What makes a story memorable? Vivid characters stay with us long after plot details fade. Every writer must fashion flesh, bone, and spirit from words. But author truly becomes alchemist when he breathes life into characters and creates people we connect with, ones we can’t seem to forget.

Model Home (Scribner, 2010), the confidently crafted first novel from Eric Puchner ’93, is an absorbing tale about a troubled suburban family. Puchner populates his fictional universe with an extraordinary array of eccentric yet believable individuals. The distinctly drawn characters have quirks and foibles aplenty. But their strangeness engages, rather than alienates, the reader. The author uses humor and a keen insight into human behavior to help us understand them from the inside.

The five members of the Ziller family often behave strangely. Since their move from Wisconsin to tony Palos Verdes, California, they seem to orbit their home more than inhabit it. The separate paths of two parents and three kids rarely intersect.

In moving, dad Warren wanted to provide them all with a better life by pursuing a classic version of the American dream: go West, and make a fortune in real estate. By the summer of 1985, however, his dream has become a nightmare. A toxic waste dump is opening next to the community of affordable homes he has just built. He has invested everything in the now worthless development.

Warren’s immediate goal is to keep his family in the dark about their impending bankruptcy. It is surprisingly easy, with wife Camille and the kids distracted by their own pursuits and problems.

Camille, an earnest public school health educator, struggles to avoid controversy while making a sex-ed film, Earth to My Body: What’s Happening? Son Dustin, 17, keeps busy with surfing, girl trouble, and his garage band, Toxic Shock Syndrome. Daughter Lyle, 16, makes lists of things she hates—CALIFORNIA merits all caps—and secretly dates the neighborhood’s security guard. Warren borrows Lyle’s old Renault when he pretends his Chrysler, repossessed by the bank, is stolen. Its decor reflects her caustic worldview: “A half-naked Barbie dangled from the mirror, twirling from a shoelace noosed around her neck.”

Baby brother Jonas, 11, seems “macabre and friendless,” even to his own father. He dresses head to toe in orange and obsesses over news of a local girl who has disappeared. “I was thinking whether it was worse to be eaten by sharks or to get picked apart by vultures,” he announces one afternoon at the beach.
The kids do vaguely notice that “something weird’s going on with Dad.” By the time the Zillers go on their annual camping trip to Joshua Tree, they’ve all had such a stressful summer that the need to confess erupts around the campfire. Warren begins to unburden himself, and “he couldn’t stop. It was like sledding down a hill.” The truth, however dire, brings them closer than they’ve been in years. But when the Zillers return home, a terrible accident proves far more devastating than financial ruin.

Model Home doesn’t have a magic happy ending. The bad things that have befallen the family can’t be undone. Because Puchner’s characters see the absurdity and irony around them, however, their wry observations keep tragedy from eclipsing the novel’s plucky tone. For example, Warren has to recite cheesy maxims while training as a door-to-door knife salesman, the only job he can find after his real estate venture collapses. He wonders “if losing your last shred of dignity in a place where no one was capable of perceiving its demise was like a tree falling in a forest.”

Puchner paints the Zillers as survivors. They don’t escape unscathed, but they maintain enough wit and perspective to hang on. And they gain a little more understanding and forgiveness—for each other, and for themselves.

*

Shakespeare knew four centuries ago that “everyone can master a grief but he that has it.” In the Bard’s time, childbirth often imperiled a woman’s life, something mercifully uncommon in modern America. Losing Charlotte (Knopf, 2010), the debut novel from Heather Clay ’93, brilliantly captures a family’s anguish when a new mother dies from a rare complication shortly after having twins. Husband, parents, siblings—each processes grief in idiosyncratic, unpredictable ways. “No one’s normal,” admits Robbie a few weeks after his sister’s death.

Losing the vibrant, quirky Charlotte launches the moving, well-told story. However the death itself doesn’t take place until almost halfway through the novel, and the first 100-plus pages contain many detours and digressions. Lengthy anecdotes from the sisters’ Kentucky childhood and the young couple’s New York City courtship and marriage greatly slow the initial storytelling and risk losing readers before they reach the ultimately compelling tale that follows.

