I have occasionally fantasized about what my dog might say if she suddenly became able to talk. I imagine that she would reveal that she has a deeper understanding than we humans do of everything she has observed during her lifetime.

A variation on this scenario, involving a feline, was executed marvelously by the Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki  in I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru), and David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle does an outstanding job with the canine point of view.  In the latter vein, there is also The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein, which is narrated by a very perceptive dog named Enzo. If you love dogs or car racing or both and need a brief, light entertainment, read this book.

Stein skillfully ties Enzo’s astute observations to a compelling plot. However, his attempt to extract a Buddhist-like philosophy from the human protagonist’s extraordinary ability to race cars, especially in the rain, becomes a bit heavy-handed at times-- or perhaps it just feels as if it was contrived with too close attention to what might appeal to the most book buyers and sellers. Nevertheless, the story’s heart is in the right place, and if you are in bed with a cold or your spirits are a low, this is just what you need to get through. 

Julia Glass is amazing! Since the publication of the National Book Award-winning Three Junes in 2002, she has cranked out three more novels, most recently The Widower’s Tale. Although I was not as impressed as many were with Three Junes, its 2006 sequel, The Whole World Over, enchanted me with its descriptions of a character running a bakery and the achingly poignant sections written from the point of view of a woman who has suffered slight brain damage. Then in 2008 came the very impressive and quietly affecting I See You Everywhere, which explored the lives of those left behind by a suicide.

Now we have The Widower’s Tale.  As in her other books, Glass tells this story in chapters that alternate the point of view among several characters, but what is astonishing here is how convincingly true each voice rings despite the huge range among them in terms of age, class, and other key characteristics. At moments the pomposity of the voice of the eponymous widower almost verges on caricature—would anyone alive today, even a retired Harvard University librarian, begin sentences addressed to his female offspring with “Daughter”?—but we soon understand that this affectation is a necessary part of the armor that he has donned to cope with the hand he has been dealt by life.

But what makes Glass a master of her craft is her ability to make the possessors of these unique voices come together as actors in a plot that makes you rush to turn to every next page as soon as possible, while at the same time feeling regret in advance as the dwindling number of dots at the bottom of the e-book reader screen indicate that the story will be ending too soon. The hints about how the destinies of characters will collide are such that there is a moment when the reader might think, scornfully, that the plot twists are too obvious, but just as in “real” life, there are plenty of surprises in the details.  

I read two really great books this past week. What they had in common was beautiful writing that conveyed a deep understanding of and compassion for this dilemma called life, as well as the kind of page-turning suspense you'd expect from the best mystery. But in every other way--setting, characters, style--they were as different as could be. William Trevor's Love and Summer, which takes place in the Irish countryside, centers on the life of a young woman who, after her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage, is sent to be the maid to a widowed farmer. I surveyed reviews of it after reading, to see if it was as appreciated as it deserved to be, and was relieved to discover that there was considerable angst when it was long- rather than short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

It's hard to write about Scott Spencer's Man in the Woods without giving part of the plot away, so suffice to say that it is set in the northeast United States in our time (around the year 2000) and delves deeply into the question of how and why we live. But far from being heavy-handedly philosophical, Spencer keeps you guessing, until the very last page, how these questions will be resolved for one man and his makeshift family--himself, a woman, child, and dog.

"Found in Translation," Michael Cunningham's New York Times op-ed piece of Sunday, October 2, begins with insightful musings on the translation process but quickly plunges into the heart of the matter to discuss writers, readers, and creativity. You must read it all, but here's a sample sentence: "We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. . ."

Here I go again, making my first entry in close to a year! I’m sure I won’t be able to remember even books that, when I read them, I thought were among the best I’ve ever read (I admit that I award a lot of books that distinction, but it’s how I feel at the time!), but I will do my best. Instead of struggling to find an interesting enough variety of superlatives to distribute among the many candidates, I’ll simply list some of the best.

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (you need to read this twice or more to get everything, but it is so worth it!)

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Anna Quindlen, Every Last One

Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (I finally read it, after intending to for so long! A friend tells me that the six-part BBC dramatization is also wonderful. I enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Trollope so much that I started another one I’ve never read before, Can You Forgive Her?)

Margot Livesey, The House on Fortune Street. I happened upon this after attending a wonderful event at Symphony Space. Margot Livesey, Jennifer Egan, and Siri Hustvedt had a public discussion entitled rereading Middlemarch. (Which I did, and of course loved all over again.) Apparently these three novelists had done a similar event previously to great acclaim. I had read nothing by any of them beforehand, and Livesey’s is the only one I have read since, although I have since picked up used copies of Egan’s Look at Me and Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American at one of the best local events we have in our vicinity, the Desmond Fish Library book sale in Garrison, New York. (We increased our book collection by twenty-odd volumes for twenty dollars and change once again.) Anyway, the three women are each different in the way they think about literature and express those thoughts, but with very light touch moderating by Egan the discussion proceeds smoothly and stimulatingly. The audience comments and questions are interesting as well—you feel as if you are at the meeting of a very large book club on the Upper West Side. Next spring they are doing Anna Karenina!

