Books to Read When Your Brain Has Melted
Consider these the literary equivalent of a day spa: sink in,
tune out, turn page, turn page, turn page.
1 of 7
A Small Indiscretion
By Jan Ellison
336 pages;
Random House
Thirty odd years ago, after her alcoholic father spends her
savings, a broke and lonely
Annie Black lands a job with a handsome, unhappily married architect. Seduction
ensues as her boss' wife openly conducts an affair with a photographer who, in
turn, conducts an affair with—yes, you guessed it—Annie
Black. All this soap-opera action makes for delicious, lazy-day reading. Just
don't underestimate the writing. Ellison describes her various love triangles
in lavish prose, such as the daydreams that fill Annie's life with "a
colored emotional fluorescence with which the plain waking world could not
compete." Other parts of the book revolve around Annie's later life as a
mother and her adult son's mysterious car accident. While these add
tension—will her son survive? What do his past mistakes have to do
with hers?—the real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate
flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a
young woman in a foreign land who thrills at the pleasure of buying a cheap
scarf or eating dinner at the boarding house ("the thick gravies, the
custards and puddings and soft, fat rolls") and believes that "any
false step I made now would be mine alone. Any foolish moves would be private
business that had no bearing on the hopes and dreams of others." As if our
pasts stay where they were created—and never follow us home.
— Leigh Newman
Published 02/06/2015