THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR

THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR begins gently, the way good stories and good music do. Its opening paragraph situates young doctor Hugh Grange, one of its main characters, in the lovely English landscape, “The town of Rye rose from the flat marshes like an island, its tumbled pyramids of red-tiled roofs glowing in the slanting evening light.” Such an introduction is at odds with rules designed to confine contemporary fiction to a straight jacket dreamt up by academics with too much leisure and not much imagination. According to these rules, contemporary readers must be hit between the eyes with an opening sentence that dazzles them to the point of disorientation. Place and time are  vague. Readers must  work for entertainment. Sentences must be short, adjectives and adverbs must vanish and nouns that have the vaguest etymological association with Latin are forbidden. Passive voice is taboo and so the gerund. Hemingway’s clipped journalistic style trumps Dickens and Trollope's.

Fortunately, Simonson rises above such silly directives. She renders the town of Rye and people as  timeless and universal. There is a special alchemy in that. There is magic firmly rooted in British literary tradition. Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, had the gift to tell stories that transcend time and place. So does Simonson. Her characters range from those burdened with the prejudices of their place to those ho can break free from parochial morality and outdated conventions. Well-traveled, well educated, forward thinking Beatrice Nash, is one of the latter. Eager to escape the humiliating confines of the aristocratic household of a domineering relative, she accepts a teaching job at Rye. There she meets Hugh Grange, who has been tutoring underprivileged boys while he spends his summer vacation at the home of his aunt Agatha Kent. She also meets Hugh’s cousin, poet Daniel Bookham, an effete poet who is the perfect foil for the level headed young doctor. The three become Beatrice’s friends and supporters.

Beatrice moves into Mrs. Turber’s house, a woman of Dickensian narrow mindedness. In time, she meets the local social leaders, the wannabe social leaders, and the local outcasts, personified by a Roma family. Add Belgian war refugees to that mix and the sweet Sussex summer acquires an entirely different flavor. This is a change that Simonson handles with exquisite deftness. What seems,  at first, no more than a good read in the style of Barbara Pym, deepens into a study of social conditions and their effect on the life of minorities—the Roma—and the powerless—women. But this is done without preachy condescension. As the story moves from tense peacetime to war, Simonson’s theme darkens. Effete Daniel’s sexuality comes into question, solicitor Poot, another Dickensian character, reveals his ambitions, a newly arrived couple of writers hits Rye’s brick wall of prudery, Agatha Kent discovers the limits of her tolerance. The Roma boy for whom Beatrice has such hopes  learns that the scholarly life to which he aspires is barred to him. A Belgian refugee whose beauty initially gains her the approval of townspeople soon confronts a crisis that nearly turns her into an outcast.

ut these are nothing but the bones of the story. The real thing is richer and far more enjoyable. It is well constructed and enlightening though it never attempts to bludgeon  the reader. Rather, it relies on unaffected simplicity.  This is superior writing by a gifted author. It is a work I want to keep close  as I keep those of Dickens and Trollope. It is work to which I will return after I recover from having my heart wrung by sadness of the awful war that sundered Hugh, his cousin, and so many Sussex boys from their golden landscape where, in summer, “...the bluffs were a massive unbroken line of shadow from east to west, the fields breathed out the heat of the day, and the sea was a slate silk dress.”

A STERLING WOMAN IS SHE

                           

Sue Margolis unfurls a broad canvas in LOSING ME. She does it with elegantly and with bravado. Much as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings of peasant life in Renaissance Europe, her novel compels the reader to look at beyond the sunny spaces and joyful feasts to find the dark corners most of us would prefer to ignore. In this, she is as fearless as her main character, 58 year-old special needs teacher Barbara Srirling—a telling name, that--who never misses an opportunity to do battle for a good cause, unless it is to save her own life.

Margolis bestows upon Barbara Sthe gift of illuminating numerous aspects of today's human experience—a war veteran's post-traumatic syndrome and its affect on his family, the terrors of approaching old age, the question of professional identity, the struggle of the economic underclasses, the dual burden of ageing adults who care for boomerang children and fragile elderly parents, the pitfalls of long term relationships, the matter of fidelity. The global environment, the class system, the callous attitude of politicians, violence against children and women. As abstractions, these make up an incongruous mix. In real life, which Margolis portrays deftly, it is all in a day's work.

