One afternoon

 

The novel Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford captures a child’s perspective in this brief novel with minimal details, minimal plot, minimal characterization.  A few lovely passages describe a summer afternoon of childhood play while adults sit on porch, drinking and ignoring their children. 

The writing has a dreamlike quality, rambling about an afternoon for a group of cousins. The memory could belong to one individual or the collective. The setting is an unmarried aunt’s home, with a small patch of woods nearby, somewhat familiar but leaving plenty of strange questions that go unanswered. The children are both hyper and bored together, inventing challenges. The exact number of cousins is unknown. Only four “main players,” those who happen to be older or admired, are named. Others, including the narrator, are regarded as unimportant and also-rans, blurring together like a watercolor,  an exact count never given. 

The vague setting, the lack of names and details, creates an atmosphere of unease: “We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable… It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent. Nothing, on the other hand, meant that we would need to go downstairs eventually an get ourselves a 7UP, start thinking about the 9 times tables or something along those lines.”    

Accuracy is constantly in question as the unnamed narrator relays childhood memories that mostly center on one afternoon. A brother is sure his 3-year-old sister has gone missing and the group sets out to search. The children switch quickly from cooperation to competition, compassion to cruelty. Clues about family disappointments and failures abound in overheard snippets of adult conversations, old photographs and claims over a mother's possessions.

The afternoon stretches out expansively, foreshadowing adult outcomes for the four named characters, and these adult careers and relationships are relegated to a few pages, meaningless when stacked next to that strange and adventuresome afternoon. Still, the novel delivers little in the way of suspense or motivation. The older children fail to escape the influences of a dysfunctional extended family.  Not by chance, Abi, the youngest child labeled as “missing,” achieves success as an artist. No trying to tag along for her. Age, stealth and an ability to vanish in that crowd of cousins lend protective distance from troubled family members. 

The book leaves many unanswered questions, and readers will give up caring. One afternoon does not make a life. The quest promises thrill but in the end the lingering memory and novel seem pointless. Children who flourish shake off childhood labels, anxieties and family issues. They move on and take control of the life they have now.      

Finally, the publisher made a terrible mistake by describing the novel as “a warped Nancy Drew detective story.” The phrase may have snagged a few readers who became readers with that series, but the false promise is sure to leave deep disappointment. There is no mystery, spunk or resolution.

Careless

Wealth can make one careless. Too much pushes other priorities aside and weakens those who eventually must encounter life’s realities. And by comparison, too little might heighten feelings including empathy and caution. Insecurity abounds in either camp. 

Johnny Careless by Kevin Wade is the story of two friends on who met as teens on an elite-league lacrosse team based on the North Shore of Long Island. One comes from old wealth and the other is solidly middle-class. In the background are two fathers, a New York City police officer, who worked the remains of the twin towers post-9/11, generous with advice and love for his only son until early death, and the other controlling and persistently disappointed.  

Johnny Chambliss and Jeep Mullane fix situations for each other, with little imbalance in that regard though Johnny tends to act before asking: Jeep claims to be a driver when Johnny crashes a new Porsche, and Johnny blows off a playoff match for a family ski trip but points out that his absence will help Jeep gain notice from college recruiters attending the games.

Johnny leaves it to Jeep to inform the coach who then confides that staff had long nicknamed his friend Johnny Careless – “He could care less, the wake he leaves just walking around.”  Jeep, also annoyed by his friend, too, is troubled: “it seemed wrong to me for the adults to brand you for how you were when you were seven or eight.” 

Jeep does win a college scholarship and follows in his father’s footsteps by joining the NYPD, hard-working, thoughtful and considerate with perps and victims alike. Involvement with a victim of domestic assault and a subsequent attack prompt him to quit the NYPD and become chief of police for the small North Shore community where he grew up, regularly reminded of words of wisdom from his father about smart policing, including always thinking twice and being generous with favors. Candid with judgment and opinions, Jeep regularly gives breaks to perps as well as annoying citizens and officers. He sees irony in Long Islanders suffering from the lifestyle choices they embrace, traps they may well be.  