Clay focuses heavily on the relationship between Charlotte and her younger sister, Knox, documenting how the sisters were opposites, in personality and behavior, as they grew up together on their parents’ horse farm. But chunky paragraphs of description and analysis interrupt the narrative flow.

The story springs to life, however, with Charlotte’s shocking death. Clay’s writing gains pace and poignancy as her characters reveal themselves through action—or inaction. Knox and Robbie numb themselves watching mindless reality TV programs they “can’t quite understand the purpose of.” Their father rarely leaves his room, “stay[ing] in bed for most of the time . . . a prone shape in the half dark.”

Charlotte’s widower Bruce, who has instantly become the single father of two boys, has no choice but to take action. In the hospital, he does briefly consider that “his previously unlimited choices had narrowed to two: either he could force one of the nonoperating windows here open and let himself fall through space toward the barges on the silent, beautiful river, or go through the rest of life this way.”

Clay’s matter-of-fact, affecting chronicle of Bruce’s predicament quickly gives the novel page-turning momentum. In the Manhattan neonatal intensive care unit, Bruce finds himself “an emissary from the VIP section of the obstetrics wing, closed off to the plebes with a velvet rope fashioned out of everybody’s worst nightmare.” He gains an unexpected ally in Knox. She has firmly declared herself “not a baby person,” yet arrives to help him care for the twins when they are released from the NICU.

Bruce and Knox hardly know each other—the sisters were virtually estranged before Charlotte’s death—yet, they become a surprising, seamless team as they spend unfathomably grueling, incredibly intimate time tending to the motherless preemies. Taking care of the babies’ relentless needs becomes Bruce’s anesthetic, Knox’s penance, and their unspoken joint process of grieving for Charlotte.

The second half of the tale is beautifully told and leaves the reader wanting more. The process of grief is unique, solitary, painful, and rarely discussed. And it is difficult to understand, let alone describe. In Losing Charlotte, Clay eloquently illuminates the darkness.

Recently Published
Reviewing the Skull (WordTech Editions, 2010) by Judy Rowe Michaels ’66

Artist Against All Odds: The Story of Robert Strong Woodward (Paideia Publishers, 2009) by Janet Gerry ’77

To Join the Lost (Antrim House, 2010) by Seth Steinzor ’74

The Lawns of Lobstermen: Poems from the Maine Coast and Belgrade Lakes (Moon Pie Press, 2010) by Douglas Woodsum ’82

1809 Thunder on the Danube (Frontline/Pen&Sword, 2008–10) by John Gill ’77

“Taste is connected to history,” writes Deirdre Heekin ’89 in “Bitter Alchemy,” the third essay in her collection Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (Chelsea Green, 2009). “The history of the table, which is, after all, a narrative history, an oral history. The tongue experiences; the mouth tells a story.” Libation is Heekin’s own history of taste, chronicling the sensory experiences that have shaped her liquid-centric life. Her enviable globe-trotting (offset by a homebody’s sense of terroir; she’s determined to grow wine on her farm in Barnard, Vermont) is forever guided by the deeply textured pleasures of the palate and the connections between taste and memory. A restaurant owner and sommelier, spirits crafter, and Italophile, Heekin is also a seeker of stories: Her essays are vessels through which she shares the insights and people she experiences in pursuit of her passions.

Food and drink writers are prone to Proustian moments, when a taste experience evokes a memory, just as Marcel Proust’s madeleine cake does in Remembrance of Things Past. Heekin’s occurs in “Ode to Campari,” her love song to the Italian apéritif. “I’ve only just realized,” she writes, “that a Campari and soda, or Campari and orange, or a negroni, that powerful elixir made of equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth . . . have become a kind of personal Madeleine.”

Like other culinary-minded works, Libation also includes recipes: for rosolio, a spirit Heekin makes with petals plucked from her rose garden, and pan di spagna, a cake flavored with alkermes, a crimson liqueur colored with ladybug wings. But while other culinary memoirists shy away from the technical and the esoteric, Heekin relishes them, telling us how the microscopic flavor elements in alcohol are called esters and that Thomas Jefferson used the varietal V. vulpine to produce homemade wine. Libation is, like that bitter delicacy Campari, an acquired taste, rewarding slow and thoughtful intake and a genuine interest in what you might call “liquid culture,” the alchemy and history surrounding beverages.

