TheBookJeanie

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams

READING WITH THEBOOKJEANIE

Borrowing the title of Kenneth Koch's book on teaching poetry to children and pairing it with Aimee Sicuro's delightfully whimsical painting - perhaps this is how a writer feels when setting free a finished book out into the world. As novelist Ann Patchett noted, "Once the book is written, its value is for the reader to decide."

With the passing of noted Southwest mystery writer Tony Hillerman, I also sadly bid farewell to Leaphorn and Chee, the tribal policemen skilled in solving complex cases that often involved intimate knowledge and understanding of the traditional Navajo ways. I pulled out an old paperback copy of The Blessing Way in which seasoned veteran, Joe Leaphorn, grudgingly takes on a new young recruit as a partner, Jim Chee. Leaphorn quickly learns that Chee has the right instincts to be a good policeman as well as being firmly rooted in the Navajo traditions. Over the many subsequent novels the two develop a friendship based on mutual respect and implicit trust that supports them through many difficult and puzzling cases as well as dangerous situations involving desperate criminals and an unforgiving landscape. Happily for me and his thousands of devoted readers Tony's daughter Anne Hillerman, herself an experienced writer of non-fiction, adopted her father's characters and set them off on another case in the recently published Spider Woman's Daughter, this one centered the near-fatal shooting of Joe Leaphorn, now retired from the Tribal Police Force but still serving as a consultant to the Tribal Police. After stepping out of a restaurant where Captain Largo held regular breakfast meetings, Leaphorn was shot as he was getting into his truck. Officer Bernadette Manuelito, Chee's wife, sees the gunman from the window and rushes out to try to apprehend him but only manages to note the details of his car as he speeds off. As the only witness to the crime, Bernie feels that she must find out who tried to kill the man who has been almost a father to her over the years and now lies near death in a coma. Although her boss, Captain Largo, prevents her from joining the investigation team headed by her husband, Bernie manages to provide key details and help Jim meaningfully piece together random bits of information based on her knowledge of Navajo legends expressed in weaving and pottery. Anne Hillerman has made a seamless transition to authorship of this series, as attentive to detail and pacing as her father, but allowing us another perspective of these characters, focusing particularly on the relationship between the husband and wife team of Chee and Manuelito. You will notice certain trademark words and phrases of the elder Hillerman in this latest novel - onlookers to a incident still are referred to as "looky-lous" - but Anne has enriched the narrative with enough of her own skillful writing style to satisfy any Hillerman fan.

I picked up Donna Tartt's latest novel The Goldfinch with enthusiasm and a positive attitude although actually lifting it off the coffee table took considerable effort. A 700-page book would be daunting for any reader but its glowing reviews had me intruigued and I was game for at least for the first few chapters. After that, I stopped complaining about the heft and carted the darn thing everywhere, mesmerized by the singular voice of the young narrator, Theo Decker, as he escorts the reader on an amazing roller coaster of a story. From the first chapter, we are there beside thirteen-year-old Theo as a terrorist attack at the Met leaves him shell-shocked and motherless, alone in New York City, and in possession of a major work of art. For lack of anywhere else to go, Theo asks to be taken to a school friend's Park Avenue apartment where he is reluctantly included in the this large dysfunctional family until his own dysfunctional father appears after deserting the family years before. Theo is carted off to Las Vegas where his father makes a living of sorts by high stakes gambling, living in an unfurnished mini-mansion in an abandoned development on the edge of the Nevada desert. This is where the novel takes on a desperate tone and the reader watches in disbelief as Theo's young life spirals out of control and the narrative becomes fogged by the effects of drugs and alcohol. Suddenly we realize that we truly care about Theo, he is our son, our brother, and as he tries to explain his behavior and motivations we silently scream at him to just run away from all this and get back on a plane to New York. But things are not as simple as that. Theo is grieving for the mother that he loved unconditionally, concealing a stolen painting that was her favorite piece of artwork, while knowing that he cannot trust his father or anyone else. His only ally is another lost boy, Boris, the son of a shady Russian contractor, who can barely recall all the places in the world that he has lived but he seems to have absorbed all the languages as he went along as well as all the street smarts that he needs. Probably Tartt's most brilliant creation, Boris is that friend that Theo needs but he is also his worst enemy at times. Years later, when Theo has finally straightened out his life and is working as an antique dealer in Manhattan, Boris reappears in his life and sets in motion a heart-stopping sequence of events from New York to Amsterdam that will certainly keep you turning those last few hundred pages. Tartt has taken the art of narrative fiction to another level with this expansive multilayered novel that will certainly stand as a remarkable literary achievement.