The novel begins with Frederick and Jette Meisenheimer, who immigrate from Germany speaking no English, settling in Beatrice, Missouri filled with either unbounded hope (Frederick) or grim despair (Jette). Frederick is determined to be a good American and enlists in World World I, and is shot on the battlefield singing an aria as he untangles his coat from barbed wire. Their son Joseph grows up with his father’s extraordinary voice, though he cannot sing in public, to his shame. His four children, products of a truly happy and loving marriage, encounter their own independent struggles, but grow to find peace together in the barbershop quarter their father encouraged them to become. James, the second child, narrates the story close to the heart once he becomes prominent in it. The worlds of chess, P.G.Wodehouse, and writing help him manage his grief in face of his ultimate loneliness.

Each generation and each character redefines what it means to be American, often steeped in history. Take Lomax, for example, a cornet-playing, moonshine-making black man who befriends the widowed Jette and helps her establish the restaurant that will serve as the family’s livelihood for the rest of the novel. He plays a powerful and influential role with her children (helping shy Joseph at last approach the girl of his dreams through song, and giving Rosa, the second child, the ability to play chess, a game that swallows her frequent despair), who is brutally murdered in a race-spurred hate crime. Or take Martin Leftkemeyer, father of Joseph’s wife, who, as the town’s banker, must repossess homes during the Great Depression and sinks into ever-deeper depression as a result.

Music and food are key part of this novel, but the wide-open story of a family is built more upon its people than anything else, its people and their dreams, many of which are not fulfilled. Some must learn to manage to live with the world they were born into, and handle that very well. And others, like James, the narrator, must eventually look inside himself for his worth. At the very end of this gentle novel, George treats the reader to a stinging surprise that shows the power of his impressive writing. And makes clear the importance of being able to create one’s own peace in a country alternatively unforgiving and glorious.

A Good American will be released on February 7, 2012.

This was the experience of a Victorian scholar I know who has been diagnosed with macular degeneration (the dry kind, she told me wryly, in the tone of someone ordering a martini who doesn’t like to drink). She’s someone I’ve been close to for years, a fascinating expert in her field whose riveting stories of research and primary source detective work keep me at her house visiting for entire days. Her life—and she’s more than 80 years old—has been based on research and the fiction that covers her shelves (including some early and first edition Dickens and Coleridge).

For a person whose internal organs are in such excellent condition (it’s just her joints and that minor part of the human physique called “eyes” that are the problem), this is simply cruel. Especially for a Victorian. It’s precisely something you’d find in late Trollope. I haven’t told her that yet, but when I do, I’m sure our conversation will last hours. But our greatest hope in this situation is in a medium distant from the Victorian age, yet one that would have delighted Victorians, who adored the modern: the computer. Its monitor, at least, on which much of her work can live, is still her friend. And this means her research can continue. For now.

William Morris's "Peacock and Dragon" design, 1878

The designs of William Morris have always fascinated me since I discovered them at age 18. Newly graduated from high school, I took a month-long vacation with my mother to two of my favorite countries: England and France. In England, we stayed with a research colleague of my father for two and a half weeks, then spent three days in Kelmscott, where our hosts, where one member of the couple was another paternal research colleague, introduced me to the world of William Morris. Kelmscott Manor was closed during our visit, but my hosts had many examples of William Morris’s art around their house, and described every room in the Manor to me so well that, with their William Morris book in hand, I felt I had a fairly good understanding of the place. I’ve always liked the dense imagery of his designs, but, without much money after college, I didn’t think much about obtaining any of them for my own dwellings. A Victorian scholar who is a good friend of mine these days piqued my William Morris feelings when I first visited her home and saw her green Willow curtains. As I have been researching details for my current novel, I have delved once more into the world of William Morris and am, to put it mildly, in desperate need of a small fortune to satisfy my present desires.

