Contemporary Book Club classics

By Lesley Owens

As the weather cools and the kids head back to school, you may be looking for a palate cleanser after all that pulpy summer reading. So re-shelve your copies of Twilight and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and make a plan to catch up with these three classics of contemporary literature.


The Center of Everything

At the beginning of Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything (2004), Ronald Reagan is president and Evelyn Bucknow of Kerrville, Kansas is nine, old enough to notice when her mother's life becomes a series of misfortunes: the car breaks down, she loses her job, and she gets pregnant by a married man. But as things go downhill fast for the Bucknow family, Evelyn finds herself increasingly singled out as a gifted student “special” enough to distance herself from her mother's mistakes.

As Evelyn tries to escape her unwanted poverty and her mother Tina struggles to find happiness, Moriarty creates something very special: two characters who are flawed yet likable, and tragic without being gratuitously gritty. As you read, you're sure to recognize high school classmates, your grocery store check-out clerk, and your best friends in the novel's startlingly realistic characters.

There are many flaws in this novel, Moriarty's first, but she ably tackles complex relationships, welfare, and small town life, producing a page-turning coming-of-age novel that avoids melodrama and political warfare.


Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage

Alice Munro is known as a master of the short story form, and Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001) solidifies her reputation for writing quietly beautiful short fiction. The stories in this collection are set in Ontario, Canada and take on the difficulties of real life relationships. Unwanted and strained connections abound, mostly between wives, husbands, and desperate female relatives.
 
Munro's characters come from a variety of milieus and eras, but they are always short on happiness and long on repressed urges, unreachable temptations, illness, and death. But these stories feel flat, not sad. Munro's characters could explode into action and drama at any second—in fact, as readers, we often expect them to—but they simply don't.

And that's the whole point. The stories in Hateship, Friendship are not “slice of life” pieces, but they are very much like life: no matter how rich and riotous our inner lives feel to us, our outside lives often remain as plain and practical and faded as old linoleum.


Housekeeping

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) is a lot like reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway: it's fascinating, somewhat baffling, and immensely compelling. As you turn the last page, you'll find yourself wanting to start page one all over again.
 
Housekeeping is set during the Depression in Fingerbone, Idaho. After a series of family deaths, Ruthie, the narrator, is adopted by her aunt Sylvie. Sylvie is a former transient and an unconventional parental figure: she takes catnaps on park benches and fills her family home with tin cans and stacks of magazines. As Ruthie's sister Lucille increasingly rejects Sylvie's ways, Ruthie willingly dissolves herself into the rhythms of Sylvie's bizarre lifestyle.

Robinson's prose is supple and rich with sensuous imagery, and each page of the novel is lush with contemplative eddies as Ruthie considers memory, death, and time's liquidity. Robinson's skillful writing ruthlessly mirrors Ruthie's increasing difference from the outside world, and despite the novel's leisurely pace, you'll find yourself content to slow down, to wander within the watery flow of Ruthie's mind.