"At This Moment He Can Think Only One Thing: How Was It Possible, He Wonders, To Have Been So Wrong."

When I first started Everything I Never Told You, I thought it was going to be a clever, but strikingly similar to other recent fiction I've read, whodoneit story about the death of a young high school girl, Lydia Lee. But I was VERY very pleasantly surprised that this novel ended up being pretty much nothing like that. 

Yes, Lydia Lee dies by drowning in the lake by her Middlewood, Ohio home, but the resulting story is not necessarily about who may have had a hand in her death, but instead is the unfolding story of the Lee family in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s: James, a Chinese American Harvard-educated professor working at a small college, his wife Marilyn, a brilliant and promising academic with big dreams who met James while attending Radcliffe, their oldest son Nath, their daughter Lydia, and youngest daughter Hannah. Marilyn had always expected to make something remarkable of her life, rejecting her mother's goals for her to marry a "nice Harvard man." After falling in love and marrying a Chinese American man as a white woman, and promptly having children, no longer pursuing her dreams of being a doctor, she somehow finds herself living the exact life that she had tried to avoid. When Marilyn deserts her family to go back to school, it tears a rift in the fabric of all of their lives and things are never the same. 

Marilyn discovers she is pregnant with Hannah and returns to her family, abandoning school. She chooses to shift all of her dreams to Lydia, to raise her to be the person that she wasn't able to be. On the flip side, after experiencing discrimination his entire life, all James wants for Lydia is to fit in, have friends, and be popular. Between both parents, Lydia is completely smothered. The other children are largely ignored. 

Where the novel really shines is in the exact meaning of the title: everything that is never said. All five characters have so so  many missed opportunities to express things to each other that would likely have averted Lydia's fate: James to Marilyn, Nath to Lydia, Lydia to Nath, Hannah to Lydia, Hannah to her parents, Nath to his parents. So many things held back. So many things observed but not spoken aloud. So many things suffered in silence. It was very brilliantly done. 

I found I enjoyed the book much more than I thought. The exact writing itself didn't necessarily blow me away (I'm still on a God of Small Things high where I'm measuring everything against the exquisite language there), but as a whole, the characters and story was intertwined so well that it caught up with me by the end. I'm glad that I had the chance to read it. As a side note, according to good old Wikipedia, Celeste Ng's favorite novel is The God of Small Things. Go figure. 

After this break from the lists, back I go with Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I am officially off work until January 4th so I plan to spend the next week and a half doing nothing except relaxing and reading. 

"And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside."

Normally I capitalize every word in the heading of the blog post, which is always a quote from the book I have finished. This was the first and probably only (we'll see) time that I made sure that the capitalization matched what was in the book. Because there were so many nuances in the author's choices in the format of the text that were deliberate and added so much to the meaning of the content.

And ya'll. The God of Small Things blew me away. 

It got me to thinking. As an occasional writer (ok, so technical writing is my full time job, but occasional fiction writer), all writers have access to all the same words. Sure, there are some who have slightly more advanced vocabularies than others. But for the most part, 99% of the words we all know are the same. So what Arundhati Roy was able to do with words, all the same words as I have access to, just blew my mind. And certainly made me think, "Oh yeah, no way I could ever in a million years write the way she does." I don't mind being brought down many pegs to be able to experience something this brilliant. 

And I don't throw around the word brilliant often. I think I tend to be pretty tepid with saying that every book was one of the most amazing things I've ever read. But this book honestly is. There is so much vivid imagery and creativity in what she presents about the environment, the characters, their actions, their inner thoughts. Like nothing I've ever read. And such a clever use of repetition throughout the book for key details about the characters, their physical attributes, things that happen to them, the world they exist in. I may be repetitive myself, but all I can keep saying is that it just blew me away. It was a book that I delighted in getting drawn into and one that I know would benefit from being read a second time.

As a just a quick summary of the story, it tells of two inseparable fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha, who live in Ayemenem, India and the fateful events that occur when their cousin, Sophie Mol, comes to visit from England in 1969. The children have their own lush world, part imagination, part very harsh reality. There are complex family dynamics and each character's history is explored. There is a backdrop of political issues (the burgeoning of communism in India, the persistence of the caste system) and an illicit love affair that leads to some of the horrific events that conclude the novel. Although, while these events "conclude" the novel, the storyline is split up throughout the book and heavy foreshadowing allows the reader to have a pretty clear idea of how things are going to end. But that doesn't make it any less shocking and terrible.

This book just rocketed up my list of favorites. I will probably say it again and again, but I've really never read anything quite as exquisite and lush with imagery. And written in a way that is new and interesting and compelling. And not done just for the sake of doing it. But because that is the story and who these characters are and the fiber of every moment of the book is made better by the way it is written. I wish I could provide a better explanation of what exactly it is that makes this novel so exemplary, but even with 99% of the same words, I cannot even remotely do it justice. 

So read it. READ IT. 

I'm taking a momentary pause from the lists to pick up Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I'm on break for the holidays starting next week so I wanted to pick up something to usher me into my glorious free time that I felt I could read quickly. I also have some quality time in the waiting room of a hospital next week, ripe for reading. We'll move on back to the lists after that. I'm hoping to finish this one before the end of the year and squeeze in a year recap post, but we'll see how that goes. 

197 left to go.