Dance Lessons by Áine Greaney

Published by Syracuse University Press on April 11, 2011 

Dance Lessons is a story of hidden truths and unspoken memories.  The interwoven stories that comprise Dance Lessons begin with Ellen Boisvert, a child of French Canadian parents, and Fintan Dowd, an Irish immigrant working illegally as a Boston bartender.  They meet and marry and are near divorce when Fintan dies in a sailing accident.  At the novel’s center, however, is Fintan’s mother Jo; from her story all the others radiate.  Jo takes stoicism to a new level; she prides herself on bearing pain and misfortune. It is “bitter sacrifice that forms the core, the credo of Jo Dowd’s very existence.”  Jo sacrifices her future to wed a man chosen by her parents, a man who can live on the family farm and do the chores her aging father can no longer handle.  She sacrifices companionship when her loquacious sister moves to the city, leaving her husband and parents to settle into a “deep silence, a silence that seems to have a life of its own.”  Unable to tell Fintan that she is proud of his scholastic achievements, filled with resentment of the woman he loves, she sabotages his happiness and sacrifices the bond between parent and child.  Sacrifice has warped Jo Dowd, and that is the condition she is in when Ellen finds her -- a condition magnified by the cancer growing in her lungs.

At one point in the story, a character wonders what “terrible, awful thing” he would have to do to make his child “deny his very existence.”  That is ultimately the question Ellen seeks to answer.  After Fintan’s death, she learns that his mother is not dead, as he had always claimed, and she travels to Ireland to find Jo.  She says she wants to put her husband’s ghost to rest, but it’s never clear why she believes meeting Fintan’s mother will help her achieve that goal.  For reasons that are again unclear (particularly given her decision to end her marriage), Ellen wants to know why Fintan kept his mother’s existence a secret.  The trip to Ireland seems like a contrivance designed to introduce the reader to Jo, but that is a minor complaint given the compelling story that follows.

The narrative ultimately comes full circle, beginning and ending with Ellen.  Along the way, it jumps between the past and present:  between Jo’s deteriorating relationship with Fintan and Ellen’s discovery of the events that caused their estrangement.  We see parallels as the twin stories develop:  similarities in the behavior of Jo toward Fintan and of Fintan toward Ellen; the absence of family connection, evidenced in Jo’s household by silence and in Ellen’s by meaningless conversation at holiday dinners, family members “making noise -- words to while away the hours until everyone retreated back to his or her own world.”  As it tells these twin stories, the novel branches into other lives that have been touched by the tragedy of Fintan’s upbringing.  At some point the novel starts to read like a literary mystery, with Ellen trying to piece together Fintan’s relationships and tease out the cause of his estrangement from Jo.

Apart from Ellen, there aren’t many significant characters in Dance Lessons a reader might like.  The novel’s strength lies in its ability to make the reader understand and even empathize with unlikable people.  Ellen comes to know her husband and in so doing, comes to terms with his death, with their failed marriage, and with her grief.  In some respects, the ending, starting with a chapter that is almost an epilogue and continuing to the actual epilogue, seems false, out of synch with the rest of the novel, as if Áine Greaney felt a need to bring the storylines to a “feel good” conclusion that would please readers after exposing them to such sad and difficult lives.  At the same time, the pre-epilogue ending offers additional insight into Jo, jolting the reader with another small shock.

There are moments when the beauty of Áine Greaney’s prose dominates all else:  gently rhythmic sentences, descriptions of sights and sounds and smells that stimulate the reader’s senses.  At other times the hushed drama of futile hopes and despairing lives prevails.  Greaney makes subtle changes in the narrative voice as the novel shifts from rural to urban, from the United States to Ireland to England, from older characters to younger ones.  Both in prose style and in content, Greaney crafted a mesmerizing novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom

Published by Picador on March 29, 2011

I knew Gin Toad was a character I would like when, newly arrived in Wyalkatchem, she meets a woman who pats her shoulder, telling her that it's good luck to touch an albino, and Gin responds by tapping the woman and saying "Maybe it's good luck to touch an idiot." Gin doesn't often give voice to her sharp humor but she's nobody's fool, despite being committed to an institution before Toad married her. Toad can barely look at Gin and rarely touches her. Although they feel no passion for each other, she bears his children (losing one to diphtheria) while wondering whether Toad views her as just one more sheep to be bred.

