The Crying Tree

In May 1985, 15-year-old Shep Stanley was shot and killed in his Oregon home. His killer, Daniel Robbin, was sentenced to the death penalty, and in October 2004, the Tab Mason, superintendent of the state penitentiary, received notice that the execution date had been set.

This is the basic premise of The Crying Tree by debut novelist Naseem Rakha. The book focuses on Shep’s mother, Irene, who doted on her son in life and immerses herself in grief after his death. It is only after she decides to secretly write a letter of forgiveness to Daniel that she is able to pull herself out of her despair. When Irene learns that Daniel’s execution date has been set, her feelings about the event that she had initially hoped for are complicated by the years of correspondence with him.

This novel is reminiscent of the work of Jodi Picoult, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your view of Picoult. Me, I’m indifferent to her work. I don’t mind reading it if it’s suggested for book club or the only thing available on audio at the library, but in my experience, her work is too formulaic to be satisfying. And this was also the case with Rakha’s book. I didn’t mind reading it, and I suspect that it would make a great conversation starter at a book club like mine. (We tend to focus on the issues in the books we read, rather than on the writing.) However, I couldn’t quite bring myself to care about the people in this book because they felt less like people and more like representatives of various points of view.

Rakha does do a nice job of juggling the multiple time lines present in the book. The opening chapters alternate between the days immediately after the execution date is set and the days leading up to Shep’s death. Eventually, the earlier time line catches up with the later time line, and the book follows a straightforward path to its ending. There are some secrets revealed along the way that are not altogether surprising because Rakha lays the groundwork well, but they aren’t obvious either. Unfortunately, one particular revelation turned the story into something altogether different from the exploration of the power of forgiveness that it started out to be. The element of forgiveness is still present, but the impact is lessened as the story goes on. Instead, we get to consider a completely different issue, and that issue is not handled with much depth.

The biggest problem I have with the book is with the characters. They’re just one stereotype after another. The characters who have been victimized are sensitive and thoughtful people who, perhaps, have made some mistakes that weren’t entirely in their control. The only men who are at all compassionate were beaten up by life somehow at a very early age. (Eyeroll.) Nate, Shep’s dad, is a tough, uncompromising military man who went into law enforcement and wants his son to be a tough guy like him. The members of the clergy are mean-spirited and judgmental. The women all have a little more wisdom and insight into the human condition than the men do. It’s just so darn predictable.

If you enjoy the works of Jodi Picoult or are looking for a decent book club read, you could do worse than The Crying Tree, but if you’re looking for a compelling exploration of the death penalty, you could do much, much better. Try Dead Man Walking, The Executioner’s Song, or In Cold Blood instead. Those books tell true stories, and truth is, in this case, much more powerful than fiction.

A Blogiversary Giveaway!

Last April, Jenny made her first post to Shelf Love. When I discovered that she was blogging, I mentioned that I’d been contemplating starting a blog myself and she was gracious enough to invite me to join in. So, one year ago today, I posted my first review, The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta.

Even though I’ve always been an avid reader, blogging has motivated me to read more, and it’s helped me to think more deeply about what I read. But the best thing about the blogging experience has been the opportunity to share the love of book with other. It’s been especially great fun to blog with a friend–and to make so many new friends this year. I’ve discovered so many new authors to try and been excited to point others toward authors and books that I love.

So to celebrate, I’d like to share a book with a Shelf Love reader by giving away a new copy of one of the books I’ve read and reviewed. For your chance to win, follow this link to my book list where you can find links to all my reviews. Leave a comment on this post letting me know which book from that list you’d like,* and I’ll randomly select a winner on Sunday, July 12. Worldwide entries are accepted.

Thanks so much to all our readers for making this a great year, and good luck!

*You can choose a print or audio book, but I’ll be sending you the print version. I believe all of the books I’ve reviewed are available for purchase at a reasonable cost, but if the winner happens to choose a book that turns out to be out of print and/or only available at an exorbitant cost (more than $25 or so), I may ask the winner to choose a substitute book.

