Maggie Shipstead’s prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe.—Maria Semple

SEATING ARRANGEMENTS by Maggie Shipstead

I discovered Shipstead’s work this spring. And what a find. Her writing style speaks to that bastion of the artform: make the writing seem effortless. She does. In spades. In Seating Arrangements, her first novel, the Van Meters have gathered on an island near the cape for the wedding of their oldest daughter, Daphne, who is seven months pregnant. Winn Van Meter, the father of the bride, is preoccupied with his chances of getting into a prestigious private golf club and the crush he has on one of the bridesmaids. After being dumped by her boyfriend, Livia, sister of the bride, sets her sights on one of the groomsmen. Add in the various personalities of the other members of the wedding party and the groom’s family, and it makes for a rollicking weekend of amusing disasters. 

Favorite line(s): She rode a bicycle almost every day at home in Brussels, to and from the restaurant, but she was always having to dodge and dart through fierce swarms of tiny European cars, racing for survival and not pleasure. But this—the air full of salt and bayberry, the sky as iridescent and capacious a the inner membrane of an infinite airship, the slow loosening of her muscles—this was something gorgeous. She needed speed, space, the abrasion of rushing air. Poor Livia was laboring under the illusion of being owed something, some karmic charity, for the pain, but the universe felt no compunction for its cruelties, no sympathy for its victims, especially those who helped misery along with some idiotic bareback sex. 

GOOD COMPANY by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 

If you’re into unique novel structures, this one is a lesson in understated storytelling. I don’t know how Sweeney did it, but she did. Good Company is the story of Flora and Julian, married, both actors, the parents of Ruby, and best friends to Margot and David. When Flora finds Julian’s wedding ring in a file cabinet years after he claimed he lost it, the couples must contend with a secret kept for over a decade. There’s much to admire in the details Sweeney gives us of the profession of acting we never hear about: the voice-over actors, summer theatre snobs, and the behind-the-scenes personalities on the set of a popular hospital show. But more than anything, Good Company is about marriage and friendship.  

Favorite line(s): And even when she questioned his priorities, she accepted them because she thought she and Julian were a team, both playing by the same rules. How to incorporate this information into the story of her life? How to accept that she’d been lied to so grievously, fooled so completely? How to decide if her life—as she’d always thought—had been a series of carefully considered choices or, in light of this new information, a series of unfair accommodations?

THE HENNA ARTIST by Alka Joshi

This was our April book club selection. I didn’t know a thing about henna, its artistry, its makeup and application, its symbolism, but this novel takes us to 1950s India and the life of a struggling henna artist. We’re immersed in the caste stranglehold, the patriarchy of arranged marriages, and the hurdles one woman faces to live an independent life. I found the narrator’s use of medicinal herbs fascinating when medicine and social customs disallowed certain options for women. Another novel that reinforces the problems of the appalling history of male-dominated societies since the dawn of time.  

Favorite line(s): I stood in the passageway just outside our compartment, along the row of windows facing the platform, where porters swathed in mufflers were hauling bags on and off the trains. Important-looking husbands in wool vests, trailed by wives and children, shouted at the baggage handlers to be careful. Families with first-class tickets walked to our part of the train. Most headed to second-class seats. Those who couldn’t afford porters were stuffing their mismatched carriers into the third-class cars, yelling at everyone to make room. The chai-wallas strolled up and down the platform, selling glasses of tea through the car windows. Keeping one eye on the departure schedules, men hurriedly consumed chappati and curried subjis in tiffins prepared by their wives, mothers, sisters, aunts and friends. 

A BURNING by Megha Majumdar

The story about choice and circumstance centers around three protagonists. A young Muslim woman, Jivan, is wrongly accused of firebombing a train full of people that kills more than one hundred. Lovely, an aspiring actress is a so-called hijra and lives in a house with other transgender people. Jivan was her tutor. The package the authorities claim were bombs Jivan carried to the station were actual books she was bringing to Lovely’s house. And PT Sir, a physical education teacher who had Jivan as one of his charity students at the girls’ school where he taught. PT Sir is a moralizing character who quickly assumes Jivan’s guilt because she never thanked him for his kindnesses (sharing food) when she had none. Centered in and around the slums of India, A Burning is a cultural third eye into the institutions (political, religious, caste systems) that undermine and condemn the people it is supposed to protect.  

Favorite line(s): When I am thinking about it, I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled. Is anybody believing that she was innocent? Is anybody believing that I can be have some talent? If I am wanting to be a film star, no casting man or acting coach will be making it happen for me. So I, myself, Lovely with my belly and no-English and dramatic success only in Mr. Debnath’s living room—I am having to do it myself. Even if I am only a smashed insect under your shoes, I am struggling to live. I am still living.  

ABANDON ME by Maggie Shipstead

Shipstead’s second novel is the story of Joan Joyce, a modestly talented ballerina with a NYC touring company in the 1970s. She helps Russian principal dancer, Arslan, defect to the United States. Joan’s unrequited love for Arslan leads her into the arms of Jacob, where marriage, motherhood, and a quiet life as a dance teacher in the suburbs of southern California seem satisfying until her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy. Joan gets caught up once again in the behind-the-scenes dramas of Arslan, his wife, Ludmilla, Joan’s former roommate, Elaine, and Mr. K, the ballet company’s choreographer. The reader feels the cost of ambition and the higher cost of suppressed dreams. Wonderful! 

Favorite line(s): His small eyes turn searching, and Joan slides from her chair to the floor, pretending a sudden need to stretch, taking the scrapbook with her. “I’m going to quit,” she calls up to him. “I mean it.”

“No, darling, you can’t. You mustn’t. Why would you say such a thing?” His chair squeaks, and suddenly he has beached himself across his desk, his piratical beard hanging over her like a storm cloud.

“I’ll never be satisfied.”

“Who wants to be satisfied?”

“Who wants to be tormented by their own inadequacy?”

“Touche.”

“I think if I had just been allowed to toil in obscurity like I’d planned, everything would be better. I would admire Arslan from afar and idolize Ludmilla even though she’s a bitch, but now it all seems so disappointing. So drab. Now I have to think about how if I’d only happened to be more talented, my life would be a thousand times more exciting and I’d get to really dance with him, and he would take me more seriously. It’s like there’s an empty space in the world that was meant for me, but I can’t get inside. I can just bang on the outside.”

GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead

The opening line of the novel, “I was born to be a wanderer,” sets the tone for this satisfyingly meandering story of pilot Marian Graves’s “lifelong love affair with flight.” Set in Prohibition-era Montana and Alaska and London during WWII, the Great Circle interweaves Marian’s story with actress Hadley Baxter, cast to play Marian decades later in a film version of the pilot’s life. What these two women have in common are a cast of characters who author books about Marian’s life and the Hollywood filmmaking machine interested in telling the story. The novel is chock full of aviation history. But Marian and Hadley’s fierce quests for control of their destinies is what sets this novel airborne. Shipstead has become one of my favorite novelists. This, her third book has it all.  

Favorite line(s): It’s really exciting, he said. We’re making something out of nothing. I thought he was talking about us. I wanted to say, that’s what all relationships are, but then he said, well, not nothing. Marian was real, obviously, but people’s lives don’t get preserved like fossils. The best you can hope for is that time will have hardened around someone’s memory, preserving a void in their shape.

Or he said something like that, and I realized he was talking about the movie, not us.

You might find out some things, he said, but it’ll never be enough, never be anything like the Whole Truth. You’re better off just deciding what kind of story you want to tell and telling it.

I think that’s sort of what he said.

I said, But where do we begin? Where’s the beginning?