Books

"Carry the One"  by Carol Anshaw.

A very good book.  Dense, intense, funny and painful.  A group of friends, some family, some just along for the ride, are unfortunately linked together by a fatal automobile accident (this happens in the first five pages so I am not giving much away) that continues to have repercussions for 25 years.  The real thing about this book is that the characters are all fucked up in their own ways, some in big ways, some in small, and even if that accident had not occurred, their lives would have still been complicated and sometimes sad.  At times infuriatingly self-absorbed, each person is fleshed out as much as the character allows that to happen.  While the writing is intense and sometimes the characters are intensely obtuse and self destructive and  deliberately stubborn to a fault, there are enough of them to find one or two that the reader can like.  In other words, they aren't all assholes.  Just a couple of them.

But the writing.  It's so lovely. It is difficult to skip along in this book because each sentence, every paragraph is important.   Here is a short paragraph about Amsterdam.  The streets along the water slipstreamed with bicycle traffic.  Men in suits, women in loose skirts, their purses dangling daintily from the handlebars.  A musician with a cello strapped to his back.  Parents with toddlers in rigged-up seats, front and rear.  A woman with her dog in a box cantilevered out over the front wheel.  There were no stop signs so the mix of traffic - the bikes, but also cars, motorcycles, delivery vans, pedestrian tourists five abreast - disbanded then reassembled itself at each intersection, in this or that nick of time.  Alice thought she might be able to be happy here in an interestingly sad way.

Or this, as an adult son sees his mother on the other side of a Metro track:  He stood watching her out the window. 
He saw that she was looking up, her thoughts broken by the noise.  If she had looked through the window of the train, she might have glimpsed his huge, crazy love for her, before he recalibrated his expression, turning down the volume to what was bearable in the give and take between them. 

Or this:  She was losing her belief in the possibility of changing people.  It wasn't so much that they were in opposition to her or that they held their own beliefs so strongly.  Rather, they appeared to have lost interest in belief itself, as though belief were tennis or French film.  And this was so discouraging Carmen had to put a lid over the abyss or risk falling in.

In some ways Anshaw reminds me of some of Jane Smiley's works, like "A Thousand Acres" where you read something and you simply put the book down and pause, then read it again.  The story here is not always happy but it is worth the work to read it.  It's new.  The library has it.  Check it out.