But what William Morris does for me is more than simply delighting my eye: his designs take me back to those autumn days in Kelmscott. During my visit, I stepped inside a 12^th century barn and, with pigeons softly cooing above my head, thought what the warm, wide space would have felt like to a native of the time. We visited Salisbury Cathedral at my request, where I confessed to my hosts a certain sympathy for St. George’s dragon (they approved) and, over a cup of Darjeeling in the café, I pondered what the stained glass artist had been thinking in depicting such a beautiful creature about to be slaughtered. We saw parts of the Uffington White Horse from a distance (impossible to see the whole but from the air), and my dream of people leaning over those broad lines, carving anew for centuries, made me a silent observer of the landscape for many miles. I felt a powerful draw to history, too, in a field of huge standing stones, surrounded by sheep (“Don’t touch them,” the lady of the couple warned me, “because of the ticks,” so I didn’t, though I touched the stones) where a lit pub nearby was a beacon in the darkening dusk.

When I am at last able to afford my household of William Morris fabrics, I know these memories will be joined by the contemporary actions of my family that will become memories in themselves. The barn and the ancient stones will join my son reading aloud to himself on our Tulip & Rose sofa, nestled into the pattern as if he were a part of it.

This book of captivating paragraphs reads like both a prose poem and a fascinating history of the Japanese women who came to America to marry men they had never seen but through a photograph, often a deceitful one. As a history, it is marvelous, telling the story of the group in a powerful, lyrical, compelling manner. As a poem, it is rich, sharing a vast experience in its lines. As a novel, it offers a unique experience of a group rather than an individual: of the journey to America, of spousal rape, of labor in fields and in houses as servants, of infants who die and ones who live, of children and their growth and shame of their parents’ foreign ways, and of the forced removal of Japanese citizens to camps during WWII.

This is where Otsuka’s novel sings the most. The lists of how people reacted felt extraordinarily real: in a section of “leaving,” she writes:

“Katsuno left her husband’s laundry in San Diego mumbling, ‘Somebody wake me up, please.’”

And, my favorite for its poignancy:

“There was a boy from Parlier who left carrying a blue flannel blanket that still smelled of his room.”

In the final chapter, entitled “A Disappearance,” the narrator shifts. No longer is it the Japanese collective protagonist but the Westerners who remain behind, neighbors who valued the quiet and neat Japanese but never bothered to read the notices on the telephone poles. Their regret is clear, but never maudlin. And there is humor, too, such as when an assistant pastor’s wife opens a letter beginning, “Darling, am all right” and wonders who “Hatsuko” is. The eventual forgetfulness of those who remained behind is tragic, but chillingly believable. Rumors are heard of antique trains traveling over mountains, never stopping, in whose window a Japanese woman’s face was briefly glimpsed looking tired. And that is the final sight we have of the women we have followed.

I hope that Otsuka’s short novel is widely read, and widely discussed.

George Grossmith as "Ko-Ko" in Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Mikado." Think "The flowers that bloom in the spring tra-la…"

A grim winter day in New England is never the best time to learn about bad news, especially the economic kind that sinks one’s very heart. A friend had that experience when she was told that the garden center in which she works is being closed for the winter. The main office is still going to be open, and seeds will be planted, but the retail operation, which supplies our area with pots, houseplants, birdseed, and cards, will be shut from January until spring. And my friend has no work for those months.

That’s hard for most people, but especially hard for her. With two children and a husband who already works two jobs, the economic impact in her household is not going to be easy. And she’s not the only person I know who is suffering in this economy: a colleague in my own workplace has had to take a second job after a separation from her spouse because her full-time work (after nearly five years with our organization) doesn’t pay her enough to make ends meet.

Soup kitchens are struggling in our area. So are land trusts. So are animal shelters and libraries. These are all organizations I care deeply about and support when I can, and they serve my community in important ways. But we also need an organization to help people like my friends, people who have work, are willing to work, and who make a difference in the places where they work. In this society, however, I’m not sure what organization could fill that role.

My writing revolves around the Victorian world, and my characters are often economically disadvantaged. In my completed historical novel, one of my protagonists muses about the marvelous feeling of truly good tea in his mouth and wonders if the wealthy people who can regularly afford it ever realize what it really tastes like. It’s been hard for me as a writer not to have a wealthy person swoop down and make my characters’ lives better, just as it’s hard for me as a person with scant disposable income to hear of my friends’ struggles, like to many others in the U.S. these days, and know of so few options to help them. We simply must hope, and, like my characters, keep trying to find a way to hold happiness close to our hearts. It’s not always easy, but may this new year justify not simply hope but happiness for those who work to make this world a better place.

