Last night, I went to listen to Chris Cleave talk at the Brookline Booksmith, an excellent independent bookstore. (Earlier in the day, Cleave spoke at Porter Square Books, another lovely indie.) The talk was completely worth the crosstown trip in rush hour. Cleave is a delightful speaker; he’s energetic, articulate, intelligent, funny, and self-effacing. He talked about his writing process and about the research he did for each book, and then read a little bit from his newest, Gold, and answered questions from the audience.

Cleave’s approach, as a journalist-turned-author, is to investigate “timeless questions in a timely manner.” For Incendiary, the question was, “Why do governments take better care of rich people than poor people?” For Little Bee (published as The Other Hand in the U.K.), the question was, “Should we step outside our comfort zone to bring others into it?” And for Gold, the question was, “How much ambition should we give up in the name of love?”

Olympians, Cleave pointed out, have “a different scale of ambition.” For Olympic athletes, unlike the rest of us, it is “necessary for everyone else in the world to fail” for them to win. Rivalries are intense; but rivalry is similar to “romantic love…[it] lifts both people up better than they could have been individually.” In Gold, Zoe and Kate train together and push each other to be their best, each hoping that her best is the best.

In researching Gold, Cleave interviewed top-level athletes, as well as doctors and nurses at a children’s hospital. “These people operate at such emotional extremes….It’s my job to describe indescribable things…[to visit the] extreme edges [of] exceptional lives and report back.” Cleave also trained on a bicycle himself, discovering a “savage joy” in winning (“That’s why you do the research, to go out and find things you weren’t expecting”), as well as the “unbridgeable gulf” between top athletes and the rest of us. Cleave said that the race scenes between Kate and Zoe are the heart of the book (“reclaiming action for literary fiction”). As a reader I’m not sure I agree, though the race scenes are well-written and intense.

Of the two high-level struggles in Gold – Kate and Zoe’s rivalry, eight-year-old Sophie’s fight against leukemia – Cleave said, the characters either see the difference or they don’t. Kate, as Sophie’s mother, has more often sacrificed ambition for love than love for ambition; Zoe is the opposite, and whether she will or can change is one of the central questions of her character and of the book.

After Cleave read a brief passage from Gold (Kate and Zoe’s coach Tom Voss speaking with Zoe’s agent on the phone, early in the book), there was a Q&A period. The first question was, “How do you write children well?” As a father of three children (or “experimental subjects”), he observes closely, with special attention to speech patterns; Charlie, from Little Bee, was closely modeled on Cleave’s eldest son. “Moments are ephemeral, you have to preserve them,” he said. “I’m nostalgic for the present even before it’s become the past.”

Why, I asked, did all three of his books contain infidelity? “I’m interested in people who are in transition,” he answered. People in steady states aren’t interesting; you don’t see many novels about happy marriages. When characters are in flux/in crisis/changing, “there’s only so much you can change” – your city, your job, your partner. Infidelity isn’t one of Cleave’s “timeless questions,” and his writing about it is remarkably free of judgment.

Another woman in the audience asked how Cleave wrote women characters so well. “Well there is a lot of dressing up involved,” he joked. Asking taboo questions during interviews was one successful tactic; wearing headphones (sound off) in public was another. He then explained an early rule he set for himself: “[I’m] not writing about me.” Counter to the common advice to “write what you know,” Cleave sets out to “cross a boundary every time” he picks up a pen. “I’m very curious about people,” he said, and one can tell from his books that he is a careful listener and close observer indeed.

During the book signing after the reading and Q&A, Cleave was polite and engaging. When I asked him if he had ever considered another outcome for Sophie, he said right away that he had, in the first draft, but he changed it. “Sensitive readers,” however, will pick up on certain sentences that are so full of foreboding that they have nearly the same impact as another outcome would have done. (Sorry if that’s vague; I’m trying to avoid spoilers.)

All in all, I now have even more respect for this author than before. If he comes through your city or town on his tour, I encourage you to go see him, and of course I highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of Gold.

Read the Goodreads interview with Chris Cleave.

Chris Cleave’s books on Goodreads:

There’s been plenty of buzz about Karen Walker Thompson’s debut novel, The Age of Miracles. Often I’m skeptical of hype, but I did enjoy this book very much. Rather than jumping on the post-apocalyptic or dystopian bandwagon, The Age of Miracles is a slightly different genre, “speculative fiction.” It reminds me of Alan Weisman’s nonfiction thought experiment book, The World Without Us, which examines what would happen to the planet if humans disappeared. In this case, however, the premise is that the earth’s rotation – for some undiscovered and unexplained reason – has slowed.

This, of course, has immediate and drastic effects on ordinary life for the narrator, Julia, and her family and friends. Unlike most post-apocalyptic or dystopian books, here the reader gets to experience the transition itself, rather than being dropped into a world after the catastrophe – whether natural or man-made – has occurred. In addition to “the slowing,” there are the changes Julia would be going through anyway as an eleven-year-old girl; the author’s focus is on character and theme, on the effects of the slowing rather than its cause.

Julia narrates her childhood in the past tense, at a distance of several years. Her reflection is more matter-of-fact than nostalgic: “One thing that strikes me when I recall that period of time is how rapidly we adjusted. What had been familiar once became less and less so…But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth” (82).

There is no definite solution to the slowing, no wrapping up of loose ends or determination of the narrator’s ultimate fate. Julia and her friend Seth’s message, written in wet concrete, serves as the conclusion: We were here.

Beautifully written and thought-provoking, I can see this inspiring great discussions in book clubs.

