Private Life by Jane Smiley

I looked forward to reading this book and had it reserved for me at the Library, but I must say, I was a bit disappointed, especially since one of Smiley's early books, A Thousand Acres, has always been a favorite of mine. It is a slow moving story, but in the end, I realized that it was probably Smiley's intention to tell the story that way to convey the slowness of Margaret's life and how she must have felt during her long marriage to a delusional and eccentric man.

This book tells the story of Margaret Mayfield and it begins in the late 1880's when she is just five years old. The story ends during WWII in 1942, so you experience Margaret's life over a long span. In essence, the story is of her marriage to Captain Andrew Early, a "brilliant" scientist in a fairly well-to-do family in St. Louis where the story begins. She marries late (for the times) at age 28.  Never is there a shred of evidence that there was any romance in her marriage at all.  And her childhood was spotted with tragedies - the death of two brothers and the suicide of her father. You realize early on that the title of the book has relevance; Margaret lives a very quiet and introspective life and takes what life has been dealt to her with acceptance, sacrificing her own urges and interests to her husband. She rarely stands up to him but just accepts his dictates and fanciful ideas without question.

After Margaret and the Captain marry, they move to the west coast, outside of San Francisco in Vallejo. I must say, I enjoyed the fact that most of the book takes place in an area that I love and am so familiar with. The novelist brings current events of the time  into the story - the Civil War, the 1905 earthquake in San Francisco, the first world war and then the second world war.

Out west, Margaret meets some interesting people who help to spice up her life a bit and she becomes close to a Japanese family and an odd Ukrainian man named Pete. Perhaps one of the most interesting characters in the book is Dora, from her home town, who stays single her whole life and travels all over the world as a news correspondent. Certainly, daring for a woman during that era.

A public hanging witnessed by Margaret when she was five years old is an event that is mentioned over and over again throughout the book and in the memory of it serves as a way to bring Margaret's life to closure.

It is written well, and has some passages that did captivate me, but overall, I was anxious to finish the book and move on to the next.

So Much for That by Lionel Schriver

This is a very powerful and disturbing book but in the end, uplifting. It deals with a family's confrontation with a serious form of cancer and the accompanying issues at hand when facing such a tragedy: the illness itself, facing death, chemotherapy, changes in your life and then - the health care issues. At the start of the novel, the husband, Shep, is preparing to tell his wife of many years that he is ready for "the Afterlife." For him, the afterlife does not mean death, but instead means that he plans to pick up and leave the United States, his job and his family (if they won't accompany him) and move to Pemba in Africa. It's been his dream for many years to leave the rat race that is life in America and live a simple, self sustaining life in a third world country where the cost of living is very low. Before he can tell Glynnis, she tells him her news: she is sick and has been for a while and has been diagnosed with mesothelioma. She is an artist who works with metal and over the years has had much exposure to asbestos. And the bottom line is - he can't go to Pemba because she needs his health insurance.
There are other interesting characters in the book, mainly his best friend Jackson and Jackson's family. The daughter has a rare congenital disease, familial dysautonomia (FD), which requires frequent and unpleasant medical interventions, and of course, vast amounts of money to contain and control. So the theme of health care, its costs, its inequities are all a very large part of this interesting novel.
One theme that was particularly difficult for me to deal with was the cancer victim's relationship with her family and "friends."  The book hit very close to home for me in this regard, as I have lost several friends to various forms of cancer and grappled all the time with my inability to deal with people who are sick and provide the "right" kind of support. I was always beating myself up for not doing enough. Glynnis expresses her feelings quite frankly about the friends who don't know what to say or how to act and it was difficult for me to read these passages, as they strengthened my feeling of inadequacy in this regard. Glynnis' end was painful to read as well, as I was reminded of being with my mom when she took her last breath.
I don't want to sound as if this book is a terrible downer, because it is not. I really liked the ending, but won't give it away. The book had humor and pathos and I did enjoy reading it.