Written by Anne Tyler

I’ve been thinking a lot about Liam Pennywell over the last few days. Wondering how he’s getting along. Whether he and Barbara will be spending any holidays with the kids over the next months …

That’s what Anne Tyler does to me. She introduces me to a character like 60-year-old Liam, then his daughters, and his ex-wife Barbara, and his sister, and Eunice — the much-younger woman he starts seeing — and they all become part of my life. I think Tyler must somehow channel her characters; her masterful use of dialog and description can have me laughing out loud or tearing up in a moment.

Yes, Tyler has done it again, in her 18th novel, “Noah’s Compass” (2010). We meet Liam Pennywell at the end of his last year of teaching fifth grade — he’d been “excessed,” not fired. He wasn’t sorry to leave. “Teaching wasn’t what he’d been trained for. His degree was in philosophy.”

In a burst of enthusiasm about the need to economize and simplify the solo life he was leading, he left his roomy apartment in an established part of town and rented a little one-bedroom across from a shopping center near the Baltimore Beltway. (As Anne Tyler fans know, her characters almost always hail from Baltimore.)

After an exhausting day of moving, instead of awakening in his brand new bedroom, Liam finds himself in a hospital and is informed that an intruder gave him a concussion. His complete lack of memory about the incident plagues him so he consults a neurologist hoping for a breakthrough. The doctor has little to offer but reassurances, yet that visit changes the direction of Liam’s life. In that office he meets Eunice, the assistant to a big-time land developer with dementia — Liam likes to think of her as a “rememberer.”

Through a rather-convoluted plot device, Liam pursues Eunice, and she becomes part of his life. “People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper baskets; they stepped on their own skirts.” She has her faults, but she makes him smile.

Since the assault, Liam’s three daughters involve themselves more in his life. True to form, Tyler draws them beautifully. Xanthe, the oldest with “her social-worker clothes, matronly and staid,” is shrill and judgmental towards her father. Louise, in the middle, is married to a fundamentalist Christian and is active in the Book of Life Tabernacle. Kitty, a good-natured 17-year-old, moves in with Liam and comes out with the keen observations and bluntness that only a teen can offer a parent.

In a scene with Liam and Louise’s son, Jonah (as in Jonah and the Whale), we learn where Tyler’s metaphoric book title comes in. The boy is crayoning in his “Bible Tales for Tots” coloring book with Liam when the grandfather explains that besides all the pairs of animals in the arc, Noah carried a sextant and a compass to keep him afloat.

This is a lovely book, not as well received as most of her others, but one that may touch your heart as it did mine. 

I’m downright dizzy from the hours I’ve just spent with young Ernest Hemingway and his appealing wife, Hadley, in the apartments and cafés of the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s. It’s exhilarating! One day we’re listening to Gertrude Stein tell Ernest to stick to strong, declarative sentences and another day we’re watching Ernest and Ezra Pound sharing barbs over glasses of absinthe.

Of course, that’s exactly why I picked up Paula McLain’s novel “The Paris Wife” (2011) — to transport myself to the City of Light during the Jazz Age when the most creative young minds were drawn into that melting pot of ideas and innovations. McLain says, “Interesting people were everywhere just then. The cafes of Montparnasse breathed them in and out, French painters and Russian dancers and American writers.”

Hadley Richardson was the first of Hemingway’s four wives and perhaps his least known since she was with him from 1921 to 1926, before his fame. McLain chose to use Hadley’s voice for her novel after reading “A Moveable Feast,” Hemingway’s account of those years where he admitted, “I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.” Through Hemingway’s works and the volume of correspondence between the young couple, McLain discovered a young man quite unlike the outspoken, cocky man that most of us are familiar with.

Ernest was just 21 when he met the unmarried 28-year-old St. Louis native in Chicago. At that point he was not a published author but was a strikingly handsome young man with ideas and talent that were being noticed. The two had a brief, long-distance courtship and married in 1921. Hadley was eager to experience a bigger life and enthusiastically sailed to Paris with him that December to start their life together.

In McLain’s capable hands, we see the struggling young writer as a kind, even tender husband who values the warm, playful Hadley. They have little money but an exciting life surrounded by people who take them under their wings. Hadley is aware that she is less stylish, less accomplished than other women in their group, but she understands that he needs someone like her with strong values to anchor his energy, drive and talent.