He keeps his deepest belief tight to him: that people are good and want to be good, if only you give them a chance. That’s the most magnificent thing about Arcadia, he knows. It is the shell that protects them. (98)

I just finished Arcadia by Lauren Groff two days ago, and I’m inclined to agree with the back-of-book blurb from Richard Russo: “It’s not possible to write any better without showing off.” I have enjoyed Groff’s previous work (The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds) and she just seems to be getting better. Arcadia is the story of Bit, who was born to hippie parents on a commune – Arcadia – in rural New York. The first sections of the book are his childhood and teenagerhood in Arcadia, as the commune evolves and eventually dissolves. Then there is a skip forward in time, and Bit is an adult living in New York City, with a small daughter and a disappeared wife. The final section, which takes place in the near future (2018), is full of hope and fear: a pandemic, SARI, is sweeping the globe. At the same time, Bit’s mother Hannah is dying of ALS. Hannah, Bit, and Bit’s daughter Grete return to the house Bit’s father Abe built in Arcadia to wait out the pandemic and take care of Hannah.

The imagination required to create the atmosphere of Arcadia and the character of Bit is similar to that of Room, Emma Donoghue’s novel about a boy who has spent his whole life in one room, and is overwhelmed by the world when he escapes. As the 1970s end and the commune crumbles, Bit’s entire way of life, everything he has known and that has been normal to him, disappears, and he has to learn to live in the world “outside.” (Regretfully, this transition doesn’t get its own section, but it is briefly sketched out in the adult Bit’s memories.)  Everyone must leave their childhood behind, but it is a rare case in which the whole community and its way of life ceases to exist as well. “It isn’t important if the story was ever true,” Bit realizes. “…He knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like the wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves (208).

One of the things that does remain is Bit’s relationships with others from Arcadia; most of them reconnect later in life. Many also end up in New York City, which would seem to be the opposite of a commune, but in fact has similarities. as Bit says to his father Abe, “It wasn’t the country that was so beautiful about the whole Arcadian experiment, don’t you see? It was the people, the interconnection, everyone relying on everyone else, the closeness. The villages are all dying now, small-town America is dying, and the only place where the same feeling exists now is here, in the city, millions of people all breathing the same air” (208).

Overall, this is a work of tremendous imagination and empathy. I would suggest it to anyone, particularly those who enjoyed Groff’s earlier work, Emma Donghue’s Room, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted any book reviews here (though I’m always active on Goodreads). I realized recently that the last several books I’ve read are either very new or haven’t been published yet, but all come out this summer, so I’m offering a little preview.

Broken Harbor by Tana French (July 24, 2012)
This is the fourth Dublin Murder Squad book. I hesitate to call it a series, because you can read the books in any order and they are all perfectly good standalone novels; however, characters in one book often appear in the other books. Broken Harbor features detective Scorcher Kennedy, who investigates what looks like a quadruple-homicide in a housing development called Brianstown (an area that used to be called Broken Harbor). Together with his rookie partner, Kennedy digs for the truth, relying on expertise and instinct. French does a beautiful job maintaining the suspense throughout, and there’s real character development there as well. I’d rank this just below The Likeness (my favorite of hers), and if you’re looking for a good creepy murder mystery with some good twists and turns, this one’s for you.

The Red House by Mark Haddon (June 12, 2012)
Author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and A Spot of Bother, Haddon follows those two successes with another. It may take some time to adjust to the style of storytelling – point of view often changes from one paragraph to another – but once you get to know the characters, the reading experience becomes smoother. The Red House is the story of eight people on holiday, and the way in which Haddon tells the story shows their relationships to each other as well as what is going on in their own lives. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it is very well done.

The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards (August 16, 2012)
I had high hopes for this one, as it is a follow-up to The Little Book, which I adored. The Little Book involved time travel to fin de siecle Vienna, and was fascinating because of its setting, characters, and plot (the time travel bit). The Lost Prince simply isn’t as good. The main character, Eleanor Burden, returns from Vienna with her destiny in her hands: specifically, in a journal that sketches out future events that she must help bring about. She struggles to follow the incomplete instructions, never knowing if her actions are the right ones. She is determined and brave, but the sense of magic and adventure that The Little Book had is lacking in The Lost Prince. Even twists that should have the impact of revelations (relating, for example, to Arnauld “the Haze” Esterhazy’s true past) lack power.

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper (August 21, 2012)
If you liked Tropper’s previous work – How to Talk to a Widower, for example, or This is Where I Leave You – then picking this up is a no-brainer. Again, Tropper delivers a heartbreaking suburban comedy. Silver, our middle-aged male narrator, has an ex-wife, an estranged daughter, supportive parents, and friends in situations similar to his own. His life is stagnant, but when he discovers that he has a life-threatening medical condition, he has to decide if he wants to live or wants to die. For most, this isn’t a tough question, but it takes Silver the length of the book to decide. Meanwhile, there are moments of laughter, introspection, shame, and love. Recommended, especially for fans of Nick Hornby and Michael Chabon.

Gold by Chris Cleave (July 3, 2012)
I missed Cleave’s first two books, Incendiary and Little Bee, but now I see I shall have to go back and look them up, because Gold blew me away. It is the story of three Olympic cyclists – Zoe, Kate, and Jack – their coach, Tom, and Jack and Kate’s eight-year-old daughter Sophie, who has leukemia. Zoe, Jack, and Kate met at age nineteen, and Zoe and Kate have been friends and rivals ever since. They are now thirty-two, and London 2012 will be their last Olympics. Due to a rule change, however, only one of them will be able to qualify to go. Will it be Zoe, who has been racing away from events in her past since childhood, and for whom winning is everything? Or will it be Kate, who, having missed out on Athens and Beijing to take care of Sophie, inarguably deserves to go? The relationships between these five characters, as much as the actual events of the story as it unfolds, are the reason to keep reading. This is a five-star (five-Olympic ring?) book.