Category: Literary Arts

While I was excited to read Jodi Picoult’s newest book, The Book of Two Ways, it turned out to be less enjoyable than I had hoped. Although it is a masterful piece of writing, for me, the death-centric subject hit a little too close to home during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact found myself avoiding the book and even starting another book at the same time. (Gasp!! I do not usually read multiple books at once.)

Death permeates nearly every page of The Book of Two Ways, and though this may be cathartic for some, it had the opposite effect on me. The novel centers around Dawn Edelstein, a death doula (a job described as like a birth doula, but “at the other end of the life spectrum”), and the divergent paths that her life could have taken. Readers learn that years in the past, she had been a doctoral candidate in the Yale Egyptology program, but she did not complete her degree. The story line alternates between past and present, and in the present-day, she finds herself caught in what could have been. Her dissertation was going to be on The Book of Two Ways, an ancient Egyptian text that is “the first known map of the afterlife.” As a result, there is no escaping the endless theme of death in either of the two storylines. However, what I think finally put me over the edge was a guided death meditation that Dawn completed with one of her clients she has as a death doula. Described in excruciating detail over multiple pages, readers contemplate what it feels like to die alongside the characters. Perhaps my futile desire to avoid this death-talk was all too human (Dawn aptly points out during the meditation that “not a single sentient being – no matter how spiritually evolved, or powerful, or wealthy, or motivated – has escaped death”), but it is the truth, nonetheless. The writing was excellent and the theme important, but I just was not in the headspace to appreciate it.

On the other hand, however, I did enjoy the book’s rich details that engross readers in its world. For one thing, reading The Book of Two Ways whet my appetite to learn more about Egyptology, and though some of the specifics in the book are fictional, many of the facts are real. Additionally, Dawn’s husband, Brian, is a physicist, and this leads to crash-course summaries of the multiverse, electron spin, and Schrödinger’s cat, all of which become instrumental to the plot.

Though I did not personally enjoy reading The Book of Two Ways, it is still a skilled piece of writing that I probably would have appreciated more in non-pandemic times. Indeed, if the quality of a book is measured by the amount of time that it haunts readers’ minds after it has been completed, I was still thinking about The Book of Two Ways for days after I had finished it.

Though Ann Patchett’s novel The Dutch House tells the story of a brother and sister, Danny and Maeve, the real star of the story is the titular estate of their early childhood. The descriptions of it are lavish: the Dutch House “was a singular confluence of talent and luck,” and “seen from certain vantage points of distance, it appeared to float several inches above the hill it sat on.” Its front windows “were as big as storefront windows and held in place by wrought-iron vines.”

In fact, the house takes on a sort of mythical quality as the novel progresses, both in the mind of the reader and in the minds of Danny and Maeve. For the two characters, it comes to represent both an idealized version of the childhood that was taken from them, as well as their mutual hatred of the woman who took it from them. The Dutch House was originally purchased at the end of World War II by Danny and Maeve’s father, marking the beginning of his real estate empire. He was not an affectionate man – according to Danny, “the only thing our father really cared about in life was his work: the buildings he built and owned and rented out” – but he thought the house was wonderful. Danny and Maeve’s mother, on the other hand, felt entrapped in this grand home that once belonged to the since-deceased VanHoebeeks, and she left them when Danny was too young to really remember her. Later, their father was remarried to a woman named Andrea who already had two daughters. The pivotal event of the story, however, is that when Danny and Maeve’s father died, Andrea kicked them out of the house. Danny was still in high school, and Maeve was left to be his guardian, and neither of them had any claim to the Dutch House or any of its contents. The only thing left to them was an educational trust fund, which Maeve strategically drains by forcing Danny to go to medical school.

Though it is by all indications a work of historical or realistic fiction (the story inches closer to modern-day as it follows the siblings through adulthood), the enormous character of the Dutch House makes it read almost like a tragic fairy tale of sorts. It is a place of pain and a place of memories, and it nearly overshadows those of the living characters. The Dutch House’s mythical quality is reinforced by Danny and Maeve’s longstanding ritual of sitting in a parked car on the street in front of the house. It takes the whole story for readers to understand the relationship between the house and the two siblings, as well as the relationship between Danny and Maeve. I will not spoil the ending here, but I will say that the novel comes full circle at its conclusion.

The Dutch House is an engrossing novel of loss, relationships, and loyalties, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for something thought-provoking and enjoyable to read!

To baseball fans, MLB’s annual spring training is almost romantic. After a long winter without baseball, spring training finally marks the sport’s return.

Emily Nemens’ novel The Cactus League digs into the darker side, the hopefulness of baseball’s spring training replaced by a cast of characters all struggling in their own way.

The book reads less as one overarching story and more as a series of interconnected character studies. Each chapter focuses on one person connected with the Los Angeles Lions baseball team during its spring season in Scottsdale, Arizona. Each story stands on its own but focuses on a central thread: how the divorce of star player Jason Goodyear happened. Goodyear’s fall from grace is revealed bit by bit from the perspectives of those around him before finally telling it from his perspective.

The Cactus League is a baseball novel that clearly understands baseball. The game scenes are realistic, and more importantly, the book has a good grasp on baseball’s social scene. Many who have a connection to baseball are part of the story — the aging batting coach, the high-powered agent, the rookie fresh out of college, the “cleat-chaser,” the baseball wives. Each character has a vice and all are somewhat unlikeable, yet their individual arcs were compelling enough to keep me reading.

I was able to figure out (for the most part) what was going on with Goodyear halfway through the novel. It was unclear if that was the intention or not and the heavy-handed foreshadowing did detract a bit from the intrigue. That said, the character development for the other characters was strong enough to stand on its own.

Overall, The Cactus League was a good read that transported me back to the spring training we missed out on this year. I love character-driven stories so it was really interesting to get inside the heads of a wide variety of characters. At the same time, I wished some of the explorations had been deeper. While the idea of class and what it means to be rich, poor or somewhere in between was observed at length, many of the characters also had preconceived notions about race and gender that I felt were left unexplored. Some of the characters were racist or sexist or problematic in other ways. I didn’t have a problem with that in itself — people in general are often racist or sexist and that shouldn’t magically change in a book — but given the depth with which class was explored, I wanted to see more in the other areas as well.

While most of the book felt only loosely connected, the ending to The Cactus League was the payoff. It brought together many of the characters from the earlier stories and showed how in the cactus league, everyone’s lives were affected by the others and everyone had a different piece of the story. Not every character had their arc resolved, but the ending was a provocative conclusion to the main spine of the story.