LOSING ME is about more than travails and causes. It is about a woman whois trying to find her way through a complex world. Barbara is feisty and wimpy, caring and full of anger, clear eyed and obtuse, agentle and savage at the same time. So are real people.

Humor is an important element in LOSING ME. It can be tongue in cheek, such as Barbara's responses the social media, “Barbara's Facebook sidebar contained another 'fifty-nine next birthday' ad for 'cheap, no fuss funeral plan. Underneath was an invitation to take part in a medical trial aimed at detecting early-onset Alzheimer's. Then there were the plus-size clothing outlets pushing New Year's discounts. Zuckerberg knew she was a size fourteen because he had elves….peering over her shoulder as she typed.” She segues with an acerbic comment on another Facebook ad, “Cruises no matter why they were taken, were the first sign of the dying of the light and to be fought at all costs. (Elasticized waistbands, on the oter hand, had, since the arrival of her ample post-menopausal belly, become her secret pleasure.) “

Determined as she is to mock Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg—she eventually reaches the point where she replaces the Z in his surname with an F—Barbara is rather slow at directing her bile at those who really desrve it, such as horrible husband Frank. the typical humanitarian who is willing to risk life and limb to bring attention to so-called plight of the Palestinians, but who is incapable of engaging with individuals. He can make movies that show the suffering of poor people in the Third World, but close up, his self-absorption is staggering, his indifference to his wife's ill health and concerns is staggering. The best he can do when Barbara asks for his support during a crisis is to say,

“You are such a drama queen.”

Unlike her best friend Jean, Barbara does not seek solace in the embraces of paid escorts. No, she soldiers on, helping her narcissistic mother whose all encompassing love of her damaged husbnd, war veteran Stan, leaves no room for the needs of wee little Barbara, thus shaping her into a dual-personality fighter for rights of neglected children abused women even as she herself endures her husband's neglect and the bad behavior of her supremely entitled son. Her relationship with her daughter Jess is only marginally better. It involve self-sacrifice of the sort her own mother, Rose, refused to make for her. There, is one of the flaws in LOSING ME, in this not-subtle shades, no gradations the cliché mom who “never needed to work.”

To make Rose, who is as much a victim of the horrors of war as her PSTD afflicted husband, the cause of Barbara's inadequacies, is an error of judgment. It leads the reader to ask Margolis from whom Barbara got her love of social causes and her strength. Surely it was not her teacher, Mrs. Emmett, who saw her for a few hours during the day. To attribute it to a reaction to her mother's perceived neglect and alleged narcissism is way too facile and convenient.

A story that has so much realism fails when it lapses into the usual “mommie made me do it” mode. It fails when it does not provide a source for the main character's ferocious criticism of “hummusy mummies” who own Kegel balls, exchange air kisses, babble about their Christmas trips to Tuvalu, feed their kids breast milk parfaits, name their kids Atticus and Bryony and use—I will not go there—family cloth. The reader wonders to know why such a sterling characters compassion and understanding only extends to those materially poorer than she.

The imperfections in LOOSING ME are no reason to dismiss the excellent writing in most of of it. There are moments when Margolis makes excessive demands on plausibility—Rose, who “only loved Stan,” Barbara's lightning fast bonding with an abused, low-income woman and children, and her swift insertion into the deliberations of a wealthy family all have a fairytale air. But all in all, this is a story told honestly and with brio.

BRINGING ROMAN HISTORY TO LIFE

The simplest way to review Kate Quinn's WOMAN OF THE ETERNAL CITY is to say that it is marvelous. But it is more than that. It is an engrossing, beautifully crafted story that includes romance, geopolitics and the question of ethno-religious identity. The deftly handled plot encompasses a shift in Rome's imperialistic policy,  efforts to impose Roman values and ideals on conquered nations and to define the borders of territories annexed in war. These,  as Quinn's impeccable research shows, are Roman Emperor Hadrian's documented contributions to history. But it is the imagined details of his relationship with his wife Sabina and  his lover Antinous,  as well  her relationship with the warrior Vercingetorix (Vix) that grab and hold  the reader's attention .

