Prose and Cons

Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June is a svelte, finely crafted exploration of faithfulness, forgiveness, and family. Her sentences string together like the lace of a wedding veil, a gossamer that reveals complexity when held up to the light.

The domestic drama centres on Gail and Max, a divorced couple whose opposing temperaments mirror the eternal Tyler question: how do difficult people find love?

Gail, recently ousted as assistant headmistress for her lack of social grace, represents Tyler’s archetype of the prickly outsider. Max, with his impromptu arrival (shelter cat in tow) and easy charm, is the social butterfly who might save her. It’s territory Tyler explored before, notably in The Accidental Tourist.

Tyler’s skill lies in making Gail’s social ineptitude both cringe-worthy and endearing. When she bluntly tells a wealthy parent that their daughter “doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton,” we wince and laugh. But beneath the comedy lies a deeper truth: her frankness makes her uniquely qualified to provide the raw honesty required for true forgiveness. Her bluntness is both her curse and salvation.

The novel’s crisis arrives when Debbie discovers her fiancé’s infidelity on the eve of their wedding. When she shares the news with her parents, it brings old wounds to the surface: Gail, too, had a brief affair with a colleague while married to Max, leading to their divorce.

Max, the wronged party in his marriage, advocates for patience and forgiveness, while Gail, the former adulterer, pushes for the wedding to be canceled. This reversal suggests our harshest judgments stem from unresolved guilt.

Debbie decides to proceed with the wedding. “I refuse to be one of those wives who hold a grudge forever. Who won’t forgive their husbands for one little stupid mistake,” she says.

Gail and Max are left to confront the infidelity that caused their divorce. Max opens the door to forgiveness not with dramatic speeches, but with thoughtful gestures. The man who used to leave a clutter in his wake now prepares lunch (grilled cheese and frozen pot pies) and does the dishes.

Their icy standoff begins to thaw. The cat Max brought acts as a stand-in for himself. It gets comfortable at the house. Gail, initially insistent she wouldn’t adopt the cat, gradually warms to it, allowing it to sit on her lap while she scratches its ears.

Tyler captures the intimacy of spouses—how they complete each other’s stories, anticipate reactions, and share a vocabulary built over decades. As Gail eats lunch with Max at one of their old haunts, she reflects on “those married couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks… branching out and doubling back like a piece of crochet work,” showing how a shared history can bring both pain and comfort.

Tyler concludes her story with understated grace. When Max leaves and returns moments later, the scene feels inevitable—but not contrived. The parallel resolutions of parent and child suggest not that history repeats itself, but that each generation must find its own path to reconciliation.

Tyler mines profound truths from ordinary lives. Three Days in June is a triumph that shows why, after twenty-five books, she remains one of our best chroniclers of family life.

“Three Days in June” by Anne Tyler was published Feb 11, 2025, by Alfred A. Knopf. This review was of an uncorrected proof from the publisher.

“Anyway, I think, she’s dead, and though I loved her, I now have both the time and freedom to write my essay on Montaigne . . .” With these startling words, Mark Haber launches his tragicomic third novel, Lesser Ruins. It’s a story of a widowed professor who immerses himself in an endless academic project, apparently more concerned with footnotes than grief.

Yet as the novel unfolds, what at first appears callous turns out to be a defence mechanism. The narrator makes avoidance an art form, embracing distraction to avoid his grief. He can’t stand to go near his wife’s closet, which still smells of her, so he avoids it. Happy memories of their life together lead to despair, so he casts them aside. The structure of Lesser Ruins mirrors this evasion, each digression a way to avoid confronting grief.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Haber balances heavy emotional themes with genuine humour. The passage about an espresso machine exploding under the narrator’s desk is raucously funny. The constant calls from his son, Marcel, a DJ with a tendency toward lengthy monologues on electronic dance music, are also hilarious.