The town is not sleepy for long with a South American gang targeting luxury cars and Johnny’s battered body washing up on shore. Nassau County police take the lead on such cases but Jeep knows Johnny, his parents and ex-wife, as well as his darkest secrets which he can help hide or expose to show the true character of his best friend. 

Being careless extends to both sides of the wealth divide, and Jeep observes that “Being careless wasn’t a crime around here, just a tribal custom.”

Stories

Ordinary, everyday relationships offer more intrigue than a murder case in Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout. In small Crosby, Maine, a curmudgeonly 90-year-old woman, Olive, forms a companionship with Lucy, a writer, and they exchange stories. Both agree that all people, even the most ordinary, have stories to live and learn from. The stories may draw curiosity, intrigue, hope and other reactions, patterns others can observe and learn from even if the person living the tale does not. 

Olive observes a budding relationship between Lucy and Bob, a lawyer in town who is not so happily married, and during the course of their exchanges, Olive relays stories about love, including unrequited love and the damage accompanying destroyed marriages. At one point, Olive tells Lucy a story about people who live with ghosts in marriage. Couples who don’t communicate, who don’t really care about the other and constantly pine for someone they cannot have. A person simply may not be available at that moment in time. Those who once enjoyed close relationships might remind others to appreciate the bird in hand.   

The meetings between Bob and Lucy and happy and innocent, including regular walks along the river with deep, uplifting conversations.  Each believes the other is truly listening and listens in turn. Their respective partners do not object and even support the deep friendship. Bob is conflicted as his wife calls Lucy childlike and Lucy raises no quick objections when Bob recalls how his wife was once labeled a narcissist. Trust is on the line.

Any number of factors blunt the potential love affair. A bad haircut results in Bob going into a period of hiding. Bob abruptly cancels a NYC trip with Lucy in the airport after a potential suspect passes by and he takes off to follow. Lucy is rude to a woman in the grocery store, not realizing Bob is observing. Irritation at an immature comment and cutting retort. A naïve client idly mentioning how much he admires and appreciates Bob’s wife. Perhaps all combine into the inescapable knowledge that such a relationship is wrong because it hurts others.

Toward the novel's end, Lucy and Olive talk about people who are their partner’s linchpin, and how they fail to thrive without that partner. Lucy finds herself wondering, “How many people out there are able to be strong – or strong enough – because of the person they’re married to.” 

Some people have reserves of strength on their own and others do not. Lucy may often seem shallow and immature, almost selfish in her quest for details, but still can prompt others toward self-reflection.

By the end, Lucy and Bob separately decide that they cannot be together and each take steps to recalibrate, easing the relationship’s intensity. “We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by  those who have come before us.” 

Influenced yes, but we can and should shape the plots we live. 

Love comes in many forms, and love can be shared, but taking what belongs to another will trouble more than satisfy. All have stories to live and learn from. The smallest of stories, the unrecorded ones, often matter the most deeply.  

Strangers

Health experts are adamant that maintaining strong social connections is key for healthy aging.

Loneliness and social isolation contribute to depression, anxiety, as well as increased risk of suicide, dementia, stroke and heart attacks, reports Mayo Clinic. 

The elderly are not the only ones feeling loneliness.

In Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang, a young man works for an online rent-a-companion service, well paid for standing in as dates, friends and even father to a little girl with a distracted, insecure single mother. The mother has paid Stranger for years to stand in as father to the intelligent and somewhat neglected girl, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. The time commitment is one day per week, and his storyline: He works as a long-haul trucker. 

That relationship is shocking but understandable as Stranger was the child of a single mother dedicated more toward her failed acting career than her role as mother. Stranger didn’t finish high school and has few skills except for good looks and an amiable personality flexible for most client scenarios. He excels at his work, hence the novel's title. He balances long-term connections with suitable cool distance, likely atoning for past transgressions and his mother’s suicide. Adept at providing people with the services they need, Stranger surely would have relished a stand-in father who would have helped with homework and offered guidance on everyday problems: “Wasn’t the staid performance of love and care everything anyone really wanted? Did deeper feeling have to exist for the act to have meaning?” 

Stranger also sees his line of work as another reflection of “the trashed decadence of an overfattened empire poised for its inevitable fall.” 