Vix is a conflicted man who struggles to reconcile his Jewish identity--technically, he  is a Jew though his enslaved mother has been cut off from normative Judaism--and his allegiance to Rome.  He also struggles to reconcile his work as  a tribune in the Praetorian Guard and his love for Mirah, the  religious Jewish woman whom he married and who gave him two daughters. Additionally, he strives to contain his emotional attachment to his former lover, Sabina, a woman whose great intelligence, beauty and kindness make a brilliant contrast to the darkness of Hadrian's violent moods.

Enter Vix's adopted son, Antinous, who is supremely handsome and gentle. He and Hadrian meet and what follows is a heartbreaking love story told enormous sensitivity and grace. The first heart to break is Vix's. His  dislike of Hadrian is  as strong as his loyalty to fray  destroy his ties with his son.  Next heart to crack it is Mirah's. Her  narrow view of  good love  is shaped by religious prejudice. As for Antinous, life becomes a series of  painful encounters with hypocritical Romans who pattern their  view of homosexuality on that of the Greeks--it is OK if one of the partners is a young boy.

There are, in this story,  two young boys  and a remarkable young girl whose reaction to Antinous have great  significance for the empire--Marcus Aurelius, his remarkable  cousin Annia Galeria Faustina the Younger and their sworn enemy. Gneus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator, whose lust for power and Annia' virginity might have earned the cognomen of Salivator. How the  love of the first two and the hatred of the third change the shape of  history is a tale that  will captivate students of philosophy, feminists, and admirers of a well written romance.
 Romances in this novels are as complex, as they are in real life.  Vix and Mirah's meets with a formidable obstacle when they move to Judea where her uncle, Simon Bar Kochba leads the resistance against Rome. Much has been written about Hadrian's response to Jewish aspirations. I will leave it to you to discover the choice Vix made in this fight between Roman imperialism and Jthe Jews' ardent desire to free Judea. The Bar Kochba war against Roman invaders lasted three years at the end of which approximately 580, 000 Jews lay dead and Judea was left in ruins. Countless Jewish survivors were enslaved and the very name of the  Jewish homeland was replaced by that of   Syria Palestina. Quinn's novel reminds us of how history repeats itself; Although it it is set in 128nB.C.E.. the history of imperialistic nations,  the ways in which humans love or hate each other have changed very little,  It is to her credit that there is no sense of deja vu in a tale as old Christianity itself. Bar Kochba,  Hadrian, Sabina, Titus, Marcus Aurelius,  Roman legionnaires. the defeated and the victors emerge from page with such clarity they might be one's next door neighbor.. This is a book I am glad to have read. I would hesitate to recommend it to the most fastidious reader.

A CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA MARIA TUCELLI, AUTHOR OF GLOW

 Jessica Maria Tuccelli.

 (Viking / On-Sale: March 19, 2012)

Q: GLOW is steeped in the geography and folklore of northeast Georgia and Southern Appalachia, yet you were raised in New York City.  Why did you decide to set your novel in this region, and how did you come to learn about this part of the world?

A: It was an adventure: I’d written the first chapter of GLOW, but I didn’t yet have a setting. The world of GLOW is an unconventional one, meaning ghosts inhabit the landscape just as easily as living beings, sometimes the two even being interchangeable. I needed an environment that could support and evoke that. My husband and I drove from Manhattan down the east coast, and when we arrived in Northeastern Georgia, I knew I had found the ideal surroundings for my story. The forest was wet and lush and fertile with spooky pockets of light and dark, and exotic flowers the likes of which I’d never seen before in the United States. There were mountains, hidden coves, cataracts, and cavernous gorges, the perfect playground for my characters, the perfect place to befriend a ghost. The confluence and clash of cultures lured me as well—Cherokee, African-American, Scotch-Irish—with such deep-rooted histories, yet still vibrantly alive.

Q: In GLOW, you write mainly in the voices of people of color (both African-American and Native American). Is it challenging to write characters that are culturally and ethnically so different from you?  What inspired you to do so?

