Old School by Tobias Wolff

I found a copy of this book when we stayed in the Guest House of Davidson College (NC) over Thanksgiving break. "Required reading for 2009," a sticker on the cover proclaimed, and that was enough to convince me to grab the slim paperback and head back to the room. Also, it isn't a long book, and I was pretty sure I could finish it before our trek back south. The unnamed narrator attends a New England boarding school in the early 1960s; one of few Jewish boys amid a sea of WASPs, he works hard to disguise his background in order to fit in. Part of his assimilation plan is to win the school literary contest, judged each year by a famous author. According to the narrator, the winner of this contest attains ultimate Old Boy status; his own intelligence and valor would be unassailable should he succeed. Unfortunately, the boy fails at winning twice--Robert Frost chooses someone else's poem (deemed trite by the narrator), and his bout with flu precludes a writing submission when Ayn Rand is the judge. (He does meet Rand though, and his fever-laced description of her supercilious audience with the students is hilarious.) The third try at the contest is a hit, but only because the boy suffers a horrific case of writer's block and plagiarizes someone else's work. Submitting a short story from another school's literary magazine--a story about a Jewish teenage trying to fit into WASP society no less--the narrator suffers from little guilt because he feels he surely could have written this story. Indeed, as the weeks pass, he often thinks he is the real author--after all, the story sums up his deepest fears and dreams so well, the words are more his than the actual author's. A school master discover's the boy's deception, and what unfolds after that raises important questions about honesty and integrity, both literary and otherwise. This plot outline sounds deadly serious, but actually the tone and language of Old School is not heavy-handed at all. Indeed, Wolff manages to keep the reader chuckling about the foibles of youth and the often unworthy adoration we throw at icons. I loved this book--it reminds me of a droll Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Yesterday's book featured a character slipping between past and present by virtue of memory and dreams. The Time Traveler's Wife's character Henry DeTamble travels through past, present, and future courtesy of a "chrono displacement" disorder. I am not a huge fan of time travel stories (or any science fiction, for that matter) but I make a huge exception for this story. The reason this book is so successful is its readable prose, likable characters, and brain teasing plot. I won't lie to you...you have to use your smarts at the beginning to figure out what's going on. Henry is 28 years old in one passage, and then only 8 in the next, then he's 32, and so on. And his lovely wife, Clare, is likewise variously aged throughout, depending on where in time Henry travels. But once you get the hang of it, it's fun--like putting a puzzle together. You realize the plot's progression, though seemingly random, is in fact solidly chronological--it always loops back to Clare. (After all, she is the time traveler's wife.) I think we can learn a lot from this book as well as yesterday's book: even though time plods forward, we are fortunate that our memories let us revisit and reframe events again and again and again.

Evening by Susan Minot

A dreamy, hypnotic novel, Evening is a little more complex than my other choices but well worth it. The chief character is Ann Grant Lord, a wife and mother who is in the final stages of cancer. Sounds depressing, right? Well, Evening is deceptively sad because in the midst of impending death lies all the lushness of a life remembered. Minot's writing takes you seamlessly from present to past and back again. Most of Ann's memories/hallucinations revolve around a man, Harris Arden, with whom she had a brief affair decades ago at a friend's wedding. She fell passionately in love with him, but tragic circumstance blunted the relationship. It's apparent from Ann's mental meanderings that she never really got over him, or at least what he represented. The poetic quality of Minot's writing places it well above the standard love story, and its examination of what passion really means bumps it up even more. You see, the reader learns through Ann's story that a love lost is not lost at all. Memory survives: the memory of who you were when you were with that person, the flip flop of your heart, the anticipation, eagerness, and expectation. These feelings are recorded in the brain and never forgotten. Evening is a story of memories and the lessons they teach.