Vermonters know Deirdre Heekin as half of the couple behind Pane e Salute, the Woodstock osteria where husband Caleb Barber ’88 cooks up rustic Italian recipes while Heekin helps diners navigate a wine list of the rare Italian varietals that are her life’s obsession. But then, Deirdre Heekin has a lot of obsessions. There is Italy, her “adopted home,” and New Orleans, the city of her birth, which is “her personal Carthage.” When she finally returns there, another obsession is born: She scours the Big Easy for the perfect Sazerac, a cocktail that originated in a French Quarter apothecary. “How did I study literature and film in college, and end up owning a restaurant?” Heekin wonders. “How did I spend so many years studying French and find myself living in Italy? How did I become a writer and also become a serious student of wine?”

What bridges these interests, it becomes clear, is the author’s fascination with the ways in which taste connects people and events over time: A Campari imbibed at an Italian café is recalled while sipping a second on a porch in Vermont—the taste links the locations and experiences, forming a chain that connects the events that make up a lifetime.

Or rather, lifetimes. Of a long-ago vacation that Heekin’s mother and father took before she was born, one they would relive through a nightly belt of Irish whiskey, Heekin writes: “It was here in Skull, with its scent of salt on the air, and the whistle of wind about the houses, that my parents fell in love with Ireland. The taste of the whiskey defined it ever after.” It is at such moments that Heekin—despite her many other interests and vocations—reveals herself to be a storyteller to the core.

Bond of Brothers

Sibling relationships outlast most other bonds, and are sometimes the most complicated. Childhood tensions and rivalries often go unresolved, or even grow, as kids become adults. In Water Dogs (Random House, 2009), the confident debut novel from Lewis Robinson ’93, the simmering struggle between two brothers in their late twenties heats up during a moody Maine winter.

Bennie and his older brother Littlefield still live in their childhood home on Meadow Island, on Maine’s midcoast. The nickname “The Manse” became the family’s inside joke because the house was relatively modest by island standards. But when the boys were teens, their father (Coach) died suddenly of a heart attack, and their mother and sister moved away.

In the decade since, the house has sunk into disrepair. “The porch seemed one or two strong storms away from crumbling into the ocean, and the old copper pipes were failing, rotting the ceilings and the walls, [and] calling the place ‘the Manse’ seemed sad.” The disintegration of the home’s infrastructure is a metaphor, of course, for how the family has fallen apart.

Only one activity draws Bennie and Littlefield together: playing paintball every Saturday, even during the winter. Bennie enjoys the camaraderie; Littlefield likes the guns. The game reminds them of biathlon, the sport of target shooting and cross-country skiing, which they trained for together as kids, under Coach.

The novel’s action focuses on what happens when one day of paintball goes horribly wrong. After a few beers, six men engage in a rematch at dusk, as a snowstorm comes in. Bennie falls off a quarry cliff and nearly dies, and one member of the other team, Ray, goes missing. In the accident’s wake, Littlefield’s behavior grows increasingly bizarre. The mercurial older brother barricades himself in the basement and then disappears for days. He was the last one to see Ray alive, chasing him when he vanished. Why is Littlefield avoiding the questions of his family and the police?

When the authorities can’t find Ray, and suspicion intensifies against Littlefield, Bennie and his girlfriend Helen decide to go “Nancy Drew” and do their own investigation. Unraveling the mystery means picking at the delicate threads that interconnect their rural Maine lives. Littlefield used to date Ray’s girlfriend; the main cop on the case bears a long-standing grudge against Littlefield’s father; Helen works for Bennie’s high school classmate, Julian, another paintball teammate. Will solving the puzzle sever fragile ties or strengthen them?

Robinson—who currently lives in Portland and teaches at the University of Southern Maine—uses clear, unadorned prose to conjure the setting. “The beach was gray with a few brilliant squares of orange where the sunlight filtered through the spruce forest, and the sand looked as smooth as an eggshell.” Crisp details of scents and sounds help make the stark landscape and volatile weather important elements in the storytelling. A river smells of dead herring; the steel chime of a bell buoy echoes across the water.

