Miss Marjorie's Picks

     This extraordinary tetralogy (including The Solitudes, Love & Sleep, Dæmonamania, and Endless Things) interweaves a subtle thread of fantasy with historical fiction, philosophy, and a thoroughly engrossing plot to form a rich, complex fictional tapestry. Through an ingenious conceit about the malleability of history, Crowley links the sixteenth century John Dee and Giordano Bruno with a small community of people in upstate New York in the seventies.  Crowley’s formidable intelligence makes these novels a delight simply for the play of ideas, but it’s his deep compassion for his characters that keeps you transfixed to the end. With their superb dialogue, their intricate, credible psychologies, Crowley’s characters take up residence in your heart and reward you lavishly for their stay.  A masterpiece. --Marjorie   

   William Trevor’s worlds steal upon you unaware, like twilight. His writing is so subtle and spare, so deceptively simple, you find yourself enveloped in the darkening gloam without knowing when it arrived or how it caught you so completely.   

    Love and Summer works in this way, building quietly, dish by carefully washed dish, to its surprising, deeply moving end.  Trevor makes you care about every character in this novel, gives each his moment in the sun. Though the events seem to march inexorably into the encroaching dark, it’s the darkness of day’s end—redolent of longing and regret, to be sure, yet retaining some faint glow of waning light.  It’s this light and the small moments of redemption born within it that rescue Trevor’s fiction from being depressing.  Like twilight, Love and Summer leaves you with a sense of fullness, an afterglow of inexpressible beauty.  --Miss Marjorie

Finishing John Crowley’s deeply moving, eloquent new novel felt like watching Brigadoon vanish in the mist, it had that quality of longing and loss.  The analogy fits since Crowley conjures a realm—America, WWII—of particular evanescence, one that shimmers for an instant between the bleakness of the Depression and the blandness of the sated fifties.  Abandoned by its rulers—the men off fighting the war—the work of this realm is now shouldered by women and the rest of society’s unchosen.  These are Crowley’s characters, but it’s not his purpose to rewrite history with a different set of heroes.  Rather, history forms the rich backdrop against which the strange, poignant, and frequently disturbing ways human beings find to connect with one another are set into relief.  I fell in love with Prosper Olander, and I really didn’t want this war to end.

--Marjorie