Gone, Baby, Gone (film)

I read Dennis Lehane’s mystery-thriller Gone, Baby, Gone back in 2004. I was on something of a Lehane kick that year: I read all four of his Kenzie-Gennaro private eye novels, plus his standalone novel Shutter Island. The books are great — well-written, solidly plotted, with a keen sense of place and an unequalled ear for the particular dialogue of Boston, where they are set. They are not ordinary mystery novels that set a problem and then solve it, restoring order to the world. Instead, they take place on the mean streets that Raymond Chandler talks about in his Simple Art of Murder, where murder, drugs, rape, and betrayal are the norm. These novels are the new noir, where all the options hurt. The protagonists, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, are themselves Chandler’s detectives: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Gone, Baby, Gone opens with the disappearance of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Kenzie and Gennaro are called in by the girl’s aunt, against the advice of the police, who don’t want interference in their all-out manhunt. Kenzie and Gennaro, who have lived in these rough Boston neighborhoods all their lives, gradually discover that nothing (nothing!) is what it seems: the bereaved mother is a drug addict and mule, the police are shady, the family is hiding secrets, and even the detectives themselves are willing to go to terrible lengths they never suspected themselves capable of.

I admit I wasn’t expecting much of the film. The book was so subtle, so good at evoking the ambiguity of the human condition, and American film is usually terrible at that. Lehane is a master at showing us a person who is capable of terrible, despicable acts and yet is worthy of pity and capable of change. I was skeptical that this could possibly come across in the film. I was also nervous that the filmmakers might provide a happy ending, to satisfy filmgoers. Yet the work of Casey Affleck, Morgan Freeman, and Ed Harris was brilliant. The film was dark, as befitted its material, but it had its moments of wry humor. It was filmed in local Boston streets and bars, and the accents were authentic. The acting was superb, and the ending had me awake, thinking through the implications, in the middle of the night. This is no neat and tidy thriller, tied up with a satin bow, but a complex film worth watching.

The Story of the Stone, vol. 4

The editing history of The Story of the Stone is a complicated one. The main author of the piece is Cao Xueqin, who claimed to have written a work of 120 chapters. However, after his death, all the versions that could be found were incomplete, made up of only 80 chapters. Two bookseller-scholars, Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan, claimed to have pieced together fragmentary manuscripts and to have bought authentic manuscripts from a street vendor to make up the last forty chapters. Debate about this last part continues even today: does any part of it belong to Cao Xueqin, and if so, how much? Is it a barefaced forgery? An edition or annotation of earlier work, as the later authors claimed? 

Whatever it is, the fourth volume of The Story of the Stone has a distinctly different feel to me than the first three had (here you can read my reviews of volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3.) I don’t know whether I noticed because I was told there was a difference in authorship, or whether it’s owing to the different translator (John Minford instead of David Hawkes) or whether there really is objectively a difference. But despite the gripping plot developments — the death of a major character, the loss of Bao-Yu’s magical jade, an important marriage, an ongoing farcical attempt at seduction — I felt there was something missing.

For me, the main difference was in the amount of detail. In the first three volumes, every holiday, every party, every little gathering was described in loving detail: we got to see what people had to eat, what they wore, the music they heard, and heard their laughing conversation. It truly seemed like a “Dream of Golden Days” (an alternate title for The Story of the Stone), someone lovingly remembering the marvelous days of his youth. In this volume, however, an important occasion would take place, and the narrator would end brusquely, “They had festivities and plays with which our narrative does not concern itself.” But… but…

The dialogue was also in a different style (this may be a quirk of the translator) and overall I felt the whole thing was less sprightly, less quick-witted. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it; on the contrary. It’s an amazing example of an early psychological novel, and its complexity, its hints of otherworldliness and unreality and mirror-lives, are truly astonishing. Even with the change in authorship and translation, it’s a wonderful piece, and I can’t wait to finish it. Xue Pan has killed a man and his own life hangs in the balance. Bao-Chai has been married; will she be happy? Will Bao-Yu ever find his jade again, or recover his wits? Will Jing-gui get what’s coming to her? And the clouds of ill luck and foreshadowing of evil are gathering over the Jia family… It’s hard to believe there are only 400 pages left to wrap everything up in. I look forward eagerly to the last installment!

Lipstick Jihad

Azadeh Moaveni was born in the United States in 1976 to Iranian parents. As part of the Iranian diaspora community in Palo Alto, California, Moaveni experienced the pleasures and pains of being part of two cultures; however, she struggled with never quite feeling that she understood her family’s country of origin:

What I wanted, though I chose not to admit it to myself, was to figure out my relationship to this other country, to Iran. Originating from a troubled country, but growing up outside it, came with many complications. Worst of all, at least on a personal level, was that you grew up assuming everything about you was related to that place, but you never got to test that out, since the place was unstable and sort of dangerous, and you never actually went there. You spent a lot of time watching movies about the place, crying in dark theatres, and feeling sad for your poor country. Most of that time, you were actually feeling sorry for yourself, but since your country was legitimately in serious trouble, you didn’t realize it. And since it was so much easier and romantic to lament a distant place than the day-to-day crappy messes of your own life, it could take a very long time to figure it all out.

