to read the last hundred pages, all in one sitting.

The back story of his wife's accident is withheld at the beginning, a great impetus to continue reading. Little by little we learn about Neil and Wendy. Anyone who has dealt with a horrendous loss will recognize Neil's post-accident plummet into despair, depression, self-medication, and withdrawal. His son Chris had lost two parents, and turned to his uncle, a Chicago chief, for support.

As Neil's life falls apart again, he is able to draw on the experience of his choices after his wife's tragedy to find strength to face his new challenges.

The author Jon Harrison was born in Michigan. The book is full of Michigan references, including the Metro Detroit IKEA were we just bought our bookshelves (and even a reference to the Philadelphia IKEA, the first in the US, where we bought furniture for our home in 1980!).

Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date Sept 23, 2014
Paperback $14.95
ISBN 978147785235

"Nest" by Esther Ehrlich, a Beautifully Written Young Adult Novel About Grief

"Chirp" loves birds, especially the elusive Red-Throated Loon. She rises at dawn, grabs her knapsack with binoculars, notebook and pennywhistle, and heads for the shore.


It is 1972 and she is in sixth grade. Her dancer mom, psychologist dad and older sister Rachel have an idyllic life. Unlike her neighbor Joey Morell whose dysfunctional family locks him out of the house when he does not meet his father's expectations.

Illness comes into their lives as the mother is diagnosed with MS and falls into a deep depression. When hospitalization and shock treatment fails, she is found drowned. The story of how the family copes, or does not cope, spirals into a satisfying climax.

When I was sent an invite to read The Nest by Esther Ehrlich I was surprised. I took a peak at the book and read it in one day.

I was impressed by the vivid portraits of Chirp and her family, fleshed out and realistic. Chirp is child enough to still use the power of imagination to escape or magically try to change reality. Rachel's sarcastic and contrary teenage life is changed as she tries to take on a mother's role in her sister's life. Rachel is on the brink of womanhood, sometimes able to play like her little sister, but trying to fit into older teen society.

Chirp's relationship with the sympathetic Joey was also very true. I remembered my experience at that age with a neighbor boy. His mom was not mentally well, and would lock the kids out of the house when she went shopping. The two older kids, a year and two years younger than I, would play together. The boy and I would take Dad's telescope out at nights and look at the moon, making up stories about outer space. At twelve I was oblivious to the fact the kids were not clean and were a bit wild. I was very sad when the children moved in with their dad and missed our friendship.

There is a blossoming of understanding as Chirp and Joey when they decided to run away. Chirp wants to return to the scene of a happy memory, only to find that memories can deceive. They.They shyly agree that some day they will kiss. They understand their friendship has been built on a deep, shared experience that will bond them for a long time.

I was filled with nostalgia by the references to the culture of 1972, the Tab and Oreos, the music, the peacoats and tie-dyed shirts. Novels today seem to be filled with specific references to the culture of the time.

Serendipity: the story resonated with my own experience growing up with a mom who was debilitated by psoriatic arthritis, severe psoriasis compounded and Sjogren's syndrome. Normal for Mom was waking up, taking her pain pills, returning to bed until the meds took effect. Her joints were frozen one by one until her hands were permanently curled. Doctors had her on medications without consulting each other and in 1968 she was hospitalized, taken off meds cold turkey to prevent further organ damage, and became so ill my family was worried she would die. So I know something with moms with illness.

The book is marketed for upper elementary students, but adult readers will enjoy it as well.

This was a pleasant surprise and I am grateful to the publisher for sending me this book.  I have been auto-approved for all Lake Union Publishing books and saw a number of titles I was interested in, including a book by Catherine Ryan Hyde who I have read and enjoyed.