The Best People: A Tale of Trials and Errors

By Marc Grossberg

Greenleaf Book Group     2019

378 pages     Legal Procedural

I love all the places I get to visit from my easy chair when I read novels. This week I got to visit Houston, for better and for worse through The Best People. This is the Houston of legal maneuvering and judicial corruption in the early 2000s. It is the Houston of wealth and the country club, and many fascinating characters. It is the Houston of one really interesting restaurant named Eleganté, which would be fabulous to visit someday (if it were real).

Paddy Moran is the main protagonist. He is a  former cop and a newly-minted lawyer who comes to Houston to make it big. He carefully watches the big-time lawyers as he makes his way connecting to the right people at the right times. It is obvious from the outset that his ambition is going to get the best of his morality.

A second narrative concerns Pilar Galt, a young single mother, who with a bit of luck and a lot of intelligence and skillful maneuvering, has risen from the barrio and met and married the richest man in town. You are aware from the beginning that Paddy and Pilar are going to follow a collision course to their doom. The novel proceeds to that pivotal moment in time. As a matter of fact, the last chapter is called “The Denouement”, which, by the way, is one of my favorite words.

There are a lot of characters, a lot of plot devices, and a lot of legal maneuvering, making the reader wonder who The Best People really are. Certainly Paddy gets his just desserts, but the denouement makes one wonder what lessons he has learned. Many reviewers called it a social satire, and I would definitely concur with that analysis. Even the title is tongue-in-cheek. One of my major take-aways is that greed and corruption are always with us, in Kalamazoo, in Houston, and in Washington. The Houston Chronicle review mentions: “His book acknowledges a naked truth about the Bayou City: it would be a lot less interesting if people weren’t willing to do whatever it took to get ahead. After all, they don’t call it ‘Hustletown’ for nothing.”

The Best People is an intense read. It involves a lot of concentration on the part of the reader, and I needed to finish it before my mind got overcome with Thanksgiving grocery lists.  One of my major take-aways is that the author knows the city and its people intimately and is willing to expose its weaknesses. After all, Marc Grossberg has lived in Houston his entire life and has had a more than a 50-year career as a lawyer in the city.  His knowledge is deep and his sense of irony is extremely strong.   

Here is an interview with Marc Grossberg on a San Francisco television station. Marc Grossberg’s website.

Nothing to See Here

By Kevin Wilson

Ecco     2019

272 pages     Literary

As I was reading Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, I remembered  a time long ago, when one of my children threw such a bad fit at the grocery store that I had to haul him out of the grocery cart, leave all the groceries in the cart, and quickly exit the store in disgrace. Many of us have been there—but Bessie and Roland, the children of a soon-to-be US Secretary of State burst into flames when they get agitated. Wow! Now that’s a fit to which any child should aspire!

Madison calls upon her long-time friend Lillian in desperation. Her husband’s twin 10-year-olds are coming to live with them and she needs someone to care for them. Their mother has died, and they are going to  come to live on their father’s family estate in Tennessee. Jasper, Madison’s husband, is a senator and will soon be appointed Secretary of State. Bessie and Roland must be kept out of sight. Because, of course, no one can know that the children have this unbelievable “disability.” Madison, of course, doesn’t reveal this well-kept secret to Lillian, as she convinces her to come and take a nanny job on a short-term basis.

Lillian doesn’t have anything else going on in her life, and so she goes with Carl, the family’s caretaker to pick up the children. She very abruptly discovers why these children are to be housed in the guest house and hidden out of sight, and she quickly has to figure out what in the world to do with them. Lillian describes Carl as “a man who was really into watches,” which I found hugely amusing, although Carl definitely is not an “amusing” man. Thank goodness he is there, though, because as things evolve, Lillian ends up really needing his services and his problem solving skills.

There is so much to report about the book. It is extremely humorous, extremely honest, and earnestly sincere. Lillian is an incredible narrator. She is tough but extremely vulnerable with a remarkable understanding of herself and her place in the world. She is a wonderful foil for her great friend Madison, who has a similar sense of herself, but Madison is in a totally different place in the world—equally tough but also equally needy.