The narrator’s book on Montaigne, the French Renaissance scholar and inventor of the essay, never materializes. He spends years obsessing over the project but produces only hundreds of potential titles and notes on tangential topics. His excuse is that he requires a “mental Sahara” of uninterrupted focus. But he’s betrayed by his eagerness to respond to distractions. Each hankering for coffee or ping from his phone becomes another escape from the task at hand—and from the grief that lurks behind it.

Even when the narrator secures his coveted “mental Sahara” at an artist’s colony, he swiftly manufactures a fresh diversion: fixating on the absurd thirty-minute checkout limit for Montaigne’s diary. The perfect conditions reveal that distraction isn’t something that happens to him—it’s something he creates. This becomes even clearer through his encounters with his neighbour Kleist, a Holocaust survivor and sculptor who represents everything he isn’t. Unlike our narrator, she transforms her trauma into art, creating sculptures that confront past horrors. But her tragic end raises the question of whether this method of handling grief is more effective than our narrator’s constant distraction.

Lesser Ruins transforms mundane modern habits—checking our phones, pursuing the perfect cup of coffee—into something comic and profound. These aren’t just distractions. They’re survival mechanisms in a world where grief competes with push notifications for our attention. The narrator’s inability to write his Montaigne book becomes less about writer’s block and more about the fundamental nature of modern loss.

The fragmentary structure of Lesser Ruins won’t suit everyone. Some may find its three-paragraph format and constant digressions challenging, but that’s what makes this book special. By immersing us in the narrator’s scattered consciousness, Haber achieves something rare: a novel that captures both our current cultural condition and the timeless struggle to face mortality. It’s an impressive achievement that, unlike its narrator’s diversions, demands and rewards our complete attention.

Playground, the latest from Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Powers, uses the island of Makatea as a microcosm for contemporary debates about AI, environmental justice, and neocolonialism. Through its exploration of the interconnectedness of humanity, technology, and nature, it challenges us to confront the choices and consequences before us.

Blurred lines abound in Playground, where past overlaps with present, human detritus entwines with nature, and artificial intelligence tangles with its progenitor: the human mind. The experience is disorienting. I often flipped back and forth to remind myself of the time period. Certain characters disappear from the narrative for long stretches, forcing me to consult my notes. But perhaps disorientation is the intended effect. By jumping between time periods, characters, and settings, Powers invites us to question convention. The text’s structure puts us in a speculative mood – and makes us more receptive to unconventional ideas.

For example, Powers questions the rote dichotomy between humans and nature. As cohabitants of the same pale blue dot, there’s more that unites than divides us. As Evie, an oceanographer who has been subaquatic since her father chucked her into a pool to test an aqualung prototype, says, “No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers.”

This comments on our limited knowledge (80 per cent of the ocean remains uncharted and unseen). But more so, it challenges the idea that humans and nature are separate. We are part of nature. So much so that we cannot see the metaphorical forest for the trees or, rather, the ocean for the puddle.

Powers uses evocative imagery to break down this barrier between the human and natural. Octopuses use glass jars to replace shells they’ve lost to evolution. Pygmy seahorses cling to plastic straws like host kelp. Ina, a sculptor on Makatea, collects plastic from the belly of a dead seabird for one of her creations.

This can be read as a comment on overconsumption and pollution, and in a sense, it is. But more so, it’s an assertion that humanity is not separate from nature. They are one and the same. We drink from the same cup, and humanity is poisoning the well.

Much in the same way, the novel questions the dichotomy between human and machine. AI evolves rapidly, making it hard to distinguish between genuine and artificial intelligence.

A generation before the novel, phosphate mining ravaged Makatea and its inhabitants. Now, they face a choice: welcome back outsiders wanting to use the island as a launch point for a techno-futuristic floating city, or cling to their traditional way of life.

Before voting, they consult an advanced AI named Profunda, shared by Todd Keane, the main narrator and initiator of the floating city project. It’s an evolution of the titular Reddit-esque social media site he created after stealing the idea from Rafi Young, his one-time friend and Go companion who now lives on Makatea.