In 1999, students began demonstrating in Tehran in response to the closing of an independent newspaper. Mouveni, who was studying Arabic in Cairo at the time, decided to seize the moment and travel to Tehran and be a witness to history. Eventually, she landed a job as a stringer for Time magazine. Thanks to her Iranian origin, she would be the only American journalist allowed to base herself in Tehran.

Lipstick Jihad serves as both a personal story of Moaveni’s search for identity and an analysis of Iranian culture and politics at the dawn of the 21st century. Her experiences are at times disturbing, as you might expect, but they’re also sometimes surprisingly funny. The book is far from being unremittingly grim. Moaveni provides plenty of insights into Iranian politics and culture, which makes it timely reading right now. Her explanations of how the restrictions on women’s dress and behavior actually heighten the sexual tension in society aren’t particularly original, but she explains the contradiction well and includes several personal stories that demonstrate the likely truth of her assessment.

This book is, of course, only one woman’s story, and so it’s not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of the situation in Iran. It is, however, a good, comprehensive look at one woman’s journey to discover her home and herself. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot.

Gifts of War

At the famous 1914 Christmas truce in World War I, British soldier Hal Montgomery meets a German soldier named Wilhelm. Before the war, Wilhelm had lived for a time in England and became engaged to an English schoolteacher. Now, because of the war, he has been unable to get in contact with her and so he gives Hal his picture and asks him to find a way to let her know that he’s okay and that he still loves her. Hal agrees. Mackenzie Ford’s novel, Gifts of War, tells what happens when Hal and Sam, Wilhelm’s fiancée, finally meet. Hal is immediately smitten and decides that he must be part of Sam’s life, and he does everything he can to make her happy.

I loved the idea behind the romance in this novel. The contrast between the forbidden affair across enemy lines and the more steady, dependable love right at home makes for great romantic fiction. There are questions of what kind of love is more real, more substantial. The problem is that I couldn’t ever bring myself to root for Hal because right from the start the romance with Sam is built on deception. Sam herself is completely forthright; she makes clear how she feels about Wilhelm and why she gets involved with Hal. Hal, on the other hand, is deceptive right from the get go. Yes, he’s a great provider; yes, he’s fiercely loyal to Sam; yes, he’s completely patient with her and lets her make up her own mind. Only he doesn’t really give her the freedom to choose because he doesn’t tell her about his encounter with Wilhelm.

So I was not a big fan of Hal as a potential love, but I was intrigued by his quandary, and I wanted to know how Sam would respond to the truth. I didn’t necessarily want Hal to get kicked to the curb, but I wanted there to be some sort of consequence. I wanted Sam to be able to choose with her eyes wide open. Whom she would choose was less important than seeing her make the choice between the romantic forbidden lover and the generally honorable and always devoted man who made one serious error early on. And (Spoilers ahoy!) here’s where I get infuriated: Sam never gets to make that choice. What’s more, I get the impression that we’re supposed to see Hal’s final decisions on her behalf to be a grand romantic gesture, instead of an act that renders Sam powerless to control her own destiny. Up until the last few pages of the book, I was hoping things would turn around because if they had, I would have ended up liking (but not loving) this book, but the last two pages took all hope of a more satisfying conclusion away.

It’s a shame that the central romance is such a problem because there’s so much more about this book that makes for great reading. Mackenzie Ford is apparently a noted historian writing under a nom de plume here, and the book is packed with historical detail. Hal’s work with the British intelligence was fascinating. I’ve not read much about military intelligence, so I loved learning about how the intelligence workers scoured German newspapers to see if they could discover any patterns that might reveal something significant to the war effort. At times, Hal seemed a little too much of the boy wonder in this area, but that still didn’t take away from the work. I also enjoyed reading about Hal’s sister, Isobel, who worked as a nurse in a unit that specialized in blood transfusion, which was being widely used for the first time. Ford also explores how the war affected morality and social expectations as an entire generation watched almost all of its men and some of its women go off to war, never to return.

