A Field Guide to the North American Family

A Field Guide to the North American Family, an illustrated novella by Garth Risk Hallberg. 127 pages

This is a strange little book. It has an attached ribbon bookmark, as if it were a bird book or a Bible. Some pages are made to appear bent, smudged or doodled upon. Two families who are neighbors on Long Island are discussed in out-of-sequence snippets, alphabetized by headings such as Guilt, Infidelity, Innocence, Rebellion. Each right-hand page has a photo that purportedly helps to illustrate the heading of the prior page, but the photos often seem to add obscurity instead.

Although the book is short and the snippets are brief and incomplete, an aura of drama about these families emerges, a storyline is sketched in.  I was moved, even though I didn't really want to care.

What You Break

What You Break by Reed Farrel Coleman, 357 pages.

Gus Murphy used to be a cop with the Suffolk County PD. He used to be married, and he used to be the father of two children. Now he drives the van to the airport and the train station for a second-rate Long Island hotel, provides security for the place, and works the door of the bar / nightclub on weekends. His son is dead, his wife left him, and a fair number of his former coworkers think that he is not to be trusted. Gus's life has turned to shit, but he has been coming back, slowly, with the help of three of his friends. Slava, who works with him at the motel, saved Gus's life, as did Father Bill, a former priest who quit the church when he regained his long-lost faith. Gus is a believer in loyalty, and he feels that he owes these two friends everything. When Father Bill asks Gus to investigate the murder of a young woman on behalf of her grandfather, someone who is definitely not Bill's friend, Gus agrees. When Slava's secrets start to unravel, Gus feels he has no choice but to help him as well. Deft, artful writing with interesting characters and an interesting plot. I have already put the first book in this series, Where It Hurts, on hold for myself.

Charming Billy / Alice McDermott 308 p.

One of many great things about reading is getting inside the head of someone whose experiences are so different from yours.  Really, I love that about reading.  But when you read an incredibly talented author who apparently has actually met all the members of your extended family and can describe what they eat, the jokes they tell, and the way as restaurant diners they put "...hands in laps to make the poor man's job easier as he reached between their shoulders," well, that is a mind-blower. 

Which is to say that McDermott's book is a small, beautiful story of an Irish Catholic family in mid-century, and the way that faith, alcohol and dreams touch that family, and lots of others as well.