"Cty of Friends," by Joanna Trollope

     I had never read any of the twenty some novels of Joanna Trollope, an English author, who--to judge by this book--is a chronicler of British society and mores.
( She is of the same family as the famous Trollope, but not a direct descendant. She is now in her seventies, and her contribution to literature has been recognised by an OBE--Order of the British Empire, an empire that is no longer.)
      The novel chronicles the lives of four professional women over a period of about a year. The four met in an economics class at their university--the only women in the class--and bonded in close friendship in the subsequent years as they all undertook demanding professional careers. Stacey in finance: Gaby in banking: Beth a professor of business psychology; and Melissa, a consultant to companies on the efficiency of their boards of directors. Gaby has three children. Melissa is a single mother with a teen-age son. Stacey is happily married to Steve, and her mother is deeply into dementia. Beth is a lesbian, living with Claire.
       Stacey is fired from her job and is devastated--and that kicks off the whole complicated story of the relationships among the four women and their spouses and children. And who tells whom what, and who withholds what from whom, seems to be a rather artificial underpinning of the stories of the four characters.
        At the center of the novel are questions concerning the reconciliation of motherhood with demanding, full-time work, and the position of capable working women in the masculine environment of the business world.
    It's all very well done, very well written, but I did not find the various crises and relationship problems particularly gripping, although it held me sufficiently to hang in there until the end. Maybe a woman might find the issues more interesting. I will try to get Joan to read the first chapter and see if she sticks with it.
     It is available in hard-cover at the DC Public Library.

       

"Odds against Tomorrow," by Nathaniel Rich.

     Nathaniel Rich has just published a new book that was briefly noted in the New Yorker. I went into the DC Library's catalogue to see if the Library had it--no, it didn't: but up came an earlier book, "Odds Against Tomorrow" that was available for downloading to my I-pad. And a what a book it turned out to be.
     The principal character, Mitchell Zukor, has a constant fear of future disaster--be it earthquakes, floods, pandemics, financial collapse, nuclear war, invasion by aliens--and he seems to be able to work out the odds on these things happening--indeed, it seems, the odds on anything happening. After a brief career in finance, he moves to a strange  company called Future World, which consults with corporations on the various risks they run and seems to provide them with legal cover in the event of some disaster striking. This corporate concern with disaster has been raised by a massive earthquake in Seattle, where the courts decreed huge damages to the personnel of firms that had occupied offices not built to withstand earthquakes.
      There is a sub-plot or subsidiary story line, involving Mitchell's obsession with a girl with a strange heart defect who establishes a 'back to the land' community in New England.
       The center of the book is a major disaster that strikes new York--a massive flood and huge destruction of property by a typhoon. Rivers run down Broadway, Grand Central Station is blocked with drowned bodies, the Hudson and the East River meet, and Mitchell and his 'on-again-off-again' female colleague and pal, Jane Eppler, paddle their way to safety in a canoe...and things get more and more complicated from there on.
        I am not doing justice to the convoluted story line, but the book is a great read--perhaps overly long and perhaps the ending is a bit of a cop-out...though how to end it must have been puzzle for the author--who is staggeringly good writer.

"American Heiress" by Jeffrey Toobin

This is a fascinating book that takes the reader right back to the early 'seventies with a detailed account of the kidnapping of Patty Hearst: her life with the crazy band of characters who constituted The Symbionese Liberation Army: their immolation by the Los Angeles Police swat team: Patty's arrest, and her subsequent trial for her part in a bank robbery. It seems like a different world--no cell phones, writers used typewriters, TV stations were just discovering the technology to do live broadcasts from outside studios--and California especially was in the grip of student demonstrations and a rash of bombings. It all seems like very ancient history, but Toobin's vast research brings the past to life in an enthralling account that kept me page-turning from beginning to end.

"Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" by Gail Honeyman

     This is a first novel by Gail Honeyman, an Englishwoman in her forties. It has been critically acclaimed (to use the cliché) and it deserves the praise it has received.
     Eleanor is a loner, a stranger to social contacts, whose routine follows the same pattern from day to day and week to week. She works in an office and is something of a figure of fun to her fellow workers, with whom she minimizes her interactions. At the weekends she buys herself two bottles of vodka and drinks them over the next couple of days. She speaks on the telephone to her mother ("Mummy") every Wednesday; it seems her mother is in some form of institution, and in each conversation  Mummy finds ways to denigrate Eleanor. And, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Eleanor has suffered some major trauma as a child.
      Eleanor becomes obsessed with the idea that she is destined to marry a wholly unsuitable pop-singer and that he will fall desperately in love with her when they meet. She Googles him, finds his home page, and follows him on Facebook and Twitter. Change comes to Eleanor, partly through the obsession with the singer, and partly because she helps a friendly colleague--Raymond--go to the assistance of an elderly man who falls in the street and is hospitalized. This brings her into contact with the old man's family and leads her into new social situations--a party, a funeral--and at the same time she is preparing herself to meet the singer--who is, of course, in ignorance of her existence--by buying new clothes, having her hair fixed, and starting to use cosmetics. The latter helps to disguise some scars she has on her face.
      And slowly, but with some major set-backs, Eleanor evolves, partly with the help of her relationship with Raymond, with whom she is constantly finding fault--his smoking, his T-shirts, his colored running shoes. At the close, Eleanor may not be "Completely Fine," but she is getting there. 
       One of the pleasures of the book is the scornful eye that Eleanor casts on so many accepted social conventions and the cutting language she uses to deplore them.