Gin and Toad live on a remote farm in Western Australia. Their hard lives are made more difficult by the shortages created by World War II. Toad is ugly, coarse, uncommunicative, lacking education and refinement, yet he is fundamentally decent, possessed of a hidden depth and secrets that, like Gin's, are deeply buried. Both characters are isolated not just in their location but in their personalities. Both yearn for something they cannot have and dare not dream about.

Gin's stultifying life is transformed by two Italian prisoners of war, placed in Toad's custody as farmhands. The boisterous nature of the Italians is in sharp contrast to the withdrawn silence and studied indifference that defined Toad before their arrival, and it is inevitable that one of them awakens urges in Gin that have long been buried. At one point in the novel the Italian Antonio has to remind Gin that he is a prisoner, but he seems less a prisoner than Gin, who is imprisoned by her appearance and her past, caged by the expectations and perceptions of others. Gin's albino eyes are nearly blind in bright sunlight, but her emotional blindness is a greater disability.

The Paperbark Shoe is a remarkable novel, a multifaceted story of love and desire, war and prejudice. Townspeople are cruel to Toad because of his appearance and unschooled behavior, to Gin because of her albinism, to the Italians because of their heritage. Moments of unexpected humor keep the story's heartbreaking sorrow from becoming overwhelming. Goldbloom's sentences flow in an exquisite rhythm. Her word choice is impeccable. Each character speaks with a distinctive voice. It was clear as the novel progressed that the Italians would change the lives of Gin and Toad, but even knowing that, their lives changed in ways I didn't see coming. Although I didn't want the novel to end, the powerful ending is satisfying, rich with feeling, offering the hope of redemption as a respite from despair. Because of the story it tells, the characters it brings to life, and the beauty of its prose, this is a book I highly recommend. It apparently did well in Australia; it deserves a worldwide audience. 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

Published by Random House on March 8, 2011

By the time she is thirteen, Natalia has taken so many trips with her grandfather to visit the caged tigers that she feels like a prisoner of ritual. Then a war hundreds of miles distant breaks the ritual: the zoo closes, curfews are implemented, students are disappearing, and spending time with her grandfather seems less important than committing small acts of defiance: staying out late, kissing a boyfriend behind a broken vending machine, and listening to black market recordings of Paul Simon and Johnny Cash. When her grandfather is suspended from his medical practice because he is suspected of harboring "loyalist feelings toward the unified state," Natalia adopts new rituals that keep her at his side when he isn't paying clandestine visits to his old patients. In return, he takes her to see an astonishing sight that offers the hope for an eventual restoration of the rituals that made up their pre-war lives. Natalia's grandfather tells her that this is their moment: not a moment of war to be shared by everyone else, but a moment that is uniquely theirs.

The Tiger's Wife is filled with wondrous moments, small scenes that assemble into a novel of power and wisdom and beauty. As an adult doctor delivering medicine across new and uncertain borders, Natalia grieves for her deceased grandfather while recalling the lessons he taught and the stories he told -- stories that more often than not center on death: how it is faced, feared, and embraced. Death is everywhere in this novel: death caused by war, by disease, by animal and man and child. And there is death's counterpoint, a character who cannot die (or so the grandfather's story goes). Death is virtually a character in the novel, as is the devil -- although the devil's identity is somewhat obscure, appearing as someone's uncle in one of the grandfather's stories, suspected of wearing the guise of a tiger by others. The tiger, of course, is a force of death -- feared by many, but not by the tiger's wife, who shows us that fear is unnecessary. Ultimately, coming to terms with death is, I think, the novel's subject matter.

Téa Obreht writes with clarity and compassion. She tells the interwoven stories that comprise The Tiger's Wife without judgment or sentiment. Her characters are authentic; with only one or two exceptions, she doesn't go out of her way to make them likable or sympathetic. Nor does she ask readers to hate characters who commit evil acts, although she wants us to understand them. She does not insist that we either condemn or condone the actions of a wife-abusing butcher. Instead, she gives us a chance to comprehend human complexity, to know that there is more to the characters than their offensive or violent actions. The village gossips, knowing nothing of the truth, judge both the abuser and the abused. Obreht shows us how foolish it is to judge others without knowing them ... and how unlikely it is that we will know enough to judge.