A: I don’t think of myself as writing in the voices of “people of color.” I write the voices of people. I write in the voice of a character who exists in a given time period, grappling with her or his circumstances. And I don’t see myself as different from my characters, which is not to say I am my characters, but they all do come from my imagination.

Inspiration is elusive. I write out of drive and a visceral need to create, a need to understand the human condition, a need to understand others and myself, a need to connect to others in and outside of my community. What infuriates and ignites me is intolerance. My mother is Italian and Catholic and my father was an American Jew, and as a young girl and as a teenager, I was often on the receiving end of racial hatred and violence. At home, I struggled with being a “half and half,” a misfit who did not fit into either parent’s community. In GLOW, two of my main characters are “mixed race,” and struggle with their sense of identity and belonging. Figuring where we fit into society—racially, culturally, sexually, who we are and what we stand for despite preconceived cultural concepts and oppressions—is one of the themes I explore in GLOW.

Q: As you were completing your work on this novel, you gave birth to your first child. Did this impact your view of the story or change your approach to the final stages of the writing process?

A: Polishing certain scenes became physically and unbearably painful because I was no longer seeing through the eyes of the daughters fighting for freedom, but as the mothers with a visceral and instinctual imperative to protect their children from the demons and bullies of the world.

Q: GLOW covers a large span of time—from Andrew Jackson’s expulsion of the Cherokee to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. What kind of research did you do to get a detailed historical understanding of each period?

A: I read the history books one would expect of someone writing a historical fiction. I also read what people were reading at the time: Life Magazine, Harper’s Weekly, cookbooks and newspapers, especially the obituaries; I listened to oral histories and the music of the period, and even went up in a 1929 biplane for my barnstormer scene to get the experience of what that must have been like. But I would say what made it all come alive for me were the people I met in my travels through the Georgia mountains, in particular Robert Murray, who was Appalachian born and raised, who was a living encyclopedia and the curator of the Foxfire Museum in Mountain City, which is dedicated to preserving the traditional folkways of the Southern Appalachian people. He showed me how to hem a hog, gird a tree, make weave rope out of dog hobble, amongst many other skills of simple living. For me it’s not so much about understanding the facts of the period, but connecting to the experience of being in that period, of surviving and thriving under certain conditions and then making it personal.

Q: What would you say is the overriding theme that unites the many different threads of GLOW?

A: Glow takes place over four generations. It begins just prior to the Trail of Tears and ends just before the US entry into World War II. From one holocaust to another, linking two moments in history that people don’t generally consider in one breath. It’s the story of mothers and daughters, misfits, identity, friendships, betrayals, and love. It speaks to the power of companionship. And human connections that prevail against forces of history that no one can escape. At its core, it’s about mother love in the most primitive sense of it, as in one’s primal need for a mother, and also the lengths to which a mother will go to protect her child.

Q: You’re a graduate of MIT. How did you make the leap from that sort of atmosphere to the world of literature?

A: Science is investigation, observation, creativity, and the use of imagination. For me, there is an easy logic in going from MIT to writing. The difference, of course, is that a scientist is working on a new theory of physics, and the writer is working on inventing the physicist who is working on the new theory of physics.

Q. When did you start telling stories?

A: When I was a child, my best friend, Darice, lived miles away. So we wrote each other letters. We pretended we were twins and our parents had sent Darice on holiday to visit a quirky old aunt in Paris. Neither of us had ever been to Paris, but Darice gleaned what she could from the Encyclopedia Britannica while I filled my letters with the antics of our fictitious brother who was busy in our basement blowing up things with his new chemistry set. In this way, Darice and I would be a little less lonely. It was my first foray into storytelling.

For me, it is a most intimate of experiences, sharing my imaginary world with someone. It’s a way of connecting to my fellow human being.

Q: How did you go about crafting such an intricate plot?

A: My background is in film and theatre, and my strength is improvisation, which is the method to my madness, as the saying goes. I basically arose every morning, allowed a voice to come into my head, and wrote down what it had to say. If nothing came, I would pose a question to one of my characters. The key was to leave my desk with the scene unfinished, so that I had something to come back to the next day. My first mentor gave this advice to me, and it fuels my writing engine. It does make for a wild and unbridled first draft, but that kind of freedom is crucial to my process. When I was a little girl, my grandmother took me to the Uffizi in Firenze. As we passed a series of four unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, the guide told us that Michelangelo believed the sculptures existed within the marble and his job was to reveal them. I like to think of a first draft like that marble, where the narrative is within the draft, and one must actively, thoughtfully, chip away and reveal it.

