Short Cuts by Raymond Carver

I remember seeing Robert Altman's film Short Cuts several years ago and even though I couldn't put it all together, I was fascinated by the characters. I felt the same way reading Short Cuts by Raymond Carver on which the film was based. It is a series of vignettes, each giving me the feeling that I had dropped into someone's life mid-sentence. The stories deal with married couples experiencing distress ranging from the great, losing a child, to the small, hunting for a lost dog. There is no real resolution to them, you don't know what has come before or what will happen after, but I felt that I had shared an intense moment in someone's life. I hope to read more of Carver.

Homesick Creek: A Novel by Diane Hammond

Homesick Creek is set on the central Oregon coast. It is the story of two marriages. Anita, a former beauty queen with high hopes, is now middle-aged and overweight with very little expectations for her future. She fantasizes of a real home, a double-wide trailer she knows she'll never have. She is married to Bob, a weak, ineffectual alcoholic with a secret life who seems to take everything and give nothing to his marriage. The other story is that of their friends, Bunny and Hack. Hack is a Vietnam vet who has drifted into town with lots of secrets of his own. He is a car salesman with a roving eye married to Bunny, waitress at the local diner. Bunny and Anita have been best friends since childhood and lean on each other for support. Bunny seems to be marking time, waiting for the pain of Hack's leaving. Hack has other reasons for staying which become clear as the novel develops. The characters are very finely drawn and Hammond does a good job of describing how little they can settle for. There were the elements in the plot I expected, alcoholism, drug use, bitterness and despair. But also some I didn't expect which made it a much more satisfying story.

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

I had some difficulty getting into this book. Although not strictly autobiographical, West has based the characters on her family. The story revolves around the fortunes of the Aubrey family. The narrator is Rose, one of the four children of Piers, a small time newspaper editor and pamphleteer, and Clare, formerly a concert pianist who gave up her career upon marriage. Rose struck me at first as another example of the peculiarly British fictional character, the very precocious child who patronizes and condescends to the adults around her. But as I continued, I began to realize that West had created Rose with an adult eye so that she could describe their failings and weaknesses of the others while at the same time loving them with a child's unquestioning love. She describes her father with the words "sneering" and "swaggering", while expressing her adoration. The mother is so sensitive that hearing music performed by one who is not gifted makes her physically ill and yet she is the strength in the family, holding them together through poverty and disappointment. I gradually became fond of them all and fascinated by their lives. My biggest disappointment was the ending, which ends abruptly, almost as if the narrator suddenly put her pen down and had no chance to continue.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I've just finished The Help and was pleasantly surprised. This was a selection of my book group and I probably wouldn't have searched it out on my own. It's a theme that has been dealt with so many times, black servants/white employers in the south, that I wondered what the author would add. But she has created some compelling characters and I found myself unable to put it down. The main white character, Skeeter, is a well-to-do, educated young woman in Jackson, MS, in the early 60’s. She is doesn't quite fit the southern belle pattern, not because she doesn't want to, but because she doesn't measure up, being socially awkward, very tall, and not especially pretty. She has graduated from college and struggles to reconcile what she has learned in college with what her mother and peers expect of her, mainly a good marriage. Her character is a foil to the other young white women, who range from those blindly following the community social leaders, to those leaders, acting from ignorance and hate. But Skeeter is amazingly naïve in her understanding of how the black maids she encounters regard their employers, even though she is interested in the maids as persons.
Aibileen is one of the black maids, an older woman who has lost her only son to white violence. Her best friend, Minny, is younger, and the mother of four children. Both work in white homes, as maid and nanny to the children. Stockett does a good job of describing the complex mix of love for the children and resentment of the mothers that these women experience. Like the other black women who work as maids, they are totally dependent on the good will of the employers for their livelihood. This tension drives the unfolding of the plot.
The characters and the stories seem very real. I recommend this as an entertaining and interesting story.