Fairies

For whatever reason, my local libraries have recently made available to me a lot of new releases.  Herewith, my reactions to a few of them:

I really did not care for Tom Spanbauer's earlier, much-loved The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, but I liked his new one, Now Is the Hour.  A lot of the same elements are in place here: showy language, tricky narrative structure, daddy issues, wise Native Americans, man-boy love . . . check, check, check, double-check.  Maybe Now Is the Hour merely spoke to me more than the earlier novel did.  It's the story of a young man's sexual awakening in the midst of a repressive, rural community and a strong Catholic family.  Our hero, Rigby John, encounters a lot of hot button young adult topics, such as racism, drugs, bullies, pregnancy and a great deal of sex.  Sometimes, Spanbauer's repetition of key phrases is unnecessarily precious, but the story is moving enough that it carried me through even the showiest sections. 

The Stolen Child, Keith Donahue's first novel, is not what I expected.  Donahue tells a modern variation on a common legend: a child is taken from its home and replaced with a  changeling, a faerie or hobgoblin.  Both the stolen child, raised by the faeries, and the changeling, raised by the stolen child's parents, tell the story, in alternating chapters.  I expected Donahue to use this set-up to look at society from the outside, the way Alice Sebold did in The Lovely Bones.  Instead, he throws himself into the story, which is completely engrossing.  There are some thematic similarities to Now Is the Hour.  Each is about a young man who does not quite belong in his family (in the latter case, literally), and the competing demands caused by that sort of disconnect.

The Stolen Child reminded me a lot more, though, of another novel, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.  Both authors seem to have a real sense for the edges of society and nature and the types of creatures that are drawn to these edges.  In both novels, there's a dichotomy: those who choose to live within conventional society and those drawn away from it.  In both, it's hardly a fair fight.  It's the outsiders we love. 

I just read Robinson's other novel, Gilead.  Like Housekeeping, Gilead is oddly compelling.  One wouldn't think that it would be interesting to read the ramblings of a moribund Congregationalist minister on, say, the correct order of the Ten Commandments, and yet I found myself unable to put it down.  -- Peter