The nice thing about being a novelist over 40 is that you don’t have to struggle to re-create the atmosphere of an era just past because you’ve lived through it. One of the many small pleasures of reading Tricia Wastvedt’s The River (Viking £14.99, offer £11.99) is that as she shifts between decades the vocabulary and manners shimmer effortlessly with her.
In 1958 two children drown in the river running through the sleepy village of Cameldip as their parents make love in their garden tree house. We know this from the start, and it colours our consciousness throughout. Come 1986, Anna, desperate to escape the city, chooses Cameldip by jabbing with a pin. The bereaved mother rents her the treehouse, without realising that Anna’s pregnant, and the baby brings to the surface years of suppressed grief.
It’s a study of the corrosive effect of tragedy on a small community, a marriage, and the human psyche, all the more poignant for being set amid beautiful countryside, and full of brooding sadness right up to the unexpected horror of the ending.
Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints (John Murray £14.99, offer £11.99; Buy the book) presents a slightly less successful panoramic view. Her canvas is three generations of a French-Canadian family, settled in America, and is really rather too big for her. The saint of the title is Yvette, devout Catholic matriarch, who becomes a liar to conceal her teenage daughter’s pregnancy from her husband by contriving to fall out with him and bringing the baby back to the family circle as her own, creating a web of deception that will tangle future generations. It’s long on plot and short on characterisation. You read on because you want to know what Meloy will make her puppets do next, rather than because you care about them much. At times events flash by: one moment Yvette’s grandson is a baby, the next he’s in preschool. You feel that the author is following her plot development chart and is just too bored by the years in between to provide more than the most rudimentary of links.
David Prete’s series of linked short stories, Say That to My Face (Flamingo £10.99, offer £8.79; Buy the book), captures another slice of American immigrant life with the dexterity of an entomologist pinning out a butterfly. We meet feisty Joey Frascone at the age of 4, doing wheelies on the pavement in Yonkers, New York, and wondering why he was sleeping, after his parents’ divorce, in four different homes.
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His distinctive voice, generous, self-aware and dancing to the distinctive rhythms of Italian-American English, guides us through his neighbourhood, past parents who don’t think he’s Italian-American enough for their daughter, to a dream road trip with his friend Benny, who cuts it short to go home to his mother, and on to a journey running drugs from Jamaica. His family walks a boulevard of broken dreams. His father’s high-school year book lists his ambition as “ actor”, his aunt lets slip that she wanted to be a ballet dancer, but got married because “it was the thing to do”. By the end you don’t know where Joey’s headed, but he’s such a life force that you know he’ll be all right.
In a Rome backstreet two young men are drinking coffee in a café when they overhear a blonde American saying that she wants a boyfriend who can cook. What starts as a Moravia short story soon develops into a Goldoni farce with added sex and food. Tommaso woos Laura, an exchange student who is mad on food. Unfortunately he can’t cook, being merely a waiter, so his ugly mate Bruno cooks for him, each meal a declaration of love for Laura, whom he worships from afar.
Naturally the course of true love doesn’t run smooth in Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (TimeWarner £10, offer £8; Buy the book), but all is well in the end. It’s a hymn to la dolce vita and the joy of food by someone who knows his stuff and his stuffing, a text that breathes authentic backstreet Rome from every page. I loved it.
Sensuality takes different forms and Robert Ford writes wonderfully in Rhapsody (Atlantic Books £10.99, offer £8.79; Buy the book) about the visceral pleasures of hearing and making music. A conducting student, Cooper Barrow, comes to Germany to take lessons from the legendary maestro Karlheinz Ziegler. The tone of their relationship is set when Ziegler demands to see him every day for a month to bring him up to standard. He becomes involved with the enigmatic, brilliant oboist Petra, a defector from the East. It’s 1989, and the Berlin wall is falling. Everyone has their secrets, slowly revealed, even Ziegler. Ford, a musician himself, writes as an insider about the violin — “the pliable resistance from the E-string, the tremors back up through his elbow”.
He has an unerring ability to create personality through dialogue and a masterly grasp of German politics. It’s intellectually satisfying as well as emotionally engaging. This is so accomplished a book on so many levels that it is hard to know what, to borrow a musical metaphor, he will do as an encore.