This narrative shifts, from the late 1880s at the time of the Scottish Exhibition in Glasgow, to the 1930s in London where an elderly Harriet is writing, as she describes it, the story of Ned Gillespie, the artist who was never recognized as he deserved. The narrative begins with a focus on Ned as an artist, and follows him with a casual initial mention of his family as if merely to illustrate the background of his struggles. But swiftly the narrative leaves his art in the background and it is the Gillespies themselves—Ned, his wife Annie, his mentally-disturbed young daughter Sibyl, and his four-year-old Rose—who are the center of the story. They share that center with Harriet, who is always hovering about their home, first having her portrait painted by Annie, an amateur but talented artist of her own right, and then as a result of the friendship that blossoms during that work. But it is a friendship that we hear of only from Harriet’s perspective, and small signs—Harriet’s observation of Annie’s occasional impatience—hint that her life within the Gillespies’ world may not be as welcome as she’d like to believe.

We trust the narrator’s voice increasingly less each time she writes about the 20^th century. While writing her memoir, Harriet struggles with suspicions about her maid, Sarah, whom she suspects to be a grown-up Sibyl in disguise. It becomes increasingly clear that Harriet’s obsession with Sarah’s “true” identity verges on the fringe of insanity, and the reader’s perception of that affects the next 1880s section.

A tragedy strikes the Gillespie family when young Rose is abducted from the street, unseen, and, of course, Harriet is in the midst of their search. (Spoiler alert) Months pass, and the child is not found, and Harriet thinks only of having the Gillespies come to the country house in which she is living where Ned can paint, Sibyl can run free, and she and Annie can be good friends. Sibyl, who was supposed to be watching Rose when her sister disappeared, has a history of disturbing acts (from drawing obscene pictures on the wall to dropping rat poison in the punch at a New Year’s celebration), twice attempts to kill herself, and is at last put in an asylum, a move that wrenches her parents apart.

Harriet has been a bystander—once who has continually nudged into all the action—all this time, but becomes central to the novel herself when she is arrested for Rose’s kidnapping and murder. I feared that the prison sequence would be tiring—neo-Victorian novelists are often too fond of prisons and asylums, settings that grow dull for the unsubtle horrors endemic within them—but the novel goes much deeper. As Harriet attempts to manage life in prison before her trial, we begin to wonder how innocent she truly is—not in Rose’s disappearance or murder, but in her meddling with the Gillespies’ lives. During her trial, we see full evidence of this meddling, learn how frequently unwelcome it was, and feel the slimy weight of her leech-like presence during the most difficult moments of their lives. But while we feel a degree of horror on behalf of Ned and Annie, it is accompanied by pity for Harriet, whose loneliness and empty life become all too clear.

Gillespie and I is a powerful story of utter loneliness. Early on, I wondered why it was set in the 1880s and 1930s rather than exclusively in the 20^th century, but realized upon finishing the answer to my constant question for historical fiction of why that time: such loneliness was most powerful conveyed in the rush and glitter of the Scottish Exhibition and the busy city around it. At the end, it is not easy to like Harriet, but it is quite easy to empathize with her. Such a lonely life, with additional ramifications that the narrative hints at, make one willing to lend Harriet Baxter the company of one’s mind.

But as in any state of wabi-sabi, Sloth offers myriad opportunities for perfection.

Extended bed time can be marked by conversations with a family member about a debut author’s novel of a 9/11 memorial or what could finally persuade David Cameron to lose his temper with Nick Clegg, and in that way be made a period of contemplation. A stained teacup could supply the natural imperfection demanded of wabi-sabi (add crookedly cut toast for a nice complement). Porcupine hair and a robe—why, that’s not only the perfect uniform for a morning of natural thought, but a prompt to do laundry, as well as an excuse to chase a child while roaring. But reading, wherever it is done, in a state of assumed Sloth or not, is in itself a noble activity; its Slothfulness is a myth created by non-writers and non-readers.

This is all to justify my post-Christmas morning. That it was spent with the two charming men of my family who were equally committed to such a state of glorified Sloth (and one to Legos) meant that it was a very good morning indeed.