Is This Tomorrow/Caroline Leavitt: Reflections

We in the Land of Facebook have a strong affection for Caroline Leavitt, that New York Times bestselling author, that Sundance worthy scriptwriter, that well-regarded critic, that teacher, that bloggess. Her generosity sweeps in all directions. When she interviews writers for her meaty CarolineLeavittville, you can tell that she's read the book, engaged with the book, wanted the book to succeed. When she's up in the late night or the early AM working or angsting or thinking about chocolate, she messages out, lassos us in, makes us part of her story.

You cannot possibly be a lonesome writer if your world has ever swept up against the world of Caroline Leavitt. She builds community. She knits us together.

To her books—novels that care as much about the characters as they care about the plot—Caroline transports her giant soul. I was a big fan of Pictures of You (read my thoughts here on Caroline's talent for creating intimacy with the third person voice) and so was the rest of the world.

Is This Tomorrow, Caroline's newest, instantly compelling tale, is trademark Caroline all over again—characters that walk straight out of real life and edge-of-your-seat plot. This time the story begins in the 1950s. It features a divorced Jewish mom, her son, Lewis, and his two across-the-street best friends. One of those friends will go mysteriously missing early on. The accommodations the characters make to keep moving forward in the wake of the tragedy will never be enough. The truth, when it is found out, will eventually snap the characters straight out of time and back toward the dark.

Ava, the divorcee with the fine legs and the almost (almost) unwitting seductive style, will, in time, come to take pleasure from baking—and selling—pies. Her hands are the right temperature (chilly) for the crust. Her enthusiasm for diverting from known recipes into uncharted flavors serves her well. The happiness she derives from doing that which she chooses to do—and begins to do definingly well—is the happiness, I suspect, that Caroline hopes for us all.

A few words from one of my favorite scenes:

He took a bite and then looked up at her, as if he were taking her measure. She saw the surprise in his face, the pleasure. "Cloves," she whispered into his ear. "Nutmeg." He took another bite and another and soon finished off the whole piece. "Is there more?" he said and she laughed.

And she laughed. As might we all.

On another note: just one more day in the Handling the Truth giveaway.... Memoir makers, this is for you.

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In which I am asked questions by the brilliant Caroline Leavitt

A few days ago, Caroline Leavitt, the extraordinary, award-winning novelist, hilarious Facebook chronicler, and truly generous soul asked me questions inspired by her reading of Dangerous Neighbors.  I had to clear the grateful tears from my eyes before I answered.  Please visit Caroline's site (where many authors are featured; you should be visiting anyway) for the conversation in which I answered, among other things, stunning questions like this one:

The novel meditates on what it means to have “dangerous neighbors” or to feel lost in a new country (or new way of being) where everything is so rapidly changing. There is also the sense that Katherine wants ownership of her sister in terms of loving her. She wants to keep that world small, even as the world around her--and her sister's world--are expanding. In the end, despite the losses in the book, Katherine actually finds surprising connection and hope. (There’s a spectacular few scenes of her carrying a stranger’s baby all over the Centennial.) Even though this novel is set in 1876, the whole idea of dangerous neighbors is remarkably current to me. Would you agree or is this simply my own interpretation speaking?

And please read here, for my thoughts about Caroline's upcoming novel, Pictures of You.   

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Between Shades of Gray/Ruta Sepetys: Reflections

If I brought just one ARC home from the BEA—the glorious The Report (Jessica Francis Kane)—I was to have traveled home with two ARCs from the ALA convention.  The first, Caroline Leavitt's Pictures of You, did in fact make it into my bag.  The second, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, was delivered to me at the Egmont USA booth by a fashion-runway-worthy Jill Santopolo, only to be snatched by an eager reader when I oh-so-briefly turned my head.  I had to wait until yesterday, when another copy of the ARCs arrived by mail, to read this book that Jill had loved so much.  It had made her cry on the train, she said.  She had thought that I might like it.

She was right, as Jill so often is.  Between Shades of Gray is an important book—a story that captures the terrifying deportation of a Lithuanian family by the Soviet secret police.  Along with tens of thousands of others, 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother, and her educated, lovely mother are packed onto trains and sent toward the bitter cold of Siberia; their father, meanwhile, is sentenced to a prison-camp death. What will survival look like?  What will kindness look like?  Who is to be trusted?  The losses will be great; in an author's note, we learn that more than a third of all Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were killed during Stalin's ruthless genocide.  Goodness, however, also prevails, for Lina is strong and she is faithful—losing and gaining, falling in love, making a record of the life she is living through drawings and words.

Simply and compellingly told, endowed with an honorable and serious purpose, Between Shades of Gray is the sort of book that wakens new knowledge in its readers.  Knowledge of a terrible time, absolutely.  Knowledge about the great capacity of the human heart:  that, too.  

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Pictures of You/Caroline Leavitt: Reflections

Lisa Zeidner is not just a beloved writer and essential, smart critic; she's a teacher who has created, at Rutgers-Camden, a place for aspiring writers to burrow in and learn.  I had the pleasure of spending this past Friday with her and among the students of her summer writers' festival; we dug in deep.  Among the many questions that surfaced over our time together was:  How is writerly intimacy achieved by way of the third-person voice?

Saturday evening, alone at DC neighborhood bar where popcorn was a bonafide (and much-ordered) menu item and my salad was wholesome and good, I began to read a book that I've been thoroughly anticipating—Caroline Leavitt's ninth novel, Pictures of You.  Pictures won't be released from Algonquin until January 25, 2011, but that doesn't matter; it's been buzz material for several months now, deservedly so.  It's a story of collisions—a story about an accident on a fog-bound road.  One woman survives.  One woman—a wife and mother—does not.  Accidents are eruptions.  They splinter and derail.  They split the flesh, they burst the heart, they leave lives and strangers raw and entangled.  Leavitt brilliantly captures all of this, placing an asthmatic, camera-toting child at the center of it all, and twisting our readerly expectations.

Many have written about the head-on, page-turning quality of Pictures, and I stand with the chorus; those driving by the Washington Plaza Hotel and looking up to the ninth floor last evening would have noted a light burning bright in an insomniac's room.  That would have been me, barreling through—marveling at the story but also (and here we return to our beginning; I have not forgotten) wishing that I'd had Leavitt's book by my side when the Rutgers-Camden workshop question arose:  Intimacy?  Third person?  How?

Caroline Leavitt, I'd have said.  Exhibit A.  For in Pictures, Leavitt, writing close-over-the-shoulder third-person, gains readers access to the inner-most thoughts and histories of some truly interesting characters.  It's never done for show, never done just because Leavitt can.  It is done to advance the story, to entangle the protagonists, to make plausible and absolute the seismic earth upon which the whole is grounded. Look, for example, at this:

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain.

Leavitt understands the telling power of the artfully chosen detail—the Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain, in this instance.  She avoids vapid generalizations, takes no short-cuts, enables us to see not just the things themselves but the ways in which these things are mulled and reconstituted by those who must remember so that they can live forward.  She lets us know what her characters yearn for ("she yearns for cities where people don't make you feel there is something wrong with you because you live there year 'round.") and how those yearnings have been seeded.  Character is story, Leavitt proves again and again.  Suspending our disbelief.  Putting us (right) there.

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