the coming-out novel is among other things, i’ve taken up smoking, by a writer called aoibheann sweeney (first name pronounced like the word “even”). that i remember, i have read exactly three coming-out novels: rubyfruit jungle, oranges are not the only fruit, and fun home. it’s not a genre i am particularly drawn to. in general, i find teenage identity crises fairly boring and teenage love stories excruciatingly boring, so you see how coming-out novels, which combine both, wouldn’t be my cup of tea. but among other things is a nice book, oddly similar to fun home even though the author apparently didn’t read fun home until after finishing the book. it’s the story of a standoffish gay father with his nose stuck in books (he’s busy translating ovid’s metamorphoses for the duration of the novel, which means more than a decade) and a sweet young girl living together on an island in maine. the father is repressed (though the story changes a bit later), undemonstrative, and neglectful, but you are meant to understand (again, later) that he loves his daughter very much. the daughter brings herself up while craving for her father’s attention, yet she turns out to be remarkably strong and assured. i’m not doing it justice. it’s a nice book, especially the first section, about living on a island entirely your own and being brought up by your father’s secret lover whom you refer to only as mr. blackwell yet love so very much (then, later, stop caring about altogether). the story could be a lot tighter. but it’s a first book, and the writing is good. in fact, the writing is the best thing, and the comparisons between the girl’s life and the stories from metamorphoses are beguiling even when they teeter on the brink of preciousness. mostly, though, i liked the old-fashioned tone, the way this book feels as if it had been written twenty years ago, the slow, foggy, north-englandy, old-timey prose.

queen of dreams is written by veteran indian writer chitra banerjee divakaruni and is quite impressive. at first i didn’t want to like it, because on the surface it’s such a woman’s book, you know, about mothering and making a go at owning a coffee shop with your best friend in the bay area and hating your ex-husband. but i had to succumb to the skill and beauty of the narrative. it starts off as a story about a woman who can see and understand other people’s dreams. this skill, though, is not the focus of the novel in itself, but in the impact it has on the woman’s life and the lives of her husband and daughter. the book’s protagonist is the daughter, rakhi, now an adult (and cafè owner etc.). rakhi’s emotional life has been damaged by the fact that her mother spent so much time on her dream work and so little time on her family. divakaruni moves the focus away from the metaphysical stuff to paint the drama of these three people who loved each other but whose needs and desires were so incompatible that they ended up experiencing abandonment, anger, loneliness, and mutual alienation. i loved the way divakaruni conveys the anguish of love and life in common, the difficulty of being oneself and the member of a family at the same time, the disappointment we are bound to inflict on those we love.

it seems to me that this book is about failure: failure of mothering, failure of loving (chidlren, parents, lovers), failure of functioning in the capitalistic society (the girls have trouble keeping their cafè open against the power of corporations), failure of doing art (rakhi is a painter), failure of following one’s vocation without hurting others. ultimately, rakhi has to grow from feeling wronged and bitter to being person of her own who can take it in the teeth and roll with the punches. divakaruni, though, definitely eschews pat solutions and easy answers, and the book doesn’t end very far from where i started. she also throws in anti-dark-skinned-people sentiment in the aftermath of 9/11. not very clear what that’s doing here, but, at the same time, this is such a brilliantly wandering novel that it doesn’t really matter.