Brushes with Cape Cod

Coincidentally, I picked up two novels that have connections to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Each of these books is new fiction that is notable and one or both may appear on 'best of' lists at the end of this year.

Truth In Advertising: A Novel by John Kenney

Finbar Dolan is admittedly a pretty average guy who wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life and somehow ended up on Madison Avenue convincing us to buy a certain brand of diapers.  Then, he broke up with his fiance shortly before their wedding.  He could have been unlikable and indulgent but he's quite the opposite.  One of four children to an abusive father and a beloved mother, victim to a tragic childhood that unfolds through flashbacks, Fin is the one compelled to do the right thing, most often not the easy choice.

Meanwhile, the family he was born into is not one giving him support and comfort.  Fortunately he finds that support in his workplace, the cocoon of a Madison Avenue ad agency, strangely enough.

This novel is funny and ironic with a skeptical protagonist front and center, but simultaneously has a bittersweet commentary about family and if blood really is thicker than water and whether that really matters.


Wise Men: A Novel by Stuart Nadler

Sometimes a book starts off strong and goes a direction we don't want to follow, waiting for it to get back on track.  You wonder, where is it going?  Am I going to be sorry I stayed for the ride?  If you stick with Wise Men, you won't be sorry.  This book hooked me in the beginning, but I was quite sure I was in for the story of a poor family gone rich and the ramifications of that, when young white Hilly met the black handyman's young niece, Savannah on 1950s Cape Cod.  A cliche class/race romance at a time when these things were not simple at all?  Not that they are simple now.

But this was not the story.  This set the stage for THE story.  Hilly Wise, son of now prominent New York attorney Arthur Wise, moved with his parents to their Cape Cod home the summer before his studies at Dartmouth.  The events of that summer would reverberate throughout the lives of Hilly's family and Savannah's for their foreseeable futures and beyond.

The story spanned decades.  Questions were left unanswered throughout and the fear that they never would be addressed dwelled in your mind.  If you want a book you won't be able to put down, this might be the one.    You will ask WHY things happened in Cape Cod, Summer of 1952.  The book finally answers you.  After you're answered, both satisfied and surprised, you will reconsider everything you just read.

I read, therefore I am,
the lowercase b