Nagging plot problems, however, detract somewhat from the tale. The central one is Bennie’s job euthanizing pets at the animal shelter, which is described in excessively graphic detail. (Sensitive animal lovers beware.) It seems contrived to serve a far-fetched plot twist.

Nonetheless, deftly drawn relationships propel Water Dogs: quirky lovers Helen and Bennie; trusting friends Bennie and Julian. Most compelling is the fraternal “push and pull” between Bennie and Littlefield. “They didn’t understand each other, and being born of the same parents only made things worse.” They vacillate between hate and “secret faith.” And they struggle to balance proximity and distance—both geographic and emotional—so that their strained bond of brotherhood remains unbroken.

—Elisabeth Crean

Recently Published

• Straussophobia (Lexington Books, 2009) by Peter Minowitz ’76
• Sicilian Enigma (Outskirts Press, 2009) by Judy Neese Woods ’60
• Standing in Two Places: A New Landscape of Motherhood (Aberdeen Bay, 2009) by Ashley Kincheloe Dyson ’93
• Renewable Energy Project Development Under the Clean Development Mechanism (Earthscan, 2009) by Elizabeth Lokey ’00
• Making Sense of 21st Century Health Insurance Plans by Jonathan Pierpont Warner ’82

Often the most illuminating books of social history serve two purposes: They dissect past events with clear understanding, and they reveal how those events inform the present day.

So it is with Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House, 2009), an engaging and instructive work by Anthony Flint ’84. While focused on a compelling conflict over the fate of a few blocks of Manhattan in the late 1950s, this book also establishes a context for today’s battles over how—and especially where—the U.S. economy grows. Flint, a longtime reporter at the Boston Globe now working for the Boston-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, reveals how preserving communities enables both strong local economies and a flourishing local spirit.

The Moses of the book’s title is not the leader from Scripture. But in the realms of urban development following World War II, Robert Moses was something of a minor deity. His city of the future was all streamlined modernism, sleek towers and efficient highways. Moses dominated the field of city planning and provided structures that stand to this day, especially in New York City: the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and more.

This medicine for urban congestion, however, had side effects. Neighborhoods were butchered, communities broken, and thousands of families driven from their homes. As head of an independent transportation agency, Moses had the power to designate properties as fit for condemnation, build projects, and levy tolls without government oversight or public accountability. As Flint convincingly argues, Moses answered to no one.

He therefore found an unexpected nemesis in Jane Jacobs, a writer on architecture who with her husband had purchased and restored a simple home in Greenwich Village. Moses proposed building a highway through nearby Washington Square Park, with the demolition of 130 buildings, elimination of local streets, and forced relocation of 150 families and countless businesses. Jacobs went to work, organizing neighbors, printing pamphlets, and winning friends in the city’s political organization (including a young Ed Koch, the future mayor, who sometimes played his guitar in Washington Square Park).

When Jacobs thwarted the highway, Moses returned with a grander scheme—an urban renewal for the Village that would drive 600 families from their homes for what he called “the larger good” of new housing towers. Having seen identical displacement when Moses built Lincoln Center, Jacobs redoubled her efforts to ignite community opposition.

With that framework, Flint’s story becomes about more than two development adversaries; it reveals a unique moment in history. America was used to following the lead of powerful white men like Moses, who scoffed that the opposition was only a bunch of, well, mothers. The nation was unaccustomed to reckoning with smart, determined women like Jacobs. In fact, her resistance led, predictably, to investigation for possible communist sympathies. And yet, by invigorating a community on its own behalf, she defeated the urban renewal plan—
a success that presaged the outspokenness that soon swept America. Only five years later, those same streets Jacobs had rescued birthed a blend of creativity and protest that redefined the individual’s relationship to institutional authority, rewrote the rules of public discourse, and led a young troubadour to conclude that the answers to life’s uncertainties were blowing in the wind.

