The purpose of Arecibo, the observatory in Puerto Rico, is to listen for transmissions from intelligent life in outer space. In her fantasy/fiction novel The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell tells what happens when it receives such a transmission.
In her story, the Jesuits, who have a history of traveling to new worlds, launch a crew of eight to find the source. What has been heard at the observatory is music, beautiful haunting singing. The structure of the book is a horizontal V; two story lines, starting far apart, meet on the planet of Rakhat. One of the lines begins with goose bumps, when Jimmy, manning the telescope, realizes what he is listening to, thus setting in motion the odyssey to outer space. The second plot line starts at the opposite end, when one of the priests returns to earth in disgrace years later, and then moves back in time to his experience on the planet.
The fantasy of a new world and space travel provides the platform for Russell to explore religious and philosophical questions, which are what the book is really about. She is particularly interested in God’s involvement in our lives. If God loves human beings plus controls everything that happens in the world, (including the falling sparrow), why do terrible things happen to us? How can we continue to have faith?
A second, less overt question, arises at the end of the book as the author examines just how much control more intelligent powerful beings should have over less able species. Raising them for food is the example but the morality of eating meat is not the issue; Russell is interested in bigger, more existential topics.
Can it still be a good book if you dislike the characters? Such is the situation in The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya. In one section, the father, a writer, is spending the summer with his teenage daughter expecting her to type his latest creation and ignoring her the rest of the time.
In another, the daughter, grown and a playwright, has produced a bitingly unpleasant play about that summer together. In a third, the daughter is having dinner out with her mother who is loud and drunk and long divorced from the father. The possible boyfriend preens and thinks he is God’s gift.
And yet – I kept reading. The emotions depicted were raw and immediate. Underneath their self-absorption and entitlement, the characters were vulnerable human beings craving love and attention – and I couldn’t help but be sympathetic. Maybe this book is a good lesson for our time. The people we dislike want the same things as everyone else and often have a hard time getting them.
This sounded like the perfect book for me – Ladies’ Lunch by Lore Segal. I loved the way it started: “Five women have grown old coming together, every other month or so, for the last thirty or more years.” I have friends like that, although there are fewer now that we lost one last month.
But it wasn’t what I hoped for. This is a series of vignettes about the very old – late 80’s and 90’s and how they manage to get together and what they talk about. For example – two of them meet at the usual café for lunch. They reminisce, joke, make future plans, but have to leave when their adult children come to collect them. One is in a wheelchair and the other no longer drives. They will meet again whenever the children can arrange it. In another story, there is the twenty minute rule: they may talk about their health issues for only twenty minutes. In all the little stories, there is this large looming undercurrent of the debilities of old age. Too realistic?
To end on a happy note:
It makes me laugh every time.
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