Four books

Tom Lake; The Wren The Wren; None of This is True; Everyone Here Is Lying

Two thrillers and two more serious books for you today.

First, None Of This Is True by Lisa Jewell. I really stay away from authors like Lisa Jewell because twisty-turny thrillers make me feel like I am being scammed. But I needed something to read and the first few pages were fine. This is as slick an operation as you would expect from Jewell, who is the absolute knock-out Kween of this genre. It follows two women who are “birthday twins” but very different - one is smart, media-savvy and wealthy and the other is slightly dowdy and weird. They meet in a pub on their birthday and a sort of strange mutual-obsession occurs. It was readable and perfectly okay but, like so much of this genre, also a bit silly.

As was Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena. A wayward 9 year old girl goes missing on an otherwise normal street and everyone has a secret to conceal. Again, this is well-written, without hysteria or cliché, but the plot turns on such a massive suspension of disbelief that I really did feel quite cheated, I was borderline offended that the author thinks readers are so thick that they will swallow the suggestion she is making about the way a 9 year old might behave. Anyway, whatever - it did also make the time fly by so I can’t really complain as that’s what I wanted it to do. If you need one or two days to go up in smoke, buy this.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is very brilliant and not at all silly, but does require a little more work on the part of the reader. It is set during the pandemic, but Patchett makes this device work for her in a way that I feel other pandemic novels really didn’t. We are in Lake Michigan on a cherry farm, at cherry-pickin time and Lara’s three grown-up daughters have returned to the farm to help their parents get the harvest in, as all the farm’s seasonal workers are away due to Covid.

While they work, Lara recalls her long-ago affair with a famous TV actor, (think a Tom Selleck or Ted Danson type), while she was starring as Emily in Our Town during a summer season of theatre in Lake Michigan. It works very well and is, occasionally, hilarious.

Here is Lara, talking to her three daughters:

“Do you remember when you would beg us to take you to the county fair every summer?” I wanted so much to make them understand this. “How the three of you would not shut up about the fair. The fair! Oh my god, I wanted to drown the whole lot of you in a bucket. You would needle and whine until finally we gave in. Your father and I would try to get you to come to the community hall and look at the quilts and pet the Angora rabbits but you wanted to eat chilli corndogs and cotton candy and then get on on of those god-awful rides that had been put together by three heroin addicts with a sprocket wrench, the rides that made you feel like your head was going to be launched off your neck by centrifugal force. One of you would vomit on the other two in the ride and then the next one would vomit on me in the parking lot while I was trying to clean you up and the next one would vomit down the back of Daddy’s neck in the car. And then in the morning you were all bright as daisies, begging to go back. Do you remember that?”

I laughed and laughed at that. There is another brilliant moment where the three sisters, bored, plait their long hair together in one braid, only for the mother to drop a bombshell piece of news. Patchett likens the subsequent scrabble to three mice tying their tails together only for a cat to saunter in.

It’s really terrific stuff, and the book captures very well the reasons why some would on-purpose not pursue a promising career as an actress or other glamorous type; because living quietly in nature is just unquestionably better than any other thing.

And finally The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright (so many Annes!). As it is sometimes with very grand novels, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what this is about. We are with Carmel, who is the daughter of a very famous Irish poet and her daughter, Nell. It has in common with Tom Lake some very Bad Men from whom women are unable to stay away. I find this a bit uncomfortable as I don’t like the idea that women get tangled up with Bad Men that they can’t stay away from, who treat them badly, (while you scream BLOCK HIM, BITCH! at the page), because when I was young I did this, too. I snapped out of it thank god but, you know, it did happen and it now just feels like such a monumental waste of my time and I am filled with regret.

The Wren, The Wren is all very Irish and has many poems in it, which I skipped because I am a complete Philistine and cannot S T A N D poetry except, e.g. Jabberwocky, but it also has poor badgers being dug out of their setts and cudgelled, a lot of stuff about the Liffey and young girls having their gorgeous, long plait cut off because there was a rumour they were seen walking next to a boy unchaperoned. I am quite into all this, (not the badger stuff), so I didn’t mind, but for some people this is very tedious.

Two other things: I was unconvinced by the voice Enright must adopt for modern, 20-something Nell. There is something just too twinkly, confident and knowing about Nell’s voice, even when she is carrying out acts of childish nihilism. Enright is also very capable of veering into a baffling stream-of-consciousness - for example, if a character is watching something on TV, while also thinking about something else, you will sure as hell be expected to untangle which prose pertains to the inner monologue and which prose pertains to something viewed on the TV. Like Deborah Levy, who can also be impenetrably gnomic, Enright usually wrestles her sentences back to Earth, just in time. But more than once I did think what the hell are you on about, mate.

How about you? Read any good books lately? They don’t have to be new. Please leave a comment in the handy box below.