Flint’s narrative is convincing in part because his reporting is thorough. His characterization of Moses’s ego, for example, is supported by quotations from his unpublished poems (so horrible they’re guaranteed to make a reader cringe and grin). Likewise Flint captures Jacobs’s gift for protest symbolism, for example holding a ribbon-tying ceremony at a site where the community hoped to prevent new construction.

One of the book’s strengths is that its position is not absolute, noting for instance that history has been kind to Moses. Methods aside, his roads and bridges continue to serve millions of people. Similarly Jacobs’s activism never fully addressed New York’s chronic shortage of affordable housing.

Still, their conflict offers meaningful lessons for today. America is littered with big-box stores in former farm fields, while downtowns struggle to remain economically viable. New urbanism seeks to reaffirm the notions of sustainable economy and colorful community that Jacobs espoused. The streets Moses called “blighted” are now homes to NFL quarterbacks and their supermodel girlfriends. Community, as Flint ably proves, is worth the inefficiency.

**

“We all live in two worlds: the world we physically inhabit, and the world we carry within us,” muses author Stephanie Saldaña ’99. The newly minted Harvard Divinity School graduate arrives in Syria in September 2004 for a year’s residence as a Fulbright Scholar. The Iraq War has thrown the entire Middle East into turmoil; Damascus teems with refugees. The city of outcasts and exiles seems a good fit for the 27-year-old as she flees fresh heartbreak and starts to question her own belief system.

In The Bread of Angels: A Journey of Love and Faith in Damascus (Doubleday, 2010), Saldaña beautifully details how she navigates two odysseys simultaneously. She confronts the external challenges of living as a stranger in a strange land, while facing even more daunting inner trials. Threads from her family’s dark past, woven into the story of her year in Syria, illuminate how the shy Catholic girl from Texas ends up a restless voyager who feels “at home in countries with a history of war.”

Buzzing with religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, Damascus welcomes the young American woman warmly. Saldaña’s nuanced portrait of the vibrant Middle Eastern city contradicts stereotypes of Syria as anti-American and Islam as intolerant. As she explores the tangle of ancient religions and modern politics, she befriends a fascinating array of people. From them, she gains strength and wisdom that help her along a difficult emotional and spiritual path.

Her Fulbright mission is to study the Muslim view of Jesus. (In Islam, Jesus is a much-loved prophet who is human, not divine.) She must tackle practical matters first, however: finding lodgings, improving her knowledge of Arabic, and preventing her mind from wandering back to Boston and the man who suddenly stopped loving her.

She rents a room in a sprawling Ottoman-era house in the city’s old Christian quarter. Her landlord becomes a grandfatherly protector, her 73-year-old “knight in shining polyester pants.” At Damascus University, she joins the post-9/11 flood of foreign students—from American Mormons to radical Iranians—taking Arabic language classes. (At $200 a month, its intensive immersion program is the world’s fastest, cheapest path to fluency.) Chatting with local street vendors becomes a way to practice vocabulary and to make the loud, energetic city feel like home.

But Saldaña also seeks refuge in the desert, at the remote Christian monastery of Mar Musa. Although she and God are “for the most part . . . no longer on speaking terms,” she decides to undertake a grueling program called the Spiritual Exercises. During a month of silence and prayer, the desert becomes a mirror for deep inner reflection. She tries to understand why she carries “the broken world inside of [her] heart.” Abbot Paolo and novice monk Frédéric patiently support Saldaña through her spiritual journey. When she returns to Damascus to study the Qur’an, she shares her lessons in letters to Frédéric.

The memoir encompasses “a year of such impossible richness” that it needs “no embellishment,” the author notes. Saldaña has published previously as a poet and journalist, but this is her first book-length project. Her grace, wit, and unsparing honesty make The Bread of Angels a compelling chronicle.

Insights tumble forth as Saldaña witnesses history, learns Arabic’s subtle gradations of meaning, and discovers surprising compassion and beauty in the Qur’an. Most moving is how profoundly she longs for a “partner in loneliness.” And how God answers her prayer in a most unexpected way.

Saldaña’s sweeping tale would work gloriously as fiction. Poignant and powerfully told, the story takes your breath away because it is true.

—Elisabeth Crean