Gail Tsukiyama, 1994
224 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Reading this charming book made me hungry—there's a fair amount of cooking and eating going on. And there are also intriguing descriptions of Japanese decor: the exquisite airiness of shoji (paper walls) and the beauty of human artistry imposed on nature. This last has to do with the garden in the book's title.

Gardens are central to the novel's thematic concerns. They require loving devotion and constant nurturing, the very qualities that heal the human body and soul and provide respite from the world's ills. In this book those ills are physical, spiritual, and geo-political.

The story is set in 1937-1938 during Japan's invasion of China prior to World War II. Stephen, a young Chinese man, is sent by his wealthy family to their summer residence in Tarumi, a seaside Japanese village, to recover from tuberculosis. There his loneliness is eased by a growing friendship with Matsu, the family's crusty retainer who cares for the house, the garden, and Stephen. Through Matsu, Stephen becomes deeply attached to the denizens of a secreted village of lepers shunned and abandoned 40 years ago when leprosy swept through Tarumi.

Parallels abound in this book, between Stephen's situation and that of Matsu and Sachi, the leper whom Matsu loves. Illness and wellness are juxtaposed, and the peace and beauty of gardens placed against the brutality of war. The metaphors are obvious but not ham-fisted. And Gail Tsukiyama writes in a plain, unadorned prose, just right for a shy 20-year-old narrator, who is uncertain of both his present and future. He is after all Chinese living in Japan, a country that has just invaded his own.

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Kim Edwards, 2005
432 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Dark secrets that lie deep in the heart always find their way to the surface. That's the premise of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, a painful but beautiful book about how lies corrode the human soul.

Two stories are told in tandem. The first is the story of Dr. David Henry who, unbeknownst to his wife, gives away their second twin, a baby girl with Down syndrome. She was stillborn, he tells his wife, a lie he will live with for the rest of his life. The second story is that of Carolyn Gill, the nurse who takes the infant and raises her in another city.

The power of the book lies in the author's compassionate treatment of her characters. Heinous as the father's decision is, we are sympathetic with his motivations if not his actions. A confession: when first reading the novel, I wanted to put it down, certain the storyline would develop along the lines of Fatal Attraction: moving from bad to worse...to just plain awful. Not so. As the years pass, the characters find a sort of equilibrium within themselves and with each other.

The title comes from the name of a camera, which starts David off on his hobby as a serious amateur photographer. The camera becomes a central metaphor of the novel: for one thing, it represents Henry's attempt to capture reality and fix it in time, on a piece of paper, as if somehow he could have fixed the moment of his daughter's birth and chosen differently. (The symbolic use of photography in this work reminds me of Sue Miller's fine 1990 novel, Family Pictures.)

The book's structure, unfortunately, feels choppy and contrived: chapters are divided and labeled by years with a fair amount of jumping back and forth between the lives of the Henry family and Caroline Gill. Nonetheless, Edwards' writing more than makes up for any structural problems: she writes with a fluid, assured prose and tells an engaging story. Many friends have told me this is one of their favorite books.

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Charles Dickens, 1860
560 pp.

Broadly, the story follows 7-year-old Pip, orphaned and living with his sister and her blacksmith husband in a Kent village. This is some of the funniest writing in the book. But Pip's contentment is shattered when he visits wealthy Miss Havisham and becomes enamored of her adopted daughter, Estella. From that point on, Pip feels shame for his lowly status and becomes obsessed with winning Estella. But Estella, haughty and even cruel, is unattainable. She is the cold distant "star" in Pip's life, the single brilliant point to which he directs all his actions.

Ultimately, Pip comes to learn that a person's true worth has nothing to do with wealth and status and everything to do with loyalty and inner goodness. Like Dicken's David Copperfield, this is a coming-of-age story (a bildungsroman), narrated by an older, wiser man who traces the maturation of his younger self.

Great Expectations is populated with starkly funny characters, and Miss Havisham is indisputably the most memorable. She's both vile and hilarious. Jilted at the altar years ago, she remains in her wedding gown, now in tatters, wearing only one shoe (she was in the process of putting on the second when she learned the groom had run off). The wedding breakfast sits decaying on the table, and the clocks forever read 8:40. Miss Havisham is one of literature's most potent emblems of aristocratic decay and corruption, a class trapped in time, unwilling to move forward.

Dickens wrote two endings for the book, changing his original to make the conclusion more pleasing to his audience. Most editions now include both versions, and a good case can be made for either one. In fact, here's a good discussion topic: which ending do you prefer and why?


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