RECENT READING
Oh William! By Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Oh William!, is a winner. Those who have read the earlier novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, will be acquainted with the main character. Lucy is a successful writer and William is her ex-husband. She left him some years ago after he had a string of affairs, and she then married David, who recently died. Despite their divorce, she and William have remained in touch, partly because they are the parents of two grown daughters. The novel is all in Lucy’s voice as she reflects on events in their marriage and the people they have both known.
Lucy often feels she is invisible and doesn’t find it easy to relate socially. When William invites her to travel from their homes in New York City to Maine to visit an unknown relative, she accepts.
Lucy is a somewhat strange person, and William is not always accessible to her as she ponders and dissects both their present and their past interactions. It’s a novel about marriage and what we might not know about our spouse or him about her, written with a delicacy and truth that shimmers on the page. Highly recommended!
My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes
Quiara Alegria Hudes is a playwright (In the Heights) who grew up in the Puerto Rican barrio in North Philadelphia. When asked what her first language was as a child, she might reply that her family communicated physically by touching, dancing, and hugging more than by words. If with words, then Spanish was dominant and English secondary.
It was a close-knit family with numerous cousins to play with and various aunts freely offering advice. When her parents split up, Quiara visits her father on a farm on the Main Line and then later in his home in a more upscale Philadelphia neighborhood. She frequently moves between her Puerto Rican home and a whiter richer world. Supported by her mother, she has the chance to go to a magnet high school and then on to Yale. Leaving her cousins behind, she again confronts cultural differences and a divide between her ethnic upbringing and that of her more affluent classmates. But she is persistent and successfully completes a major in music. Some years later, she is accepted into Brown University’s creative writing program. The head of the program is a marvelous mentor and provides Quiara a personalized list of books tailored to fill in gaps in her reading.
The early chapters of this memoir are intense and dense with Spanish phrases and references to Puerto Rican religious and spiritual practices. And yet, Hudes’ use of language and her colorful analogies reward the patient reader. I found the later chapters more accessible and reveled in one on the treasures of Yale’s Sterling Library. This is a challenging read, but worth the effort!
I received this book as part of my subscription to BookBrowse with the understanding that I would contribute questions and comments to the online discussion. It was the first time I’ve done this and meant that I read a work I might not otherwise pick up.
READING LIST FOR 2022
Here are some of the books I intend to read in the next several months. All are novels except for King’s book of short stories and the Lady Bird Johnson biography.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (reading now for my book group)
The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier (bestselling French novel)
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King
The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (book group title)
Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia Sweig
Leaving Coy’s Hill by Katherine A. Sherbrooke
The Northern Reach by W. S. Winslow
The Rent Collector by Camron Wright (book group title)