Q: What was it like writing from not one, but several very unique perspectives?

A: Natural. Prior to writing Glow, I had been working for many years in film and theatre, most recently crafting one-woman shows; so multiple voices came naturally to me. Also, my ear is drawn to the nuances of language. The music, the beauty or ugliness of words, the cadences and tropes—these are my toys and my tools. The challenge for me was writing beyond dialogue. Subtext is the lifeblood of a script, and the actress and her connection to her inner life feed those unsaid words.

Q: Do you have any particular authors or favorite novels that have played a prominent role in your reading life?

A: Most definitely. Toni Morrison for her use of language, her themes of mother love and identity, and her daring with language and the narrative form, especially in the Bluest Eye. Alice Walker for her entire oeuvre. Edward P. Jones for The Known World, one of my favorite novels, a masterpiece in storytelling. I especially enjoy experimental writing, including Finnegan’s Wake, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, most of Gertrude Stein, and all of William Faulkner. For magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. For the art of detail, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. For her eloquent and powerful short stories, Flannery O’Conner. For economy and potent images, the poets Victoria Redel, Billy Collins and T.S Eliot.

A MOSLEM WOMAN OF VALOR

  There are two ways to read a Daniel Silva novel. The first is to gobble it up in one go;the second is to savor it slowly and voluptuously.      Full disclosure, I have tried both approaches and found that either way, I remain an admirer of Silva’s clean, elegant prose   brilliant plots and no-nonsense analysis of what goes on among those in the dark side and those who fight it. PORTRAIT OF A SPY, Silva’s latest novel featuring art restorer turned Mossad agent Gabriel Allon, proves yet again the art of suspenseful storytelling, the answer is that it remains in  masterful hands.

In PORTRAIT OF A SPY, Silva revisits Gunwalloe, the idyllic Cornish village where Allon and his alluring wife Chiara have returned after he helped blow up Iranian nuclear facilities. There, he works on a painting discovered by dapper London art dealer Julian Isherwood while Chiara entertains thought of taking over Isherwood’s gallery. After all Isherwood claims that he wants to retire and Allon has no intention of going back to hunting and neutralizing terrorists.

As it often happens in real life, reality intrudes on this dream world. Jihadis detonate bombs in Paris, Copenhagen and London, killing dozens of people and shattering Allon’s resolve “ to treat the Office like a jilted lover. Contact had to be kept to a minimum and it was best conducted in public places where a messy scene would be inappropriate. “

This time, the Office comes to him, in the person of its new chief, Uzi Navot. He makes the sort of appeal to Allon that a man of integrity cannot ignore. And Allon is, above all, the personification of the Elie Wiesel quote Silva chose as an epigraph, “A person of integrity can make the difference of life and death.”

To help make that difference, Allon assembles his own reliable team: unassuming archaelogist and tracker Eli Levon, Dina Sarid, the human database, Mikhail Abramov, a glacial marksman described as “Gabriel without a conscience”, veteran agent runner Yossi Rossner, former military intel officer Rimona Stern, Oded and Mordechai, “all purpose field hands.” Since this hunt for the terrorist behind the bombings is to be an international effort, the CIA insists upon adding agent Sarah Bancroft to the group. For all that, no Allon op is complete without infuriating, meddlesome, fatherly, lovable and indispensable Ari Shamron, former Mossad chief and Allon’s mentor. He rounds out the cast of characters some Silva readers have come to regard as real people.

Together, the members of the group decide to recruit someone to infiltrate the jihadi network. They decide on a Moslem woman, Nadia al-Bakari who happens to be the daughter of the late Zizi al-Bakari , a terrorists Allon and Abramov assassinated.

In a world rife with moral and political ambiguity, characters such as Allon and his team are strangely reassurance. Perhaps part of their evergreen appeal is that readers hope . Without that possibility, it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that “There exist in the world today a force that seeks to weaken or even destroy the West with indiscriminate violence. This force is part of a broader radical movement to impose sharia law and restore the Islamic Califate.”

