Review: Run (&c.)

Last year (maybe at Christmas?) Alex gave me Ann Patchett’s novel Run. Inspired by Alex’s example, I shall blogify it. And my love for Patchett’s fiction, in general. Short version? It’s awesome.

Run is the latest in a string of books by an author whose work I find frankly amazing. Her first book, The Patron Saint of Liars, about a woman who takes her husband’s car and drives to the middle of nowhere and starts a new life (kind of like a dissociative fugue, without the fugue part), was kinda-sorta Oprah-ish and Lifetime-Network-ish in its subject matter; despite that strong handicap, I loved it for its unique style. Patchett’s stories never go exactly where you think they will; the protagonist in PSOL isn’t an abused wife, isn’t even visibly unhappy in her marriage; in fact, that issue never really gets resolved, in a traditional sense — another favorite trick of this author.

Patchett’s voice is unlike anyone else’s, although I feel I’ve encountered some imitators since I started reading her books.

Her second novel, Taft, is my favorite, so far. It’s the story of a Black bartender in Memphis, a former blues drummer and all-around bad boy who treated his girlfriend poorly until she had his son, after which he became a devoted father and husband, which seemed to cause her to pull away from him. Now, he lives day to day with no life except his bar and waiting for any word or contact from his little boy. A young White brother and sister from the Appalachian region of the state shows up in his bar, the boy obviously a teenaged druggie and the girl struggling to play Mom to her brother. She takes a job at the bar after lying about her age, and proceeds to become very confused about whether she’s interested in the protagonist as a sugar daddy or just a regular type daddy, while the protagonist does his sexually-frustrated best to resist the advances of an attractive young woman flinging herself at him repeatedly. This interesting web of relationships unfolds, poignantly and sometimes painfully, over the context of race and class issues and the protagonist’s repeated (and wonderfully subtle) alternating moments of clairvoyance about the drug-addict brother’s relationship with his deceased father before he came to Memphis, and his own son’s life in Florida, to which he has little access, thanks to his sometime-wife.

Taft is followed closely in my favorocity (so very closely) by Bel Canto, in which an internationally-renowned opera singer, for an extravagant fee, visits a South American nation (kind of like Uruguay, perhaps, though this is never stated) to sing Happy Birthday at a private concert for Mister President and assorted corporate, national, and regional dignitaries, and promptly gets held hostage, along with everyone else in the presidential mansion, by leftist guerrillas. Weeks then unfold inside the walled compound, surrounded by the military, menaced by the sometimes-cruel, sometimes-sympathetic captors, with the background of daily vocal rehearsals by the opera singer and a young rebel with a newfound talent for music. Anger, frustration, political tensions, etc. play with the feeling that this is a paradoxically pleasant, carefree island in the storms of many character’s lives. The concerts, the official meetings, the weeks hiding in jungles, and other stresses are suspended during the crisis as everyone does a forced nothing, day after day, listening to celestial music and consorting with the movers and shakers. While guns are pointed at their heads and they wonder every night if they’ll wake up or not, the next morning. As everything gets all Stockholm-syndromey, and hostages and hostagers find each other’s humanity, you know it’s not going to end well.

The Magician’s Assistant, another lovely book, starts with a wife dealing with the aftermath of the death of her David-Copperfield-esque (the magician, not the Dickens character) husband. In short order we find out that she, his faithful assistant and best friend, was in love with him since forever, and that he had been gay for approximately that same timeframe. She had married to him to keep his public appearance up and forestall awkward questions about what, exactly, he was doing in all those bars with  neon rainbows in the windows. On his death, in her grief, she finds out that his life story was not what he’d told her it was. Not even close. The journey she embarks on, to reconnect with her own past as well as to uncover his, is about sexuality, family ties, sacrifice, personal narratives, and identity.

Finally, Run. A politically-ambitious Irish American boy in Bahstun marries another faithful Catholic girl, both with flaming red hair, amid matrilineal tensions over the ownership of a beautiful Irish Madonna statue that’s been in the family for a buncha generations. They have one boy, then the lovely wife dies, but not before adopting two Black brothers. The three boys are raised by father alone, while he becomes the Mayor and then not so much, with a satisfying cluster of parental and filial failures and disappointments, especially for the biological son (though the story is perhaps most centrally about the avoidantly-attached elder son, whose passion is ichthyology, of all things).  There is a backstory for a chapter or two, and then there’s a wrap-up at the end, but between epilogue and prologue, in stark contrast to other Patchett novels, the action unfolds within roughly 24 hours. The well-off family of males, all adults now, collides with a parallel world living only a few blocks away in the public housing projects when a woman none of them seems to know pushes the aspiring ichthyologist out of the path of a racing SUV, saving him and sending herself to the ICU. Her ten-year-old daughter, like an unwanted-then-highly-cuddled kitten, goes home with the family (who can’t bear to send her to Social Services), just for the night, to predictably illuminate and modify the latent family structure, which isn’t predictable at all.

The themes are strong and gorgeous: politics, parents’ aspirations for their children versus the children’s aspirations for themselves, wrenching personal loss, and family ties. An overriding issue is the intertwined stress and interchangeability between the biological and emotional varieties of family bonds. In fact, the whole book could be seen as an exploration of the limits of what “family” can mean.

One of the best things about Patchett is that she seems to trust her readers (me, anyway) just enough. She doesn’t write so obscurely that I’m left consulting literary critics to find out what the book “meant,” but she also doesn’t force-feed meanings or interpretations to her audience. She weaves the themes, and lets them stand alone for her readers. Reading the books is like eating a strange but compelling meal, complete with sudden moments of bitterness and foreign flavors. At the end, I’m satisfied, though sometimes a little confused, until I think about it for a while. There’s plenty to revisit, and the books invite second readings (which I’m going to get to, eventually). Notably, and unlike some “good books,” the act of reading is inherently self-reinforcing. Her books are page-turners, more like Steinbeck and Austen than Melville or Bacon.

Another great thing about Patchett is how she does tension. She builds it subtly, so that even when you know a release is coming, it catches you off-guard. I’m a big softie, so it’s no surprise that her books make me cry. This one got me around page 200. The thing I love about that is the way she makes me cry: it’s never during a schmaltzy love scene or a tearful farewell (which, thankfully, she seems to avoid); it’s when someone makes a meal, or when a woman makes eggs benedict in North Dakota, or when a boy sings a song, or when a young man stops to watch a young woman run around a track.

Anyway, the book is good. Read it.