The Headmaster’s Wife (Thomas Christopher Greene)

Although Thomas Christopher Greene has written three award-winning novels, he was new to me when I began reading The Headmaster’s Wife. And I’m so thrilled to have found him, in a world where – so far – I’ve chosen only very few authors whose writing to stalk and obsess over.

But – to the novel.

Arthur Winthrop is the headmaster of an elite New England boarding school. He’s found naked in Central Park and gets into loads of trouble, at which point he recounts a bizarre story to the police.

But Arthur’s memories crash into one another, yielding a winding narrative of love, grief, nostalgia, mystery, family and tragedy. And as the reader you begin to wonder:

What’s this story actually about? Is it a tale of marriage, a family, and the terrible things human beings experience? Is Arthur a bad guy or just a sad guy?

The interesting thing for me, having already read it, is that I don’t really know.

It doesn’t really matter.

I don’t want to give too much away because, as another reviewer has put it, “The Headmaster's Wife is a book that should be read blind.”

You can expect lush descriptions of a top private school, its internal workings and its campus culture. You can expect class differences and romantic entanglement. But that’s all you should expect. The writing is so beautiful and the characters so full that the story resolves itself, sort of, and a few weeks later you want to read it again.

Here’s an extract:

…If you learn anything in a marriage it is when to give up. I used to think that all marriages ran the same trajectory. They start with wanting to climb inside the other person and wear her skin as your own. They end with thinking that if the person across from you says another word, you will put a fork in her neck. That sounds darker than I mean it to, for it is a joke. The truth usually lies in between, and the most one can hope for is accommodation, that you learn to move around each other, and that when the shit hits the fan, there is someone to suffer with.

If you like Wally Lamb and Gillian Flynn, you’ll adore Thomas Christopher Greene.

You should also, once you’ve read this novel, watch the author explaining why he wrote it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTC2K1TnfAE&feature=youtu.be.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Signature of All Things (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Fiction - supplied by Exclusive Books

Elizabeth Gilbert is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love. That’s what happens when Julia Roberts plays you in the film of your zeitgeist book, I suppose.

I wouldn’t know.

(I’ll voluntarily expose myself to all sorts of ridicule by telling you that, like millions of bookclub bobbas, I adored Eat, Pray, Love. I’ve been to Ubud and Gilbert is right about all of it: Indonesia is heaven. Also, because of the book I want to eat in Italy and find my lost self in India. But Eat, Pray, Love was a deeply irritating film. Javier Bardem notwithstanding, the film should have been titled Whine, Moan, Bitch. And I can’t even talk about Gilbert’s hideous follow-up Committed. Just trust me.)

So… I am getting to the point… when I saw The Signature of All Things on the shelves, and spotted the author’s name, I moved on. Yup, I’m a judgey cow. It was only when the glorious Zoe Hinis of Exclusive Books told me she’d heard great things about this book - Gilbert’s return to fiction after a 10-year hiatus - that I took it home.

I loved this book. I love it so much that I read it at snail’s speed, to have it in my life for longer. I left the last 20 pages for about a week, to delay the inevitable end.

Why?

1. It’s historical fiction, à la Philippa Gregory’s early work - before she became a royal fetishist. Think Virgin Earth, Earthly Joys and A Respectable Trade (three of my favourite novels of all time).
2. It’s about genius, and its many faces.
3. It is brilliantly, deeply, carefully, unhurriedly researched and vividly, beautifully, intelligently, compellingly rendered.
4. It is about an amazing woman. A woman who will, I predict, become a literary heroine. A woman who feels to me like someone Wally Lamb or Pat Conroy could create: flawed, smart, complicated, lovable.
5. There’s faith and science and evolution and slaves and passion and travel. Now some of these things appeal to me and some of them don’t, but all of them are presented in fascinating ways.

Regrettably I can’t say it better than another reviewer, who said, “Reading this novel took me back to the experience of childhood reading, the feeling of disappearing so completely into characters and worlds that your own life ceases to exist.”

So what’s The Signature of All Things about?

It’s about a 19th century female botanist, Alma Whittaker. She’s the daughter of the gruff, shrewd and successful botanical explorer Henry Whittaker who, born dirt-poor, enters the South American quinine trade and becomes Philadelphia’s richest man.

Alma inherits his vast knowledge, library and riches on his death. But her life – which begins very differently to those of other little girls – continues in adulthood to be a complex one, filled with issues of society, family, love, secrecy, fantasy and science.

The Signature of All Things takes us from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam. Along the way, we encounter memorable characters: ‘missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad’, according to the blurb. Yes, they’re all there. But the most memorable of all is Alma. She was in my head for weeks and she’s there still. Read this novel. You’ll see.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za

The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)

You know those independent films that come from nowhere, with little budgets, amazing casts (composed equally of the famous and the nobody), simple storylines and MASSIVE FOLLOWINGS? Those wacky movies that blow Tom Cruise's latest cheesy offering right outta the water? Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Lars and The Real Girl, The Garden State, and others?

Wally Lamb's writing reminds me of those movies. Every single time.

His breakthrough first novel, I Know This Much Is True, knocked my socks off and made my exclusive Top 10. His second, She's Come Undone, made me cry in the car. That never happens. And this masterpiece, The Hour I First Believed, set as it is in the run-up to and aftermath of the Columbine shootings, blew me away - if you'll pardon the totally inappropriate pun.

Why is Wally Lamb such a genius?

Because he creates sad, damaged, lonely, real people. They're not characters. They're human beings; flesh and blood. They're the sad guy at the corner cafe. The fat lady who cleans the canteen. The unfriendly nurse at your doctor's office. They're present in your life - and their heartbreaking stories weave slyly through your legs like mangy cats - only you don't see them.

Right, now, onto the story at hand.

Caelum Quirk and his wife Maureen co-exist in a shaky marriage with more downs than ups - there's a lot of bitterness; a lot of mutual resentment. So off they go to Littleton, Colorado, hoping to find the elusive fresh start. He's a teacher and she's a nurse, and in no time at all, they're settled in a new school. But if you think that's 'all she wrote', you don't know Wally Lamb.

Caelum and Maureen make connections with the kids and with their fellow staff members. Maureen even takes a troublemaking teenage stray under her wing. And then, catastrophe. For their place of work is Columbine High School and one day, two students go on a murderous rampage. But again, in Lamb form, this book manages to be about more than the massacre.

It's about what happens after the tragedy; about how the people involved come to terms with their losses and with being spared; about the many ways in which they don't deal with it at all. Like Lamb's first two novels, it's about the small, prickly, maddening sufferings of real people.

"I just wish to Christ I’d gotten up the stairs that night. Made love to her. Held her in my arms and made her feel safe. Because time was almost up. They’d bought their guns, taped their farewell videos finalized their plans. They’d worked their last shift together at Blackjack—had made and sold me that pizza that, piece by piece, Mo and I had lifted out of the box and eaten. Chaos was coming, and it would drive us both so deeply into the maze that we’d wander among the corpses, lost to each other for years."

Other reviewers have called it 'bloated', 'massive', 'big' - for me, though it did ramble a little in places, it is a book into which I could quite happily have dug for another 617 pages. It is an exceptional book.

www.tiffanymarkman.co.za