Who can fight this force better than Nadia, a Moslem woman of valor? Silva paints her portrait as loving as Allon restores paintings of Old Masters. Her beauty and her compassion shine brilliantly throughout the novel. She is, in many ways, Gabriel’s perfect counterpart. Her aim is to make a difference, to improve the lot of the poor, the dispossessed and the oppressed. She uses her privileged position to talk openly about helping Moslem women realize their potential. She refuses to close her eyes to the suffering of the guest workers in places such as Dubai and she is willing to risk her life to rid Islam of the taint of terrorism. What happens as a result of her choice’s and Allon’s make PORTRAIT OF A SPY a breathtaking read. It is all good except for one problem, now I have to wait for Silva’s next novel.

NOTE: There is an interesting revelation in PORTRAIT OF A SPY. It is so discreet it almost goes unnoticed. Ever reluctant to come to terms with the brutal requirement of killing his fellow humans, regardless of their crimes, Gabriel rejects Shamron's plea that he return to Israel to taker over the Office. In previous novels he declines   to take up the Sysiphean burden  that has been the memuneh's s life's work.
 Again and again Shamron addresses him as "my son. " His implicit appeal goes unheeded. Now, for the first time, Gabriel's replies,
"Yes, Abba--father."
This seems to indicate that he is finally willing to accept his place in the order of things. When I asked Daniel Silva about it, his answer was,
"I think so."
Do you think so too or do you know of another Silva novel in which Gabriel addressed Shamron as "abba"?

PROMETHEUS IN THE NEW WORLD

How can one not love a book that is peppered with words such as garth, bevins, baver and fanfarooons?

CALEB' CROSSING, by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, has all that and more. In this superior kind of historical novel there is, above all, a lesson about cultural assimilation and its unintended consequences. Its main character is based on a a real person, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, a member of the Wampanoag tribe of Martha Vineyard. Though his birth date, 1646, preceded by nearly thirty years John Dryden's introduction of the concept of the noble savage into the English language, Brooks painted him as an icon of tractability and lofty ideals. She had only a few facts on which to base her story—Caleb's date of birth, 1646, tribal affiliation, the dates of his graduation from Harvard, 1665, and his his death a year later. She also had a letter he allegedly wrote in Latin during his sojourn at Harvard College.

To these e wispy brush strokes Brooks added on her own vivid colors to create t a fascinating portrait of a young man's transition to a place that depended on the Old World for a cultural model although it existed, physically, in the New World. She chose an imagined character, Bethia Mayfield, a highly intelligent young girl who hungered for knowledge and who chafed at the socio-religious constraints her culture imposed upon women. Linguistically gifted, she eavesdropped on her older brother's Hebrew and Latin and of Wopanaak lessons, storing up information that had no practical use until, at age twelve, she met Caleb.

This is what she saw, “All else about him was open and naked, saved for three glossy feathers tied into a kind of topknot in his thick, jetty hair, which was very long, the forelock pulled hard from his coppery face and bound up as one would a horse's mane. His smile was unguarded , his teeth very white and something in his expression made impossible to fear him.” Of such contrasting figures—milky pale girl in ankle-length skirt, naked, sunburned young man, are romance novels made. But Brooks is way above such literary shenanigans. What she does, and she does is extremely well, is to explore the commonality and the difference between these two, adding a touch of philology, a touch a pinch of Anne Bradstreet's proto-feminist poetry, generous servings of history and large measures of theology. Bethia is a Puritan. Caleb is in line to follow his tribe's medicine man. This friendship is the first stage of Caleb's transformation into an English speaking, somewhat reluctant Christian, fit to join the privileged group of liberi liberaliter educati, gentlemen educated likegentlemen. Not only did he use his new language to speak of ordinary things, he also discussed concepts that must have been foreign to the Woponaog. This raises the question of how bethia transitions so quickly from a passive understanding of Woponaak to total fluency and the reader can assume that she is a linguistic prodigy. But then so seems to be Caleb. Else h can they discuss the fine points of theology? How do they bridge the linguistic gaps early on when they happen upon a concept that has no equivalent term in the other's native speech?