Friendship can turn on and off like a faucet, and Stranger mulls over the meaning of such relationships, wondering if it’s all an attempt to dodge loneliness: “In school, friendship was an incidental by-product of liking the same movies or being good at kicking a ball on a grassy field. Rarely did we take care of one another… but still stuck together because we didn’t want to be alone. But now, as adults, people chose friendship – this fickle arrangement that could be taken away at any time without recourse.” 

Problems ensue when Stranger mixes two clients, the young girl who trusts him as her father and a woman who’s struggling with writing assignments and relies on him for role playing. The threesome heads off to the zoo, and suddenly, “Somehow, we were more of a family with the addition of one female stranger than we had been without – a feminine power.” Darlene, the writer, actually pretending to be a paternal aunt, fascinates the little girl who wants more, and Stranger must handle a fake daughter corresponding with a fake aunt.  

The writer condemns the pretend-parenting as wrong, and threatens to expose the charade even as Stanger contemplates trying for a relationship with the girl’s mother in order to have a daughter. His narrative breaks down and the girl’s mother breaks off contact, accusing him of being a parasite. “You prey off people’s insecurities. You don’t let them change or grow. You want them to be weak, to depend on people like you.” 

Afterward, Stranger sets out to learn more about his own mother and confronts the purpose of his life, realizing he must decide if he wants to keep pretending at relationships or take a risk by proving his existence and pursuing the real thing, good or bad. 

Back to aging and isolation, Senior Navigator offers tips for staying socially connected. And sometimes companions can be rented, as one family did when an aunt suddenly became incapacitated and landed in a nursing home a few hundred miles away. The family heard that that nursing home staff pay more attention to patients with involved family members. So the family paid a woman and child to visit each Wednesday or Thursday, bringing milkshakes and standing in as family. Two nieces also visited regularly, at least every other weekend. 

Simple and regular companionship can be a treasure. The aunt was pleased with the visitors, whether friends or strangers.

Burrow

At the start of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of lockdown, a family is devastated after the loss of an infant daughter in The Burrow by Melanie Cheng. The surviving daughter, Lucie, expresses interest in a pet and the family adopts a small, timid rabbit. Immediately afterward the hospital calls to report that Lucie's maternal grandmother suffered a fall, breaking an arm. The woman needs a place to stay while healing and that ends an estrangement that began after the infant died while in the grandmother’s care.

Conversations are stilted and cool and weapons, with individuals taking turns being predators or prey. The adults, each shouldering overwhelming guilt, struggle between masking feelings and being honest about their true thoughts. 

Each yearns to care again.   

The father, Jin, is an emergency physician who regrets becoming a “follower of procedures. An automaton. Which was better for the patients, who had more to gain from a clear-thinking robot than from someone whose judgment was clouded with feeling…. Jin missed the sensation of being emotionally invested in an outcome. He missed the fear and the worry. He missed caring about something.” 

Amy, the mother, an author who on a book tour when her daughter died, is conflicted about performative style of parenting required her child’s school.  Torn inside, she resents other mothers, smug and superior and shallow with their priorities. “The entire ecosystem depended on people caring about what other parents thought of them.” After her child’s death, “Amy learnt that not caring was a kind of superpower. It provoked people.”

She agonizes how she resented the baby for interfering with her writing, yet struggles to comfort or cherish her other daughter.

Lucie, the 10-year-old, is intelligent and anxious about her death, her parents' unhappiness and an inability to make close friends at school. But she adores her rabbit, often lying still as though dead, to trigger the shy animal’s curiosity. “Human beings, it seemed to Lucie, lacked curiosity about the world. A curiosity that rabbits had in endless supply.” 

Each character wants to hide from others, yet by the book's end the three adults, very much unlike rabbits, confront one another with true feelings.

I started this book as fires raged in Pacific Heights and Altadena, California, destroying at least 12,000 homes. An opening quotation from The Burrow, Franz Kafka’s unfinished story, stunned me the morning of January 8: “The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.”  

A life, beautiful or not, can vanish in a tragic instant and others recklessly move on. Security is a delusion.     