Although Ernest is angry when Hadley becomes pregnant, the birth of their son, Bumby, seems to cement their relationship, and the threesome alternate time in Paris and Austria. Yet as Ernest’s work gets attention, the accompanying whirlwind of parties and Cote d’Azur vacations with the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, eventually unravel the marriage.

The seductive setting of “The Paris Wife” is only a part of its appeal. The writing of Paula McLain is so beautiful and smart that she will have you eagerly follow this couple through the good times and bad.

The story is set in Czechoslovakia during the 1920s and ‘30s at the time of Hitler’s rise to power throughout Europe. “Historical novel” is far too limiting a description for this wonderful book. Mawer fills out his story with perspectives on art and design, Modernism, scientific study and classical music. He is also masterful at painting a portrait of a marriage that is strained by infidelity as well as events outside of the pair’s control.

The narrative begins when a privileged young couple decides during their honeymoon to build their dream home. The new husband is Viktor Landauer, a successful automobile maker of Jewish descent. He and his bride, Liesel, want their house to reflect a new spirit that is emerging in Czechoslovakia during the relatively stable ‘20s. They commission an architect, Rainer von Abt, who calls himself “a poet of space and structure,” to design a home for them on the side of a hill overlooking their town.

They all agree upon a house that will reflect the modernist view of “form without ornament.” So the architect builds a place characterized by space and light, glass and metal. The largest glass-walled room is on the lower floor. It is captivating space; guests to the couple’s new house gasp when entering it.

Mawer writes about the partygoers at a gala held there one night. “They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all are ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sign of the tempest that is coming.”

When Hitler’s army marches into Austria, the fear felt by the Landauers becomes a reality. Things change quickly for the couple and their two children. Viktor’s Jewish background propels him to devise a plan of escape for his family. Mawer follows their drama in haunting short chapters. The abandoned house is used by the occupying powers over the next decades.

I would compare Mawer’s writing to the work of a gifted cinematographer. He creates scene after scene so vividly that they have a powerful emotional impact. Trust me. You will want to talk about this book for a long time.

Written by Hillary Jordan

When I looked at the title of Hillary Jordan’s “Mudbound” (2009) on my book club list, my heart sank. It sounded like the last book in the world I’d like to read during the excessively wet spring we’ve had, but I grudgingly picked it up.

Yet in spite of the book’s boggy setting, Jordan delivers a satisfying first novel by bringing together a colorful cast of characters living in the Jim Crow south just as World War II ends.

The appeal of Jordan’s tale rests in her ability to reveal how the larger picture of the time (the mid-1940s) and the place (a small town in rural Mississippi) affect each and every person.

Six of her characters take turns narrating the story.

Laura had been a 31-year-old teacher who felt doomed to spinsterhood when she met that “rare and marvelous creature, a 41-year-old bachelor” and married him. Since Henry was a “college man” she was shocked to learn that he bought a farm, but as a dutiful wife, she follows him to the Mississippi Delta, worlds away from her comfortable Memphis home.

When the story begins, they are raising their two little daughters in a dilapidated home on the farm.

Hap and Florence are black tenant farmers living and working on Henry’s property with their two girls and boy.

Florence is the local mid-wife who works most days in Laura’s house. She knows that a “soft, city-bred woman like Laura” isn’t meant for life in the Delta, so she exerts power over her employer.

Their older boy, Ronsel, returns to the small town after serving in the 761st Black Panther battalion that General Patton had called into action in Europe. His experiences with the more accepting Europeans make it hard to fall back into the submissive role demanded of him in the town.

Henry’s younger brother, Jamie, also returns from the war to stay for a while with Henry’s family. The once light-hearted young man is changed dramatically after serving as a bomber pilot over Europe. Their shared war experience draws Jamie and Ronsel together.

Yes, “Mudbound” is about getting stuck. Getting stuck on a farm that’s so rough compared to the comfortable urban life you left. Getting stuck doing hard labor for someone who knows less than you. Getting stuck in a town where those in power hate you. Getting stuck with memories of what you were ordered to do in a war.

Mud turns out to be a powerful metaphor.

Written by Helen Simonson

After many false starts, Helen Simonson finally discovered the winning ticket to writing her first published novel. She tells an interviewer she put aside her early efforts at an edgy sort of book that people might expect from a 30-something woman and sat down instead to write the kind of book that she would love to read. That book is the impressive “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” (2010), set in her homeland of England, in a small town in Sussex, populated by an assortment of aging characters and the younger generation who drive them crazy. It’s cozy and light reading but surprisingly satisfying.

I don’t want to suggest that she followed a formula for a flowery “English village” novel. That would not take into account Simonson’s lively sense of humor and the fact that she assertively sets her story in the England of today. It is populated with greedy developers, effete aristocracy and nouveau riche wannabes. The village of Edgecombe St. Mary is also a place that is struggling to accept immigrants into its ranks, a battle that Major Pettigrew finds himself in.

The story’s protagonist will capture your heart. Major Pettigrew is a proper gentleman in his late 60’s with a dry wit and a compassionate soul. As the story opens, the major has just received a call informing him of the sudden death of his brother, Bertie. He hangs up the phone, only to hear a local shopkeeper knocking on his door. It is Mrs. Ali, the Pakistani proprietor of the convenience store, there to collect money for an ailing paperboy. The major wavers with the shocking news he’s just heard; Mrs. Ali fixes him a nice, hot cup of tea, and a friendship begins.

Mrs. Ali and the major, both widowed, realize they share a love of literature, and the two start meeting for tea to discuss great works. Readers are aware that there is romance in the air but the major is sensible and well mannered and doesn’t dare presume anything. His first profession of affection comes one day when he says, “‘I am delighted that we have progressed already to a level of …’ He searched for the right word, recoiling from ‘intimacy’ as if it were sticky with lust. ‘A level above mere pleasant acquaintance, perhaps?’”

Edgecombe St. Mary is a perfect place to settle down in for a mid-winter read. You’ll want to see if in fact love does conquer all, for there are many obstacles for the major to overcome. Simonson’s wise and witty way of treating issues of prejudice, love, aging, friendship and honor provide laughs and maybe even a few tears along the way.

Joyce Maynard. Just her name conjures up so many images for me that my curiosity impelled me to pick up her recently released paperback, “Labor Day.”

In the 1980s Maynard wrote a syndicated column, “Domestic Affairs,” that I, as a new mother, followed religiously. Her daily reports of life in rural New Hampshire with her artist husband and their three young children charmed me — walks in the snow, hand-knit mittens, pies in the oven and such. Maynard continued to publish details of her private life, even during the less-idyllic following years when she and her husband went through a bitter divorce.

In 1997, she told the readers of Self magazine about a botched breast enhancement operation that she later reversed. Yet most intriguing, that same year, Maynard revealed publicly that she had left Yale as an 18-year-old student to live with the 53-year old J.D. Salinger for nine months after the reclusive writer pursued her by way of a lengthy correspondence he initiated. She recounted details of that time in her memoir, “At Home in the World.”

“Labor Day” is Maynard’s fourth novel and is narrated by 13-year-old Henry, who lives alone with his emotionally fragile divorced mother, Adele. On the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, the two head off to the Pricemart for back to school clothes. While flipping through magazines, Henry is approached by a man wearing an employee shirt sporting the name Vinnie. His clothes are disheveled and a tear in his pant leg reveals an open wound. The man quietly checks that Henry is in fact with the good-looking woman who is browsing in another department, and he asks the young man to give him a hand. The stranger who introduces himself to Adele as Frank is looking for a place to rest and recuperate. “Sometimes you just need to lie low for a bit,” he tells them.

Henry recognizes that for most people, this might signal trouble, but for the achingly lonely mother and son, this signals a chance for something that may shake up their world. So they lead the man to Adele’s car and head for home where they stay for five days.

In spite of this disquieting set-up, readers will find some surprising twists and turns. A story that first feels like a thriller becomes a complex and appealing story of relationships among three vulnerable people. The plot elicits from its characters a full emotional range including lust, betrayal, friendship and jealousy.

The storyline is not believable to some readers and reviewers, who ask, “What woman would take a troubled stranger into the home she shares with her child?”

And to no one’s surprise, Joyce Maynard, a woman who has taken chances and made risky decisions throughout her life, replies to her critics, “I would.”

Correction

The “guest author” pictured with last month’s “Reader’s Choice” column was misidentified. The photo was of Betty Hafner’s dog, Augie.