The novel does has some structural and narrative problems that I’m inclined to chalk up to inexperience with fiction writing. Ford has a habit of not revealing the whole of a conversation until certain facts become important. So, for example, Hal might all of a sudden know about his sister’s relationship with a man in her unit. It turns out that he found out during a conversation with his father that was actually described in detail 20 pages earlier, although that crucial piece of news was omitted. This happened several times, and it made the book feel unpolished. There are also a few too many characters; Sam’s sisters and their men, for example, were impossible to keep straight. They just kept coming and going, and only one of them made any sort of impression. These problems, however, didn’t keep me from enjoying the story and the history. It’s the ending that was the fatal flaw.

After Dark (Audio)

A 19-year-old woman named Mari Esai sits in a Toyko Denny’s at midnight, alone, reading a book. There she would have remained had she not been interrupted by a young man named Takahashi, who remembers meeting Mari with her sister, Eri, a while back. Over the course of the night, Takahashi draws Mari out of herself.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami is more of a meditation than a story. There is a plot, but it’s merely there to give the characters a reason to interact. And it’s through those interactions that we get a glimpse of these people of the night. There’s Mari, the high-achieving student; an unnamed Chinese prostitute who gets beat up; Shirakawa, the man who does the beating; Kaoru and Korugi, the women who run the Alphaville, the “love hotel” where the beating occurs; Mari’s beautiful sister, Eri, who is sleeping at home; and the mysterious man with a masked face who watches Eri sleeping.

There’s something about the night that allows people to let down their guard, and Murakami’s characters find that, in the night, they can share their true thoughts. Characters discuss their lives and loves, their fears and fantasies. They act on their impulses, and certain aspects of their natures that may be hidden in the day are revealed.

This was my first experience reading Murakami, and I loved the world that he created. His crisp, clear writing is filled with nice details that allow you to really place yourself there with the characters. It’s great descriptive writing. At times, the deep conversations about the meaning of life went on too long for me, but, really, such conversations always seem long and tedious if you’re not actually involved. And nighttime seems to lend itself to such talks, so it feels right. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Eri’s situation, but I think that’s intentional—and impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t read the book. I’ll just say there’s a touch of the surreal about it (and that’s the bit of the story that has continued to haunt me).

I’ve observed before that I tend to enjoy more plot-heavy books on audio, but After Dark is an exception. It works surprisingly well in this format. Some of that may have to do with the fact that so much of the book is dialogue. Also, at 5 hours, 44 minutes, the book almost takes place in real time.

I know Murakami has lots of fans in the blogosphere, so I’m hoping some of you can tell me how After Dark compares with the rest of his work. Any thoughts?

A Great and Terrible Beauty

In Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, Gemma Doyle is sixteen in the year 1895. She has spent her life in India, but now that she has reached the age when most young women appear in society, she longs to go to London, and can’t understand why her mother refuses to allow it. Be careful what you wish for, Gemma: in a terrifying and tragic incident — one that seems to hint at otherworldly horrors — her mother is killed, and Gemma’s father decides to take the family to London.

England is not what Gemma hoped. She must attend Spence boarding school, her last best hope to learn to be what society expects from a perfect young lady: deportment, charm, French, drawing, dancing, and most of all, the suppression of her own desires in favor of those of her hypothetical future husband. The other girls at the school are in the same predicament, no matter their family background: beautiful, vain Pippa, being married off to the highest bidder; cruel Felicity, the queen bee, whose family history is a secret; clumsy outsider Ann, the scholarship student, who can look no higher than a position as a governess.

All this, with Gemma’s grief, would be enough to contend with. But strange forces are brewing. Gemma has visions, so real she can literally touch them. A mysterious young man named Kartik pays her a visit and warns her to shut herself off from the visions, or risk terrible danger. She begins to learn about an ancient Order of sorceresses, who could harness the power of the spirit world, the living and the dead, and determine their own destinies — something of which these girls can only dream. And — is it real? — Gemma thinks she sees her mother in her vision, the only person she truly longs for. As the girls begin to discover what magic and power really bring to lives that are so bounded on every side, the book takes shape and comes to its climax.

I picked up A Great and Terrible Beauty partly on someone’s recommendation — I no longer remember whose — and partly because it has such a wonderful title. (The other two books in the trilogy, The Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing, also have terrific titles, don’t you think?) Unfortunately, the title was the best thing about it. 

