Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson, 2010, * * *

It is always cause for celebration when a debut author bursts on the scene with an original and whimsical novel that is bound to capture attention. And this novel -- Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- has much to recommend it. Major Pettigrew is a very proper and delightfully droll widower of 68 who resides in the quaint village of Edgecombe St. Mary in Sussex, England. He is also the father of Roger, a posturing and preening young man who has incorporated none of the values of his father.  The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more.  The two of them must navigate the gossip and outright prejudice of their stilted society. It is also a charming English comedy of manners and, in places, a laugh-out-loud read. A scene, for example, where the atrocities of "Pakistani Partition" are reduced to a bad-taste dinner show or where the favored ducks of schoolchildren are chosen as prey for a duck hunt are spot-on. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand touches on many big issues: the clash of culture and religions, the greed of unbridaled globalization, the tension between fathers and sons, and family dynamics in general. At its heart, though, it is an old-fashioned love story and an ode for anyone who refuses to give up on life or love at any stage of life.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett, 2009, * * * *

In her tale of an aspiring white writer in 1960s Mississippi who decides to secretly compile the untold stories of black domestic workers, Kathryn Stockett attempts to work out her own complicated feelings about race relations in her native South. She throws herself into the attempt with gusto and gravitas, a risk that pays off to a point. Skeeter Phelan is a misfit, a 24-year-old college grad growing uneasy with the social hierarchies of home; the two black women who risk their lives and livelihoods to help collect the interviews she seeks, Aibileen and Minny, two black maids, are sympathetically if somewhat predictably, drawn while the the white characters have the least dimension. Other characters feel stock and could have used more dimension. There is also the matter of a white author writing in “black” voices. It is easy to understand black idioms as an aesthetic choice but the white characters appear free of the linguistic quirks that white Southerners have. There's also the narrative rut of downtrodden but world-wise blacks showing white people their own souls, leading them out of a spiritual wilderness to their better selves. The Help has much more on its mind than that, but it doesn't always avoid going down a road too well traveled  Despite my comments, it was still one of the best reads I had last year, and I have no doubt that a great movie will be made from this story.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, 2009 * * * *

Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. What Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family and it makes for great nonfiction. This is the true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a successful Syrian-born painting contractor, who decides to remain in New Orleans and protect his property while his wife and four children leave prior to the storm. After the levees break, he uses a small canoe to rescue and feed people and animals but is eventually arrested by an armed squad at his home and swept powerlessly into a vortex of bureaucratic brutality. Eggers, compiling his account from interviews, resists rhetorical grandstanding, letting injustices speak for themselves. His skill is most evident in how closely he involves the reader in Zeitoun’s thoughts. Thrown into one of a series of outdoor wire cages, Zeitoun speculates, with a contractor’s practicality, that construction of his prison must have begun within a day or so of the hurricane. Having volunteered in New Orleans post Katrina, I believe that Dave Eggers has managed to convey the lawlessness, breakdown in communication, and hopelessness that existed in that city.