Regrets and secrets

Hang onto every day as precious – that’s the theme of both The Life Impossible by Matt Haig and Sandwich by Catherine Newman. Both writers point out that each of us, at this moment, is both the oldest and youngest we’ll ever be. “If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present,” one protagonist notes. Attitudes on age can be adjusted with new experiences.  

Both novels address aging and struggling with painful memories and regrets. In both, the protagonist has traveled to a vacation community – an inherited and modest Ibiza home in the first and a rented cottage on Cape Cod in the second. Secrets and new aspirations spill from the female protagonists. Both books engage the reader from the start, Sandwich with slapstick humor and Impossible Life with intrigue.

In Sandwich Rocky spends the week at the rickety Cape rental cabin with her husband, adult children who also welcome her elderly parents for two days. Rocky is gregarious, fun, and a tad narcissistic and frequently toys with the notion of seeking divorce from her generally capable husband who prides himself on not apologizing and manages to “look away from anything you don’t want to see.” The two argue often and playfully, and Rocky limits the secrets she shares with him. 

The boisterous family, constantly bantering, attract attention wherever they go – the beach, shops, or restaurants. The son’s girlfriend compares her large family with Rocky’s, describing them as fun and chaotic, but not “so … intentional the way you guys always seem.” 

Rocky cherishes the memories triggered by the annual stays at the cottage and enjoys hearing her children complain about the conveniences and décor.  “People insist you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.” 

The Life Impossible is a darker book about a woman who mulls over regrets from years before. “The trouble with tragedy is that it tars everything that comes after,” observes Grace Winters, a retired math teacher, in her seventies, for whom the “unknown variable must always be found.”  She finds a theme in all she meets and identifies her own theme as guilt. She finds comfort in blaming herself for the death of a young son followed by an affair and cheating on a beloved husband: “Grief felt like the only way to keep close to them” and she sees “everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.” 

Two events at the start trigger motivation for Grace who who depressingly concedes, “I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.”  

First, Grace receives a distressing note from a former student about his own hardships, and the rest of the book follows as her response, self-analysis that she hopes will be useful. Maurice does not appear in the novel other than sending another note, and Grace strives to be both blunt and kind. “Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.”  She recalls Maurice, especially his propensity to say sorry for things he had not done.  “It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.” 

She becomes more accepting of her past, explaining that “one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly.” And she warns him against “incredibly common” worry: “Along with loneliness it is the polluted air that most minds live in, the ting that deprives us of the present moment, trapping us in the past and future all at once.” 

Grace also receives notice from a law firm. An acquaintance from the start of both their teaching careers bequeathed Grace a small home on a busy roadway in Ibiza. Grace knew Christine briefly, opening her home one lonely Christmas night and encouraging the woman to pursue a singing career,  

With few friends or activities, Grace takes off for Ibiza to inspect the home. The change in scene initially does not help. “The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.” 

Suspecting foul play, Grace moves out of her comfort zone making inquiries of the woman’s friends. The book takes odd turns into fantasy and telepathy and mind control, and Grace increasingly discovers she enjoys new people and experiences, moving beyond old ruts and choices. She seeks understanding rather than love. “There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love.” 

Recalling the relationship with her husband, she finds she is less resistant to close relationships and appreciates someone by her side who can be “a shock absorber to the madness of experience.”   

In both books, the protagonists assume that their own experiences will guide others, and other characters ensure that the self-absorption does not go too far. Abrupt withdrawal from old regrets and everyday problems, along with the release of secrets, can offer survival mechanisms. 

Time play

Real Americans by Rachel Khong is a family saga – an odd mixture of fantasy, suspense and speculative fiction that toys with genre and sense of time. 

The novel has three distinct sections, with a woman, her son and mother serving as narrators, lending adding to the sense that time is fluid with no set beginning or end. The first section starts in 1999 with Lily, a Chinese American who struggles with money and resists the ambitious goals her mother has set for her. An unpaid intern at an online travel magazine in New York, Lily meets her supervisor’s nephew – a wealthy private equity asset manager. Raised by ambitious parents, both are lonely and lost. 

