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.

You'll Enjoy It When You Get There: the Stories of Elizabeth Taylor / 428 pp.

What a thrill to find this among our new books: an esteemed English novelist and short-story writer from mid-twentieth century whose work has been overlooked in the U.S. in recent years.  (And no, she was never married to Richard Burton; that was another Elizabeth T.)  These stories, written between 1950 and 1975 and many published first in The New Yorker, are, to this reader, fantastic.  They are 'small' stories set in middle-class homes in suburban England, but Taylor's powers of observation are tremendous.  Many critics describe her claustrophobic marriages dark and twisted; I found her descriptions rather compassionate instead.  Consider this description, from Sisters: "...the massive, mottled flesh beneath, creased, as it must be, from its rigid confinement, or the suspender imprints at the top of her tapering legs.  Her navel would be full of talcum powder."  It sounds cruel, but as the story plays out, it's clear that Taylor is beyond mere mockery.  Brilliant and subtle, Elizabeth Taylor gets my vote!