Written by Garth Stein

I wanted to give this writing business a try because some guy named Garth Stein, who wrote a couple of books, let a dog tell the story in his newest book, “The Art of Racing in the Rain.”

It seems like it’s some big deal! My owner, Betty, wouldn’t put it down and take me for a walk when she was supposed to, and lots of times she laughed so loud she’d interrupt my nap. Then, when I was trying to get back to sleep, she’d yell to Will, the big guy who lives with us, and read something out loud that this dog said, and they’d both laugh.

The dog’s name is Enzo and if you ask me, he sounds like a real show-off. He said something insulting I can’t get over: “Everyone knows that shepherds and poodles aren’t especially smart. They’re responders and reactors, not independent thinkers.”

Then my poodle blood boiled when I heard he said, “They’re clever and quick, but they don’t think outside the box. They’re all about convention.”

Just because he’s half terrier, he thinks he’s from some superior gene pool!

I, myself, can’t read, because without opposable thumbs (one of Enzo’s big gripes, too) I can’t hold a book. So everything I’m telling you comes from what Betty read out loud.

This Enzo is an old guy, ready to kick the bucket, when he tells the story of his life with his owner, Denny, who is trying to be a professional racecar driver. Before Denny’s wife, Eve, and their kid, Zoe, came along, Denny and Enzo watched all kinds of racing videos together. Denny explained all kinds of things to him about what it takes to handle the problems a driver faces.

In racing they say a car goes where the driver’s eyes go, so Enzo makes a big deal about that, like, “Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny.”

If you ask me, that dog spends way too much time watching television. Once when Enzo was a pup, he saw a show on the National Geographic Channel about people in Mongolia and how they revere their dogs because they think the dogs come back as humans after they die. That gave Enzo the idea that he should learn as much as he could so he’d be ready for his next life. He works hard at it. He says, “Here’s why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak, so I listen very well. I never interrupt. I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own.”

I guess some important things go on in Denny’s family because when Betty was reading the end of the book, I had a really long wait for my walk. It must have had something to do with a courtroom because Enzo had to tell the story based on “established legal practices as [he has] gleaned from various television shows, most especially the ‘Law & Order’ series and its spinoffs. …”

Geez. Television again.

“Balance, anticipation, patience,” Enzo says again and again. It’s something Denny taught him about racing, and I guess somehow it helps Denny in the mess he’s in. All I know is that when Betty put the book down, she had drops of salty water rolling down her face. 

Betty Hafner, Augie’s owner, will return to Reader’s Choice in October.

During a Christmas shopping trip to a mega-bookseller in 2003, I noticed a display promoting the newly published “1,000 Places To See Before You Die: A Traveler’s Life List” by Patricia Schultz. It brought to mind an old Life magazine story I loved as a kid about a man who, as a 14-year-old, listed the things he wanted to do during his lifetime and then methodically checked them off over the years. His list included things like “become a doctor” and “be a father,” but also “see Victoria Falls” and “climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.”

The notion of taking an active role in planning life experiences appeals to me now as much as it did then, so I bought myself a Christmas present.

When I brought the chunky book home, I checked to see which local places were included. Schultz mentions only two spots in Maryland — the Chesapeake Bay communities of St. Michael’s, Easton and Oxford and Obrycki’s, the family-run crab lovers’ restaurant in Baltimore. Her choice of that atmospheric eatery in the residential section of Fells Point convinced me that she knew what she was talking about, and I was hooked.

At times, I can spend hours looking through its pages to see whether she includes some of the places I have loved over the years. I was pleased to see Route 66 through New Mexico, the Adirondacks town of Lake Placid, and California’s Monterey Peninsula to name a few. Internationally she agreed with me about spots like the coastal town of Biarritz in France, the Canadian Rockies and the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland.

But I was surprised not to see a blurb about Portland, Maine, and the charming coastal towns east of it or more mention of the quirky, laidback towns of Florida’s west coast.

The book comes in handy when I’m thinking about trips to new destinations, with Eastern Europe topping my current list. Schultz’s descriptions are so wonderfully detailed. She has introduced me to many spots I’d like to include some day, like the spa town of Carlsbad in the Czech Republic about which Goethe said, “I feel as if I’m in some paradise of innocence and spontaneity.” When in Budapest, I’d love to have a meal in the elegant Gundel restaurant or in its popular but more cozy sister restaurant next door, The Owl’s Castle.