Obrecht writes with the maturity and confidence of an accomplished novelist. Her style is graceful. It is difficult to believe that this is her first novel. If she continues to produce work as sound as The Tiger's Wife, readers should wish her a long career. 

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Dogfight, A Love Story by Matt Burgess

Published by Doubleday on September 21, 2010

Dogfight, A Love Story was a love story for me in this sense: I loved reading it. The novel is fresh, very funny, occasionally morbid, and always energetic. It is the product of a very talented writer. In its setting and characters it reminded me of Clockers (a book I greatly enjoyed) minus the cops and with added humor, but the writing in Dogfight is of a higher quality. Burgess' writing style is exactly right for a literary crime novel: sharp and zestful and evocative. The dramatic climax (coming just before an ending that is essentially an epilogue) is frenetic, explosive, intense: powerful stuff that made me utter an involuntary "wow."

Dogfight follows Alfredo Batista during the days before and after his brother Tariq (f/k/a Jose Jr.) is released from prison. While Tariq has been serving his sentence, Alfredo, a small time drug dealer in Queens, has taken up with Tariq's girlfriend, who is now pregnant with Alfredo's child. Worried about his brother's tendency toward violence, Alfredo wants to give him a homecoming present. To that end, he engineers a robbery from a Russian street dealer -- a poor decision that will soon lead to unexpected trouble. He also tries to arrange a dogfight, despite never having seen one (dogfights not being the competition of choice in Queens).

Matt Burgess does a masterful job of merging the plot-driven demands of genre fiction with the character-driven sensibility of literary fiction. Some readers won't like Alfredo or some of the other characters because they commit crimes. But even readers who generally want to read about morally pure characters might find Alfredo to be worth their time. He's imperfect (aren't we all?) but he isn't thuggish. Despite doing something during the novel's course for which he will probably never forgive himself, he has a conscience and he experiences some personal growth, if not full redemption, by the novel's end. In any event, all of the central characters in Dogfight have distinctive, fully realized personalities. It is easy to understand their actions even if the reader might disapprove of them. At least to me, they were all interesting, filled with credible emotions, self-doubt, yearnings, regrets -- all the stuff that makes us human.

Finally, lest you be alarmed by the title, be assured that no dogs were harmed in the writing of this novel. This is a work of fiction, after all. Speaking as someone whose best friend is a golden retriever, I can safely predict that most dog lovers will recognize that this novel does not glorify or glamorize dog fighting. Quite the opposite, in fact. Animal lovers should not avoid this excellent book because of its unfortunate title.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Blood on the Forge by William Attaway

First published in 1941

Blood on the Forge tells the story of three brothers: Melody, who finds the music in every place and situation; Chinatown, who finds the humor; and Big Mat, a relentless worker who studies the Bible and tries to find an elusive inner peace. They work as sharecroppers in Kentucky, accustomed to poverty and racism, until circumstances brought on by Big Mat's quick temper compel their move to Pennsylvania, where they take jobs in a steel mill. Poverty is replaced by dangerous grueling labor that leaves them too exhausted to spend their wages on anything except alcohol, gambling, and whores. Racism is replaced by class division as black steelworkers join new immigrants from Ireland and Italy and Middle Europe, all viewed with disdain by those who inhabit the big houses overlooking the mill. By the novel's end, that conflict is defined by the workers' attempt to organize a union and by the owners' resort to violence to suppress that effort -- leaving the brothers caught in the middle of the conflict, and to some extent divided by it.

Although racism and class struggle are important themes in the novel, the story is about much more than that. If is fundamentally the story of three very different brothers, bonded by family ties and shared lives, but torn apart by their unique experiences. Chinatown must cope with injuries inflicted by hot steel, leaving him feeling less than whole. Big Mat must cope with his own feelings of inadequacy, his inability to give the Mexican woman who moves in with him the moneyed lifestyle that she craves, a feeling he can only overcome with the sense of power he derives from violent behavior. As he struggles to find his music, Melody must cope with the desire he feels for the woman who is living with Big Mat, and with the secret he learns about her.

Attaway tells the story from the perspectives of the brothers, using language that is eloquent in its simplicity. The story is powerful, sad and moving, unforgettable. At the end of the fast moving novel I literally said "Wow."

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED