Critics' choices for Christmas
McDermott, Alice
Alice McDermott Alice McDermott is the author of Charming Billy, Child of My Heart, and other novels. Considering the year we've had, a gift of literary fiction may serve as a nice reminder that...
...Meg Waite Clayton's The Language of Light (St...
...is the story of a Bangladeshi woman in London, her marriage, her daughters, her troubled sister at home...
...Nigerian writer Chima-manda Ngozi Adichie offers a vivid, disturbing coming-of-age story in Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin Books, $23.95, 320 pp...
...is a tender, multilayered story set in upstate New York in the summer of 1969...
...Finally, Paul Elie's beautifully braided four-person biography, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27,560 pp...
...Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24,288 pp...
...Carefully written, as compelling as a novel, this book, too, reminds us of what it means to live authentically in a world that seems determined to dull our senses and our intellect and our spirits with doublespeak, nonsense, meaningless distraction...
...Considering the year we've had, a gift of literary fiction may serve as a nice reminder that language can indeed be put to the service of truth...
...Joseph Freda's The Patience of Rivers (W...
...Very early in the novel, the narrator tells us, "she was as startled by her own agency as an infant who waves a clenched fist and strikes itself upon the eye," and we know instantly that we are in the company of a talented new writer...
...Vivid testimony" as Richard Russo called it, not only to a time past, but to the power of place and family and aspiration...
...For anyone with such associations, this is a wonderful gift...
...Monica Ali's Brick Lane (Scribner, $25,384 pp...
...Place, family, and aspiration feature largely in a number of fine first novels published this year...
...Martin's Press, $24.95, 352 pp...
...Set in the aftermath of World War II, it is a complex, understated work of art, a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful...
...makes the point...
...What better gift, at the end of such a year, than a novel that confirms the value of the individual the individual heart, mind, spirit even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture...
...The lives of Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day are examined in light of their work, their Catholicism, the time in which they lived...
...For anyone discouraged about the state of our own culture, the work of these young authors should prove heartening...
...is set in Maryland hunt country, and makes good use of the mores and rituals of the place as it quietly tells a gentle, romantic story about a young widow slowly reclaiming her life...
...Wrap up Paul Elie's book with a work by each of his subjects, and remind someone of the great good gift of language...
...Here history, the public turmoil of that year, is merely a distant drum as Freda's young characters and their families live out their own dramas and comedies in a landscape that is rendered so vibrantly it may change forever a reader's associations with the word: Woodstock...
...I would pair it with Hazzard's 1980 masterpiece, The Transit of Venus, and feel I had bestowed on the recipient nothing less than the gift of great literature...
...is a book I've been handing out to friends all year...
...W. Norton, $24.95,320 pp...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 21