Profunda can manipulate human emotions and actions. As the islanders interact with it, we must ponder whether it is an impartial intelligence or manipulating them for its creator.

We’ve poisoned the oceans. Who’s to say we haven’t poisoned AI? After all, it is trained on the Internet, a veritable ocean of humanity’s best and worst.

I won’t spoil the ending by revealing the islander’s decision, but I was pleasantly surprised. The disorienting experience of reading Playground left me unprepared for the resounding conclusion, where Powers weaves the disparate threads of this tale together with rare skill.

Playground (2024) by Richard Powers is published by Random House. Pages: 400. It was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 Kirkus Prize.

Originally published in The Creemore Echo.

If you’re looking to cozy up and get lost in a ripping yarn, Held by Anne Michaels isn’t the book for you. But if you’re up for confronting life’s biggest questions, it might be your cup of tea.

The novel opens in 1917 with John, a severely injured British soldier reminiscing about his lover, Helena, from a First World War battlefield. The narrative jumps to 1920, where he reunites with her and reopens his photography business. It follows their lives and their descendants, including their daughter, Anna, her husband Peter, and their daughter Mara. Like her grandmother, Mara is a nurse in a field hospital, much to the dismay of her war- journalist lover, Alan.

Held, which recently won the Giller Prize, defies convention. There are no recognizable character arcs or tidy plots with satisfying resolutions. It unfolds in fragments, giving it a dreamlike quality. Characters flit in and out. Time shifts between past, present, and future.

Michaels challenges us to engage with this structure. She leaves space between the fragments for us to fill. Like memory, the novel avoids linearity. Past intrudes on the present. Pieces disappear, lost to time.

War binds the narrative, manifesting in John’s lasting injuries, the ghostly figures in his photographs of war widows, and the anxiety connecting Peter and Alan across generations. This motif reinforces the novel’s exploration of how trauma echoes through time.

But so too does love, which appears as both counterpoint and companion to war’s devastation. In a touching passage, coastal women intentionally knit errors into the sweaters of their husbands to identify them if they drown at sea. These mistakes are a message sent “into darkness” hoping for a safe return – a metaphor that captures the novel’s central preoccupation with love’s persistence beyond death.

The opening line asks, “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” Can the dead truly be gone when they leave an imprint on the world? Does the fact something can’t be seen, heard, or felt mean it doesn’t exist?

Michaels pulls at these strands. Ghosts appear in John’s photos of war widows. Marie Curie, whose pioneering work with radiation revealed invisible forces shaping our world, appears later in the novel. Her presence reinforces the book’s central metaphysical question: how do we measure or understand that which cannot be seen? Both Curie’s science and John’s ghost-laden photographs suggest that reality extends beyond what’s immediately visible. Ultimately, we are left with only questions, not answers.

While many fragments shimmer with beauty and insight, the novel’s experimental structure comes at a cost. The characters often feel more like vehicles for philosophical pontification than fully realized humans. Their dialogue can be stilted and unrealistic, weighed down by the heavy ideas they’re meant to convey. The book might have been more effective if these existential questions emerged naturally from believable interactions.

The dialogue reads like philosophical treatises rather than conversation. Characters speak in aphorisms: “Terror can spring from what’s most ordinary,” says Marcus, to which Sandor responds, “Just as love can.” Even John’s political musings, “No political system operates without free will’s submission,” feel more like lectures than natural speech.

Despite this shortcoming, Held is an ambitious and moving meditation on love, memory, and the visible and invisible bonds connecting us across time. Michaels refuses simple divisions between science and spirituality, life and death, past and present. Like the intentional errors in those coastal sweaters, the novel’s fragmented structure becomes its own kind of message sent into darkness – challenging readers to find meaning in the spaces between.

Originally published in The Creemore Echo

The Nokia Design Archive released earlier this week is a treasure trove of great design. This slide from a 2003 presentation on the “street style” user group (skateboarders, snowboarders, BMX bandits, slam-dunkers, break dancers, stage divers) even includes precursors to AirPods and the Apple Watch.