This book certainly brings out the adventurer in me, so just for fun, I closed my eyes, opened the book randomly and pointed. Now I need to warn my husband that one January day (the suggested visiting month), I might pack up my bag and head out for Tromso, Norway, 1,084 miles north of Oslo, to watch the northern lights. Sounds good to me.

Written by Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey has explained how “Eva Moves the Furniture” (2001) came about again and again, because interviewers invariably ask her about its genesis. The story is quite unlike anything Livesey has written before or after. Her book, after all, concerns a young woman growing up in Scotland in the years around World War II
who is frequently visited by two ghosts. They periodically appear to her as helpers, but they also can meddle in her life when things don’t please them. Her explanation of the roots of the book and why it took her 12 years to finish is a great story itself.

As a child Livesey lived with her parents at the edge of the Scottish Highlands at the boys’ boarding school where her father taught geography and her mother was the school nurse. Livesey’s mother, Eva, died of cancer when the daughter was just 2 1/2. Livesey grew up hearing stories about her mother, but the ones that always sparked her writer’s imagination were those concerning her mother and the bothersome ghosts that came banging around the school infirmary at night.

“Them again!” Eva is said to have exclaimed as she straightened the room back up each time.

One day, the adult Livesey was getting a ride to the train station with her mother’s friend, Roger, who told her about the day he visited Eva’s office and saw a woman in a dark raincoat quickly leave. When he asked Eva who the stranger was and why she left in haste, Eva laughed and showed him that the door the visitor had used was screwed shut.

A light bulb flashed in Livesey’s mind. Her story ideas could have specifics about how poltergeists move around our world. Livesey got on the train that day, jotted down this very title, and began a draft of the book and the long process of research.

In the novel, Eva McEwan is a motherless child who lives in Troon, Scotland, at a boys’ boarding school with her father, David, a teacher, and her Aunt Lily who cares for her. Eva’s mother, Barbara, had died immediately after giving birth to her when a formation of six magpies was observed out the window, indicating a death would take place.

When Eva is 6 years old, two ephemeral beings, an older woman and a freckled girl with braids, appear to her. The much-loved but lonely little girl likes to think of them as her “companions” who come in and out of her life. As a young woman, Eva becomes a nurse serving in the war effort and then makes the safe choice of a husband who becomes a teacher in a boys’ school.

I found that knowing the story behind the book is an enrichment; we understand that the novel is one writer’s attempt to explore the world of a mother who was taken from her so early and to feel closer to her. Yet Livesey’s story is filled with moments of tenderness and love that all readers can relate to.

McCann’s seventh book is a breathtaking work — an appropriate description for a novel that is centered on a truly breathtaking event that took place on August 7, 1974, when the pixie-like Frenchman, Philippe Petit went back and forth across a wire strung from one of the World Trade Center towers to the other. Petit stunned the crowds by running, dancing, even hopping from one tower to another before his arrest.

Yet the Irish-born McCann, now a New Yorker, did not want to focus on Petit’s feat — an author’s note refers readers to Petit’s own book “To Reach the Clouds” (2002). Rather, as McCann immersed himself in the history of New York during the mid-‘70s, he tells interviewers he found he was more interested in the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, “ones who walked a tightrope just one inch off the ground” during those tense times. The city was going bankrupt, the Vietnam War soldiers were returning and the racial conflicts in the Bronx were out of control.

McCann telescopes down to tell the stories of 10 New Yorkers starting on that summer day. What McCann accomplishes so masterfully is the way in which each story has its own tone, it’s own language, yet they become so gracefully entwined as he proceeds. The first story, a gritty one, features Corrigan, an Irish street priest who lives in the deteriorating South Bronx and devotes his life to helping the prostitutes who work the streets below his barebones apartment; yet the next story involves Claire, a wealthy Park Avenue matron who is entertaining a group of women she met through a newspaper ad for mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. That same day a young, married pair of artists with their bodies still full of cocaine from the night before drive into the city and on the FDR Drive are involved in a small accident with huge consequences.

It’s beautiful to watch how effortlessly McCann connects these people’s lives. A book that begins so powerfully ends the same way, with small, beautiful acts by ordinary people bringing light into the lives of others.