I became completely connected to the vulnerability of Bessie and Roland, children whose entire lives have been torn apart. They are so hungry for human attachment, and it is obvious that they are not going to receive any love from their father or step-mother.  They ask Lillian, for example, if they can sleep with her, and they wind themselves around her in the night—Roland with his finger in Lillian’s mouth. They are very afraid that they will be separated from her, and she becomes equally as attached to them.

I am always looking for stories that I have not read before, and this is definitely one of those. Wilson is a terrific storyteller, and the fairy-tale, slightly lunatic quality of the narration seems totally appropriate to the subject matter. He has you laughing one minute, and crying the next, celebrating the ways in which Lillian approaches the children’s needs and desires while at the same time worrying  about the possibility that  the children will lose their cool and burn the house down.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the reviewer in the New York Times felt much the same way. (By the way she is the author of Fleishman is in Trouble that I reviewed a couple of months ago.) She begins her review, “Good Lord, I can’t believe how good this book is.” And she closes her review thus: “Wilson writes with such a light touch that it seems fairly impossible for the book to have a big emotional payoff. But there is, and that’s the brilliance of the novel—that it distracts you with these weirdo characters and mesmerizing and funny sentences and then hits you in a way you didn’t see coming. You’re laughing so hard you don’t even realize that you’ve suddenly caught fire.”

Nothing to See Here is a book that you will want to sit down with and read all the way through in one sitting, just so you can absorb its brilliance, without any distractions.

Kevin Wilson is the author of several novels, including The Family Fang. Here is his website.

Olive, Again

By Elizabeth Strout

Random House     2019

304 pages     Literary

Well, friends. I am a wreck. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout affected me like no book that I have read in the past several months. Was it because I identified so thoroughly with Olive as I watched her age like I am aging, or because she is a master of sarcasm, like my children accuse me of being, or because it was such a fitting and moving sequel to Olive’s story? My thinking was captivated by Olive’s life and her struggles, her burdens and her joys. I knew this woman.

Like Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again has stand-alone chapters with numerous characters from Crosby Maine that Olive interacts with intermittently. Olive has her opinion about everything, but she is willing to change her mind—very egalitarian as she deals with a rapidly changing community and world. One story line concerns the Somali Muslims that live in a neighboring community. Another mentions the problems in the national government with “that horrible orange-haired man” in the White House. In some stories, Mrs. Kitteridge is only mentioned as a former teacher, while in others she plays a major role. One story concerns a former student who is dying of cancer. Olive visits her frequently and listens to her fears and concerns. (That particular story affected me greatly.) She says to the woman, “You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is — we’re all just a few steps behind you.”

Olive replays the moments of her life—the good and the bad. She grieves over the ways she treated her first husband and son Christopher, and reaffirms the moment that she decided to pursue a relationship with her second husband. Jack. Olive and Jack are a somewhat mismatched pair, but they made the decision to have a relationship at the end of the first book, and they remain together until Jack dies. Olive bemoans the fact that she had left the house by the ocean that she had with Henry, her first husband, and now she is stuck in Jack’s house.  I recently began watching the HBO series that bears her name from 2014 in order to remember her as a younger woman—the house, her husband Henry, and how she got to be the way she was. Frances McDormand played Olive brilliantly in the series.

As Olive ages in the book, her body begins to betray her, and she ends up in the community’s assisted living. Her son, Christopher, who lives in New York and seldom visits her, comes frequently and fills her life with a joy she had not expected. She has a heart attack, has trouble with her bowels and bladder, and ends up wearing Depends—"diapers for old people. . .my foolish poopie panties.”  

Through it all, Olive remains as cantankerous as always. Actually, the review in the New York Times is titled, The Curmudgeon Returns. She frequently is irritated and dismissive, yet she longs for the beauty of nature and craves human companionship, even though she is not very good at companionship. In the last chapter, for example, she finally finds a friend at the assisted living, plants some roses outside her window, and lives to see them bloom the second year.

Strout marvelously captures the inner lives of her characters. She is a brilliant author, and Olive, Again is a brilliant book. Thank goodness I got to read it.

Elizabeth Strout’s website.