One of the cardinal rules of a book in which the main character goes through difficult times is to make that character sympathetic. (You have to be very brave or very good or both to break that rule.) Gemma is whiny, immature, selfish, smug, stupidly rebellious, and ungenerous. When she has problems, we’re watching the (mostly self-induced) problems of someone we don’t even like. Another cardinal rule is that the character should have solid, loving friends to go through these problems with — think of Sarah Crewe, of the Railway Children, of Harry Potter. Instead, Gemma has frenemies, girls she constantly mocks in her mind and doesn’t like or trust (with reason, as it turns out.) She never makes a single solid connection, never makes a friend she doesn’t betray.

And as far as historical fiction goes, give it up. These are modern teenagers in ill-fitting corsets. They talk in the slightly-stilted language that means “old-fashioned,” but we have a girl who cuts her wrists so she can “feel something,” a sexually knowing ringleader who is wise to the ways of lesbians, and a whole group that’s willing to get drunk on whiskey. No doubt girls in 1895 did regret their lack of independence. But I very much doubt it looked like this.

There are also set pieces that require such a suspension of disbelief that I — who can believe in anything from Cthulhu to fairies — was laughing out loud. For instance, we had the part where a candle falls over and “instantly” the East Wing is in flames. Go on, I dare you: take a lit candle to your hardwood floor and push it over. 9 times out of 10, it will just go out. The tenth, if it stays alight, nothing at all will happen for at least 15 minutes (besides a scorch mark on your floor.) Plenty of time for even a shackled drunk blind person to put it out. And then there was the part where the girls decide a sacrifice is necessary in order for them to gain magical power, so they strip naked, like huntresses (?), and chase a deer. No doubt this was supposed to seem wild and terrible, like Athena or the Maenads, but in fact I could just picture three Victorian girls in the woods in the altogether, running after a deer, which would have completely disappeared in about five seconds. Human beings do not catch deer by running after them. The poor girls would have been rather disappointed. View-halloo!

You can probably tell that A Great and Terrible Beauty was not at all my cup of tea. Nevertheless, I did read the whole thing. I kept thinking about abandoning it, but somehow I didn’t ever put it down. I wanted to see what happened. It does have at least that going for it. And it’s been a long, long time since I read something nice and trashy. Great and terrible, indeed.

Maps and Legends

*Update at bottom of post*

I’m a fan of Michael Chabon. I’ve read several of his novels, and though only The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay struck me as having truly electric, transformative power, I have enjoyed all of them and loved some of them. So when I saw Maps and Legends, a book of his essays on reading and writing, I was more than willing to give it a whirl.

In his introductory essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” Chabon  establishes the argument he will trace in different ways in each essay through the rest of the book. He claims that entertainment has gotten a bad name — a huckster’s name, like a lounge singer in Vegas. Its original meaning, coming from the same root as intertwined, is the real essence of entertainment: a reciprocal, pleasurable relationship between writer and reader, bridging the gulf that separates us all, making a connection. Within that definition, why and how has the understanding evolved that only certain genres (for instance, the contemporary, plotless, quotidian, moment-of-truth revelatory story) are considered acceptable? A hundred years ago, our finest authors (Henry James, Edith Wharton, Faulkner, Poe, Conrad, Hawthorne, Melville, Graham Greene, etc) wrote ghost stories, adventure stories, spy novels, seafaring stories, science fiction, horror. They played with the conventions of literary fiction and with the conventions of genre: they wrote along the borderlands. And, Chabon argues, our most consistently interesting contemporary authors do the same, working in the spaces between the genres: A.S. Byatt, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Cormac McCarthy, Steven Millhauser, Jose Saramago.

Chabon uses this conceit — writing along the borderlands — to explore the work of several authors. He talks about the enduring appeal of Sherlock Holmes, discusses several comic-book and graphic-novel authors, and openly wonders about tricksters and gods in the form of the wild and dark D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. My own favorite essays (mostly because Chabon so thoroughly agreed with me) were the ones on M.R. James and Philip Pullman. I honestly think Chabon is the first person I’ve ever encountered who could so brilliantly articulate my own opinion on Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (essentially that the first installment was absolutely effing brilliant, the second was heavier-handed and disappointing, and the third was heartbreakingly prevented from being any good as a story by the author’s agenda. But Chabon says it better.) I also fully expected Chabon’s essays on his own writing to be a bit self-indulgent. In fact, they were wry, self-deprecating, and in the case of the essay on golems, both funny and touching.