Besides learning new languages, Caleb must cut his hair, learn to wear hose, coat, bonnet, shoes and he must acquire a taste for unfamiliar food, as he adapts to his new, enclosed surroundings.

“So many things I loved I had to learn to hate,” he says. That, is no surprise to the assimilated immigrants who realize that in order to belong entirely to a culture other than their own, they must kill that which he once loved. Sometimes, that means leaving behind their their first language along with the notions civility, generosity, humor, honor, bravery, cowardice, hospitality, privacy, associated with it. It means replacing a collection of gestures--shrugs, hand waving, embraces—old ways of expressing emotion with new ones. Layer by layer of the old self must be peeled away so that a new one can emerge. The process is rarely gentle.

Then there is the question of how assimilated he be when it is impossible for him to change the angles of his or change radically the coppery tone of skin. Having left family and friends behind, he must have gone through a stage where he belonged nowhere. By the time he graduated from Harvard,--the first Native America to do so in Colonial times-- his heart must been torn as often as that Prometheus, to whom he compared himself. Yet when he talked of stealing the fire of knowledge to share with his people he stopped short of saying that such an act is at once a creative and destructive. Once he performed it, there was no turning back.

“You have done it, my friend. It has cost you your home, your health, and the estrangement from your closest kinsman. But after today, no man can say that the Indian mind is primitive and ineducable,” says Bethia. Her own crossing is no less than Caleb's is Bethia's as she moves from her beloved island home to Harvard's buttery and eventually, to Padua, Italy.

This is a luminous book, filled with reverence for the unsung heroes of Colonial America. Readers who might never have heard of Caleb owe Brooks a debt of gratitude.

Note: I prefer the version of the Prometheus legend in which it is his heart, rather than his liver, the eagle tears apart. 

PUFF PASTRY FOR THE MIND

Beth Kendrick's THE BAKE-OFF is a szarlotka of a book­--sweet and potentially indigestible. Szarlotska, the Polish version of the French pastry Charlotte de Pomme, plays an important part in Kendrick's story. It is the recipe Grammy Syl coerces her estranged grand-daughters, Amy and Linnie to enter into a into a baking competition the prize for which a cool hundred thousand dollars. Discerning readers will guess that Grammy's objective is not money. Rather, it is the reconciliation of these two sisters  who are “as different as oil and water.” Burdened with an IQ of a hundred and eighty, gorgeous Linnie is self-righteous, priggish and unsociable. She lives according to rigid set of rules and she shares none of her sibling's appetites. Married to a nondescript dentist husband with whom she produced a set of twins, Amy is a dental hygienist whose brilliant social skills seem to compensate for her average intelligence. Also important to plot advancement are a pair of villainous bake-off contestants, and a (ho-hum) dark handsome and wealthy hotelier. The background is a posh hotel in New York City where the bake-off takes place. Given a crash course in the art of making szarlotka, the twenty-something sisters, who had no prior training as bakers, end up as contest finalists. They arrive at the Big Apple to discover, in double-quick time, Important Truths, learn Great Life Lessons, bond like crazy, watch a porno flick, and find love-preceded-by-sex, though not necessarily in that order.

What is not to like about such a book? Surely there is a place for mindless escapism in literature. Not every novel written by Colette and Joyce Carol Oates qualifies as deathless prose. Jane Austen is not known for Sturm und Drang. The trouble is that the reader is entitled to have at least as much fun with a book as the person who wrote it. This reader certainly did not. Billed as “hilarious”, THE BAKE OFF comes off as studied and forced. Neither its characters nor situations have nuances. They seem to have been designed with demographics in mind. Does this make it a horrible book? Not really.. Not really. It is not significantly different from the novels that kept Georges Sand solvent and that made her avatars, Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele very rich indeed. In an era when vampire fiction reigns supreme, there is no reason why THE BAKE-OFF should not become a bestseller. If it does, Julia Roberts will probably buy the film rights, vox populi being what is. The point is, if her public craves a mix of cliches and froth, why should Kendrick deprive it of its just desserts? In Amy's immortal words,
" It's just fucking pie."
Clara Castelar