Four recent novels

Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

Faith Sullivan

Born in the late 19th century, Nell Stillman moved as a young, Irish-Catholic bride to a small town in Minnesota. Her abusive husband dies when their child is young—and she takes a job teaching school, which she holds for more than three decades, through war and Depression. Books, especially those by P.G. Wodehouse, become her friends during times of joy and sadness. This book celebrates community, family, and reading—but Sullivan’s 21st-century worldview crashes the party, plopping modern concerns onto someone born 100 years earlier.

Heat & Light

Jennifer Haigh

Novelist Jennifer Haigh, who writes about western Pennsylvania as one who knows rust belt territory, explores how fracking affects a dead town. In finely wrought detail she portrays the industry’s winners and losers and shows the effect of a boom industry on the everyday lives of ordinary people. For the most part she avoids political clichés, focusing instead on things that drive human beings: love, greed, selfishness, and ambition. The resulting story highlights man’s fallenness—often expressed in R-rated language—and creation groaning from the effects of the Fall.

The Quality of Silence

Rosamund Lupton

Yasmin and Ruby, mother and deaf daughter, expect to vacation with their husband/father in northern Alaska. But their plane from England lands in Fairbanks, and they receive word that his village has been leveled by fire. He’s presumed dead. They don’t believe it and rush to find him—never mind that it’s winter and the big-rig driver who’s giving them a lift has a stroke. This novel offers a heart-pounding mother-daughter battle for survival that requires smarts and ingenuity. Downsides: some R-rated language and a disappointing ending that concludes a super story with a political screed about fracking.

Re Jane

Patricia Park

Based loosely on Jane Eyre, this coming-of-age story features a Korean-American orphan living with her uncle’s family in Flushing, New York City. She ends up working in his grocery store and then as a nanny for a feminist professor, her younger husband, and their adopted Chinese daughter. Jane falls for the husband, flees to Korea, and struggles to fit in. Park explores identity and what it means to belong, but she veers far from the Christian themes found in Brontë, whose Jane resolves to “keep the law given by God.” Park replaces them with R-rated language and some sexually explicit scenes.

Afterword

Home by Nightfall by Charles Finch (Minotaur Books, 2015) is a clean mystery set in Victorian London and featuring Charles Lenox, younger brother of a baronet. He returns to Sussex to be with his brother who is mourning his recently deceased wife. Together they investigate a series of strange happenings. The book has a leisurely pace and includes characters with strong family bonds and community connections. Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall (Ecco, 2015) takes place in the Appalachians, where a fancy resort abuts a national park and marijuana growers, meth makers, and hermits relish privacy. In the three weeks before his retirement, the sheriff has to wrap up business—including a meth raid and an unconventional arrangement with pot growers. In alternating chapters, the sheriff and a female park ranger narrate the story and recall past events that shaped their lives. His matter-of-fact voice contrasts with her poetic one. Both appreciate the natural world and understand the flawed people in it. —S.O.