This book was wonderful. I loved it in part because I happen to agree entirely with its premise: that the ghettoization of genre hurts literature. When people say “I hate mysteries/ horror/ science fiction/ fantasy/ sea stories,” I never say anything, but I wonder about “Murder in the Rue Morgue” and The Turn of the Screw and 1984 and Little, Big and Moby-Dick. As long as the writing is good and the story leads you by the hand and won’t let you go, why do you care where it’s shelved in the bookstore? But I also loved Chabon’s essays because they were well thought out and interesting. I think this selection would have something for any lover of reading. Pick it up and see for yourself.

*Edited to add:* It’s been bothering me ever since I published this that I didn’t remark on the main flaw of the book, which is that Chabon barely mentions, let alone eulogizes or analyzes, women. A.S. Byatt and Edith Wharton are given passing nods, but that’s all. Really? There’s so much he could have done in another chapter or two. Not only are there so many wonderful women genre writers working along the borderlands, like Octavia Butler and Connie Willis, but there are also prize-winning “mainstream” authors like Toni Morrison, whose Beloved is arguably a ghost story. There are also women working in graphic novels and comic books that he could have included. It’s a huge omission, and I thought it was worth mentioning that a literary world without women is not, and should not be, the norm.

In the Kitchen

You’re sitting down to dinner in a fine restaurant with a well-regarded chef who has arranged a special four-course dinner just for you. For an opening course, you’re given a selection of fine French cheeses and a lovely glass of French wine. But then the soup comes, and it’s a bowl of hot and sour soup. Even more perplexing, the main course is chicken fajitas. And dessert is cannoli. These are actually all foods that you happen to enjoy,  but the meal as a whole doesn’t make much sense. Now imagine that instead of bringing each course in sequence, the waiters bring everything at once. That’s what reading Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen felt like to me. There are plenty of elements that could work in isolation, but they don’t fit together very well.

The main character of In the Kitchen, Gabriel Lightfoot, is the executive chef at the Imperial Hotel in London. He’s hoping to start a restaurant of his own, and he’s found a couple of backers to provide the funds. His relationship with his girlfriend, a nightclub singer named Charlie, is getting serious, but his relationship with his family is complicated, and made more so by his father’s recent cancer diagnosis. With just these ingredients, Gabe’s story seems like a pretty typical tale of the struggle to balance work and personal life. Not a bad story. But there’s lots more.

There’s the hotel porter, a Ukranian man named Yuri, who has been found dead in the hotel basement. There’s the mysterious young woman named Lena, whom Gabe decides to shelter in his home. She seems to be connected to Yuri’s death, as well as to the London sex trade.  There’s the illegal activity that the restaurant manager seems to be involved in. And then there’s the changing landscape of Britain itself, which Gabe’s father and grandmother complain about incessantly. And there are Gabe’s memories of his mother’s unstable behavior, possibly attributable to bipolar disorder.

Ali’s narrative bounces from thread to thread, quick cutting from the Imperial kitchen, to Gabe’s memory of visits to the mill where his father worked, to Gabe’s worries about a meeting with his backers, to his musings about the attractions of Lena’s young body. I think Ali is trying to give readers a sense of the chaos in Gabe’s mind, but the effect is often jarring, and the narrative is hard to follow. 

There are parts of the story that I liked. The workplace comedy had potential; Gabe works with a lot of colorful characters from all over the world, but they are not well-developed. The family story has some interest, but again, it’s never fully explored. The cultural changes that time and globalization have brought could fill a whole book. And there’s lots of  gritty psychological drama involving Gabe’s inexplicable attraction to Lena. Ali’s writing is good enough to carry any one of these stories. But the book never fully commits to being a workplace comedy, a family drama, a social commentary, or a psychological thriller.

Late in the book, Gabe has an insight about himself that I think applies to the novel as well:

His mind was too restless, and he needed to get a few things straight in his head. For example, was he heartbroken about Charlie or not? The answer seemed to be sometimes yes and sometimes no, which wasn’t helpful in the least. Leave that one aside for now. What about Lena? Was he her knight in shining armor, or was he currently the last in a long list of men who had abused the poor girl? Being painfully honest with himself, he had to say he did not know. Maybe the honest answer was both. Even his career, the straight line he thought he’d walked, was twisted and looped now that he looked back on it, half hidden in the undergrowth.

There are some good books hidden in the undergrowth here, but Ali doesn’t dig in and bring out those stories for her readers to see. I like some ambiguity in my fiction, but I also like a novel that knows what sort of story it’s attempting to tell. In the Kitchen, I’m sorry to say, never chooses a clear direction, and so we’re left with a novel that, like its hero, never feels quite sure of itself.