Literary Fiction | Book Chatter

The End of the Day
By Bill Clegg
Gallery/Scout Press, 9781476798202, September 29, 2020, 320pp.

The Short of It:

I was super excited for Clegg’s new book after loving Did You Ever Have a Family, but I had trouble connecting with these characters.

The Rest of It:

Blurb from the publisher:

A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn’t seen in forty-nine years.

A man arrives at a Pennsylvania hotel to introduce his estranged father to his newborn daughter and finds him collapsed on the floor of the lobby.

A sixty-seven-year-old taxi driver in Kauai receives a phone call from the mainland that jars her back to a traumatic past.

Here’s the deal, this is a novel but it reads like a collection of interconnected short stories. I was mildly interested in each of the characters but I struggled to find how they were all connected with each other. It took a very long time for me to see the common threads. But, Clegg’s writing is often very thought-provoking so even though I struggled with the story itself, I still found myself enjoying individual sections. It just never came together for me as a novel.

I had very high hopes for this book but with the pandemic and my current state of mind, I found myself a little frustrated trying to put it all together. Sadly, it was not a win for me.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Dutch House
By Ann Patchett
Harper, 9780062963673, September 2019, 352pp.

The Short of It:

A dark fairy tale of sorts told in a very modern way. Beautifully written and filled with flawed characters.

The Rest of It:

When Cyril buys a beautiful house for his wife, Elna, he believes it to be the most romantic gesture a man can make towards his wife, but what The Dutch House represents to Elna, is a lifestyle that she can never rise to, one of wealth and opulence. Coming from a convent, her needs are few, or so it seems but after years of living in the house and trying to raise her daughter Maeve and her son Danny, she abandons them for India to work with the poor.

This abandonment is devastating to Maeve and Danny but what ends up being even more devastating is their new stepmother, Andrea. Suddenly, Maeve and Danny are forced to rely on one another and the insular world they build to protect themselves from reality, affects them down the line and impacts their relationships with others.

This was not a perfect book. Some things could have been explored more fully but as I was reading it, I felt the presence of that house. This is an excellent example of a house portrayed as a character in the story. It’s pulsing with life even when lives are falling apart. It’s immune to decay, which isn’t the case for the families who have lived inside it. To some, it’s glittering and beautiful and grand and to others, it’s imposing and intimidating and a reminder of what could never be. I LOVED this aspect of the story. So much conflict in these characters and so much to ponder.

I only keep books which I have loved or ones which I think could be re-read and loved again over and over and The Dutch House falls into that category. I highly recommend it.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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