Mistakenly deeming such feelings as compatibility, the two marry. “If our bodies disappeared – if they vanished – and what remained was only our souls, I was certain they would share a resemblance. Both us had been formed like stones in a river, washed over by our parents’ expectations – the forceful currents of them. No wonder we were drawn to each other.” 

The connection is not sustainable. Lily, while young, was grateful her parents do not expect her to pursue Chinese language or culture, but questions emerge later. While pregnant, accompanying Matthew on a business trip to China, she visits the university her mother attended and meets Ping. He marvels how she cannot speak Chinese and how little she knows about her mother’s background, suggesting that she is a “real American.” He asks that she deliver a sealed note to her mother. Instead, Lily reads and discards the private communication.

Lily also learns that her parents and Matthew’s father were once colleagues who experimented on their own children in a quest to give humans better use of time. This explains why her son, Nick, appears more Caucasian than Chinese. The discovery prompts Lily to flee her mother’s control and Matthew’s stifling family wealth. 

The second section jumps to 2021 and Nick growing up the Pacific Northwest in humble circumstances. For fifteen years, Nick assumes his father abandoned the family and his mother is his only relative. Both mother and child have moments when time eerily is suspended, when a few moments can seem like weeks, allowing them to focus. The two have little control over the sense of timelessness. “Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.” 

A precocious high school friend teaches Nick to drive and lets him use computer connected to a laptop. The two wonder why Nick looks nothing like his Chinese American mother. So the teens get jobs on an oyster farm, raising money for a DNA ancestry test and Nick soon reconnects with his wealthy father. He keeps the discovery to himself and “justified the lies upon lies by reasoning that she [Lily, his mother] had been the one to lie to me first.” 

Wealth transforms Nick’s life. A hefty donation allows him to join his friend in applying to top-tier schools and both head to Yale where different interests ensure that the friendship fades. Later, Nick has a luxurious place to stay in New York City for a summer job and a professional job waiting after graduation. Entitlement, followed by self-awareness and shame, contribute to distance with his father and estrangement with his mother.

The third and final section is the story of May, Lily's mother, who fled China and yearned to improve the human experience but loses her daughter in the process. In her eighties, she observes Nick, envying his youth and ability to start anew. “People once looked at me the way they look at him, with open and interested faces. It was that way for me, before.” 

Grandson and grandmother connect in San Francisco and May recalls her plans to flee the brutal restrictions of Mao’s China. May had two options – to leave with Ping, the man she loved by swimming away in the night, evading patrols, or accepting passage on smuggling boat with a graduate student who long admired her. Calculating the odds of success, May chooses the latter plan, setting off with a man she does not love for the United States. Ambition takes priority over love. “In America, my ambition, like a flame had only grown. I had hoped for more time in this country – this place with its abundant promises. Without time, ambition is worth nothing. It is only frustration. Time was what I wanted, more than anything.” 

May accidentally becomes pregnant and is not close with her daughter, Lily, other than imposing her own ambitions on the child. May is disturbed when eight-year-old Lily gives her a watch for Mother’s Day. “In Chinese, giving a clock is bad luck. It suggests the end. In giving a clock, you’re reminding someone of the reality, the eventuality, of their time running out. My daughter, the American girl – of course she didn’t know.” 

May’s expectations for Lily are high. Her constant reminders that the girl is gifted and superior cause the child's self-esteem to wither. With so much of her life behind her, so many relationships in ruins, the many “what ifs” trouble May. Repeatedly, May chose career over love. “No, it didn’t make much sense, that I despised and thought so highly of myself at the same time. How tangled it all was! The more I hated myself, the more I needed to prove my extraordinariness.” By doggedly seeking immortality, resenting any interruptions to her career, she ensured self-isolation. “Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions – that I had been wrong about life, entirely.” 

With old age, she reflects, the “future shrinks with each passing second.” She no longer minds time rushing onward and instead relishes the present, however limited. “All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.”  

The three narrators learn that wealth does little to cure loneliness, and all reconnect at the end. The story is about parental expectations and feeble attempts to shape children. The title prompts many questions about who are the “real Americans” and how people can create meaningful lives or reject such endeavors, refusing to respect others, especially one's children, who might create meaning in other ways. Lily, Nick and May each display self-reliance even as curiosity and individuality reign.