(I have since read the Jennifer Egan book Look at Me, and I’m not sure I can recommend it. That is, I do recommend it for its literary style and storycraft. Very highly, in fact. But the story is extremely disturbing and bleak.)

A friend introduced me to a great new mystery writer this year, and I’ve already read all six entries in Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler series, which is all there are until the new once is released this month. Yes, they’re that good. As is always the case with really good mysteries, it’s not the crime detection that makes the books. In Hill’s case, it’s the characters and the setting. The stories take place in a small English town, where Simon Serrailler not only investigates difficult murder cases, he also maintains a relationship with his sister (they are two of triplets), who is a general practitioner in the town. Simon has disappointed their doctor father by being the only child who did not go into medicine, and tensions between parent and child continue. Hill’s books are populated with an amazing array of people in addition to the fascinating regulars, however, so that even as you are dying to know what is going to happen, say, with yet another woman who Simon is about to disappoint with his inability to sustain an intimate relationship, you soon become distracted by some other situation that captivates you just as much. And it turns out that before writing these mysteries, Susan Hill was highly respected for her literary fiction in England. Frustratingly, her many “straight” novels are not easy to find here at all. My own Bobst Library at NYU doesn’t even have many of them, despite having a couple of books of criticism about them. (I’m going to talk to our English literature selector about rectifying this!) The Westchester public library system has precious few as well. I just finished one that was available, called The Bird of Night. It is amazing and intense. Just after World War I, a scholar meets a famous poet who suffers terribly from manic depression. The former puts his own career and life on hold to take care of his mentally ill friend, who refuses medical help of any kind. Hill’s depictions of the poet’s psychological vicissitudes are devastating, and of course having read the mysteries it is interesting to relate his character to some of her very disturbed murderers. Strange Meeting, the other Hill title that I was able to find, is the best war novel I have ever read, because the war is not what it’s about. It is simply one of many backgrounds against which the realities of our emotional lives can be rendered as literature, waking us up to things that we are unable to see when we are in the midst of them. The plot is deceptively simple—two men meet as soldiers during combat. It’s a pity that these books are practically unknown and unobtainable. Someone needs to write one of those New York Times Book Review pieces urging the rediscovery of Hill’s nonmystery work.

A British author who the Times doesn’t neglect as badly is Jane Gardam, thankfully. Her Old Filth is everything this back-cover blurb says: “Excellent and compulsively readable. . . .Gardam’s novel is an anthology of bittersweet scenes, rendered by a novelist at the top of her form.”

Last month I participated in a weekend writing class at Omega led by Marge Piercy and Ira Wood (her husband of three decades). Wow! I was able to tell Marge that I had reviewed her amazing novel Gone to Soldiers in the late 1980s for the now-sadly-defunct women’s newspaper Sojourner. She knew the paper, though not my review, I imagine. Anyway, it was a terrific class that attracted some very talented people. The couple teaches the class every year at Omega and some other places, too, and it shows in the smooth way they run it, making every minute of the weekend count for the participants. They even set up a private wiki afterward so that we could continue sharing our work, but unfortunately people don’t seem to be doing it, as so often happens. It seems that no matter how good a writing retreat is and how enthusiastic the people are at the end of it, when they get back to their real lives, it is too hard to fit it in. Also, I think that sharing things in print is more intimidating for most of us than doing so aloud. If you’re interested in writing, Piercy and Wood have published the course in book form as So You Want to Write, and it’s excellent. The appendix has an excerpt from Wood’s novel Kitchen Man, which is absolutely uproarious--and poignant at the same time. Obtainable, but you won’t find it in your local bookstore or even many libraries, nor in e-form, although I did ask them both their feelings about e-books, and they said that in principle they are happy to make their stuff available in any possible form.

Marge’s memoir Sleeping with Cats is available as an e-book. I loved it and think that other women, particularly, who lived through the sixties and seventies would find it as interesting as I did. I also read the thriller that they wrote together, Storm Tide, and I’m sorry to say that it just doesn’t work. It’s puzzling, because the writing is really good, and it seems like the plot has potential, too, but something is wrong with it that I can’t articulate. I’ve been meaning to look at reviews to see if someone else has.

As I continue to try to practice fiction writing and look ahead to writing my PhD dissertation, I’ve been looking at some books about the psychology needed to both get one started writing on a given day and keep coming back to the project with as little angst as possible. I found David Boice’s How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure a valuable book of this genre and a lot of fun to read. He leads successful workshops designed to instill the writing habit, and the book is an attempt to let people get the experience in print. It has many, many quotations from participants in his classes, perhaps a few too many, but reading them made me feel less isolated in my struggles. I’ve just begun another book that approaches the topic from a different angle and is very promising so far: Ellen Langer’s On Becoming An Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity. In contrast to much of the reading I do about Buddhism, Langer believes that you can cultivate mindfulness without a dedicated meditation practice. She is an experimental psychologist and backs up her claims with evidence from the lab. Her writing is clear and to the point, as in, “We seek perfection and get frozen by the thought of our imperfection. This is ironic in that the outcomes we seek are more likely to come to our imperfect selves.”