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The Accidental Tourist

Anne Tyler's novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.  It was OK...but I've read other Anne Tyler novels that I thought were a lot better than this one.  Her strength is writing characters who are quirky and flawed and completely human.  No one's perfect and it's the oddities in people that she writes with such empathy.  I think I was originally put off by the disorganized way the book seemed to be written.  It's like she wrote a bunch of stuff in whatever order it occurred to her and then pasted it together.  On reflection, however, I think maybe she did it that way on purpose.  The other strange part for me was that I imagined the characters as much older than they actually were.  The way they were behaving, it made me think of them as being in their 50s, but they were really in their upper 30s.  I kept having to do mental double takes. 

The main character, Macon, is an OCD fellow who writes travel guides for people who don't like to travel.  His life is supremely structured and logical until his son is killed in a robbery related shooting.  Then his wife leaves him, he sort of goes OCD overboard, breaks his leg, and moves back in with his like-minded brothers and sister.  The twist is the unpredictable, flighty dog trainer he has to hire to prevent his dog from attacking people.  As you may guess, Macon develops a relationship with the dog trainer.  In the end, he has to make a choice to go back to his wife or stay with the new woman.

I liked the book.  It's an easy read and entertaining.  I just don't know if I would have considered it award-winning.  Ironically, there's a Q&A at the end of the book and the interviewer asks Anne Tyler what she's reading now.  She responds that she's just fallen in love with Ann Patchett's Bel Canto!  :)

Bel Canto

Alright - time to get serious!  Bel Canto won all sorts of awards, including the Orange Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  The PEN/Faulkner Award is given to the year's best fiction by living American citizens.  Ann Patchett won the award in 2002.

I think the most interesting thing about this book is that it's actually based on true events.  From Wikipedia:

The Japanese embassy hostage crisis began on 17 December 1996 in Lima, Peru, when 14 members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) took hostage hundreds of high-level diplomats, government and military officials and business executives who were attending a party at the official residence of Japan's ambassador to Peru, Morihisa Aoki, in celebration of Emperor Akihito's 63rd birthday. Most of the hostages were soon released. After being held hostage for 126 days, the remaining dignitaries were freed on 22 April 1997, in a raid by Peruvian Armed Forces commandos, during which one hostage, two commandos, and all the MRTA militants died.

In the book, the South American country is unspecified, the party was held at the vice president's house in honor of a Japanese businessman, and the crisis lasted about the same amount of time.  It seems so unbelievable that someone could be a hostage in fairly civil circumstances for that amount of time, but I guess it happens!  Patchett does a great job describing the microcosmos of the terrorists and the hostages.  She gives all the characters an emotional past, present, and future that fits perfectly well within the setting of the story.  I have no idea what the details of the actual real-life terrorist crisis were, but Patchett's version rings so tragically true.  I haven't read any other PEN/Faulkner Award winners, so I don't know if this book meets expectations, but it was certainly a good read...twice!

Outlander

I've waited three months to be able to post about this book for Book Club!  Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, won the RITA Award in 1992.  The RITA Award recognizes outstanding published romance novels and novellas.

I discovered Diana Gabaldon at the National Book Festival in DC.  The 7th book in the Outlander series had just been published and my mother-in-law's friend, Kay, was a fan.  Gabaldon was an amusing speaker and I figured, why not?  I'll give them a try.  Plus, if I like them, that was seven gigantic books to read!  And the books are BIG.  Outlander, at 850 pages, is the smallest one!

Anyway, I LOVE this series.  I love the story, I love the characters, I love the writing.  It's sort of a crazy premise, but Gabaldon is a magician.  She weaves in the magic of standing circle stones with the reality of 18th century day-to-day life in all its ickiness into a love story that is really just breathtaking.  Some of it is horrifyingly graphic.  The rape scene in Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is nothing compared to the descriptions of torture in this book.  But it's not gratuitous.  Everything makes sense.  The detail is incredible and Gabaldon's background doesn't really indicate that she would be good at writing a historical romance novel - she has degrees in zoology, ecology, and marine biology! 

Outlander is so popular, Gabaldon started a spinoff series about one of the supporting characters, Lord John Grey.  I'm starting to read those now.  Totally different feel - much more political and full of shadowy intrigue.